Article Collections: Your Custom View of Research Integrity

At Signals, we evaluate the credibility of any article or manuscript using the Signals Data Graph, which stores and analyzes the world’s publication data and combines it with expert knowledge. Because we can evaluate every article, we can also aggregate these evaluations to provide insights across journals or institutions. This helps publishers quickly identify, understand, and resolve research integrity risks.

However, research integrity issues aren’t always visible at the journal or institutional level. Some problems require more targeted analysis. That’s why we’ve built Article Collections: a customizable way to evaluate, aggregate, and analyze articles at any level.

Here are a few ways in which Article Collections are helping the research community: 

Publishers

Misconduct in scholarly publishing is becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex. Sometimes there isn’t enough evidence in a single article to know something is going wrong. Patterns of misconduct often emerge across groups of articles, not just in isolated papers.

• Special issues are an effective way of addressing specific and emerging research topics , but they are often targeted by fraudsters. Publishers can add the articles or manuscripts of entire special issues into a collection and see the evaluation of the issue as a whole, helping to detect patterns of signals and potential misconduct. 

• Editorial board members can sometimes be at the root of a journal’s integrity issues. By collecting articles handled by specific editorial board members, we’ve helped publishers identify editors who gained excessive citations from articles they handled, effectively identifying citation misconduct.     

Researchers

Researchers need to ensure their evidence base is credible. This is particularly important for creating robust systematic reviews, which can influence real-world healthcare decisions. Researchers can collect the articles in their evidence base and evaluate if any are potentially problematic, risking the credibility of their review. 

Institutions

Funder compliance reporting is often manual and time-consuming. Article Collections streamline the process by aggregating publications related to specific block grants. This helps staff to quickly obtain relevant research integrity reporting data, reducing administrative burden.

Any Signals customer can request access to the collections feature. We’re also welcoming feedback on the feature.