Category: publishing ethics

Not motivating a research hypothesis

A 100% survey return that represents 73% (or 70%, or perhaps 48%) of the population

Keith S. Taber

…the study seems to have looked for a lack of significant difference regarding a variable which was not thought to have any relevance…

This is like hypothesising…that the amount of alkali needed to neutralise a certain amount of acid will not depend on the eye colour of the researcher; experimentally confirming this is the case; and then seeking to publish the results as a new contribution to knowledge.

…as if a newspaper headline was 'Earthquake latest' and then the related news story was simply that, as usual, no earthquakes had been reported.

Structuring a research report

A research report tends to have a particular kind of structure. The first section sets out background to the study to be described. Authors offer an account of the current state of the relevant field – what can be called a conceptual framework.

In the natural sciences it may be that in some specialised fields there is a common, accepted way of understanding that field (e.g., the nature of important entities, the relevant variables to focus on). This has been described as working within an established scientific 'paradigm'. 1 However, social phenomena (such as classroom teaching) may be of such complexity that a full account requires exploration at multiple levels, with a range of analytical foci (Taber, 2008). 2 Therefore the report may indicate which particular theoretical perspective (e.g., personal constructivism, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, etc.) has informed the study.

This usually leads to one or more research questions, or even specific hypotheses, that are seen to be motivated by the state of the field as reflected in the authors' conceptual framework.

Next, the research design is explained: the choice of methodology (overall research strategy), the population being studied and how it was sampled, the methods of data collection and development of instruments, and choice of analytical techniques.

All of this is usually expected before any discussion (leaving aside a short statement as part of the abstract) of the data collected, results of analysis, conclusions and implications of the study for further research or practice.

There is a logic to designing research. (Image after Taber, 2014).

A predatory journal

I have been reading some papers in a journal that I believed, on the basis of its misleading title and website details, was an example of a poor-quality 'predatory journal'. That is, a journal which encourages submissions simply to be able to charge a publication fee (currently $1519, according to the website), without doing the proper job of editorial scrutiny. I wanted to test this initial evaluation by looking at the quality of some of the work published.

Although the journal is called the Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice (not to be confused, even if the publishers would like it to be, with the well-established journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice) only a few of the papers published are actually education studies. One of the articles that IS on an educational topic is called 'Students' Perception of Chemistry Teachers' Characteristics of Interest, Attitude and Subject Mastery in the Teaching of Chemistry in Senior Secondary Schools' (Igwe, 2017).

A research article

The work of a genuine academic journal

A key problem with predatory journals is that because their focus is on generating income they do not provide the service to the community expected of genuine research journals (which inevitably involves rejecting submissions, and delaying publication till work is up to standard). In particular, the research journal acts as a gatekeeper to ensure nonsense or seriously flawed work is not published as science. It does this in two ways.

Discriminating between high quality and poor quality studies

Work that is clearly not up to standard (as judged by experts in the field) is rejected. One might think that in an ideal world no one is going to send work that has no merit to a research journal. In reality we cannot expect authors to always be able to take a balanced and critical view of their own work, even if we would like to think that research training should help them develop this capacity.

This assumes researchers are trained, of course. Many people carrying out educational research in science teaching contexts are only trained as natural scientists – and those trained as researchers in natural science often approach the social sciences with significant biases and blind-spots when carrying out research with people. (Watch or read 'Why do natural scientists tend to make poor social scientists?')

Also, anyone can submit work to a research journal – be they genius, expert, amateur, or 'crank'. Work is meant to be judged on its merits, not by the reputation or qualifications of the author.

De-bugging research reports – helping authors improve their work

The other important function of journal review is to identify weaknesses and errors and gaps in reports of work that may have merit, but where these limitations make the report unsuitable for publication as submitted. Expert reviewers will highlight these issues, and editors will ensure authors respond to the issues raised before possible publication. This process relies on fallible humans, and in the case of reviewers usually unpaid volunteers, but is seen as important for quality control – even if it not a perfect system. 3

This improvement process is a 'win' all round:

  • the quality of what is published is assured so that (at least most) published studies make a meaningful contribution to knowledge;
  • the journal is seen in a good light because of the quality of the research it publishes; and
  • the authors can be genuinely proud of their publications which can bring them prestige and potentially have impact.

If a predatory journal which claims (i) to have academic editors making decisions and (ii) to use peer review does not rigorously follow proper processes, and so publishes (a) nonsense as scholarship, and (b) work with major problems, then it lets down the community and the authors – if not those making money from the deceit.

The editor took just over a fortnight to arrange any peer review, and come to a decision that the research report was ready for publication

Students' perceptions of chemistry teachers' characteristics

There is much of merit in this particular research study. Dr Iheanyi O. Igwe explains why there might be a concern about the quality of chemistry teaching in the research context, and draws upon a range of prior literature. Information about the population (the public secondary schools II chemistry students in Abakaliki Education Zone of Ebonyi State) and the sample is provided – including how the sample, of 300 students at 10 schools, was selected.

There is however an unfortunate error in characterising the population:

"the chemistry students' population in the zone was four hundred and ten (431)"

Igwe, 2017, p.8

This seems to be a simple typographic error, but the reader cannot be sure if this should read

  • "…four hundred and ten (410)" or
  • "…four hundred and thirty one (431)".

Or perhaps neither, as the abstract tells readers

"From a total population of six hundred and thirty (630) senior secondary II students, a sample of three hundred (300) students was used for the study selected by stratified random sampling technique."

Igwe, 2017, abstract

Whether the sample is 300/410 or 300/431 or even 300/630 does not fundamentally change the study, but one does wonder how these inconsistencies were not spotted by the editor, or a peer reviewer, or someone in the production department. (At least, one might wonder about this if one had not seen much more serious failures to spot errors in this journal.) A reader could wonder whether the presence of such obvious errors may indicate a lack of care that might suggest the possibility of other errors that a reader is not in a position to spot. (For example, if questionnaire responses had not been tallied correctly in compiling results, then this would not be apparent to anyone who did not have access to the raw data to repeat the analysis.) The author seems to have been let down here.

A multi-scale instrument

The final questionnaire contained 5 items on each of three scales

  • students' perception of teachers' interest in the teaching of chemistry;
  • students' perception of teachers' attitude towards the teaching of chemistry;
  • students' perception of teachers' mastery of the subject in the teaching of chemistry

Igwe informs readers that,

"the final instrument was tested for reliability for internal consistency through the Cronbach Alpha statistic. The reliability index for the questionnaire was obtained as 0.88 which showed that the instrument was of high internal consistency and therefore reliable and could be used for the study"

Igwe, 2017, p.4

This statistic is actually not very useful information as one would want to know about the internal consistency within the scales – an overall value across scales is not informative (conceptually, it is not clear how it should be interpreted – perhaps that the three scales are largely eliciting much the same underlying factor? ) (Taber, 2018). 4

There are times when aggregate information is not very informative (Image by Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay )

Again, one might have hoped that expert reviewers would have asked the author to quote the separate alpha values for the three scales as it is these which are actually informative.

The paper also offers a detailed account of the analysis of the data, and an in-depth discussion of the findings and potential implications. This is a serious study that clearly reflects a lot of work by the researcher. (We might hope that could be taken for granted when discussing work published in a 'research journal', but sadly that is not so in some predatory journals.) There are limitations of course. All research has to stop somewhere, and resources and, in particular, access opportunities are often very limited. One of these limitations is the wider relevance of the population sampled.

But do the results apply in Belo Horizonte?

This is the generalisation issue. The study concerns the situation in one administrative zone within a relatively small state in South East Nigeria. How do we know it has anything useful to tell us about elsewhere in Nigeria, let alone about the situation in Mexico or Vietnam or Estonia? Even within Ebonyi State, the Abakaliki Education Zone (that is, the area of the state capital) may well be atypical – perhaps the best qualified and most enthusiastic teachers tend to work in the capital? Perhaps there would have been different findings in a more rural area?

Yet this is a limitation that applies to a good deal of educational research. This goes back to the complexity of educational phenomena. What you find out about an electron or an oxidising agent studied in Abakaliki should apply in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire or equally in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That cannot be claimed about what you may find out about a teacher in Abakaliki, or a student, a class, a school, a University…

Misleading study titles?

Educational research studies often have strictly misleading titles – or at least promise a lot more than they deliver. This may in part be authors making unwarranted assumptions, or it may be journal editors wanting to avoid unwieldy titles.

"This situation has inadvertently led to production of half backed graduate Chemistry educators."

Igwe, 2017, p.2

The title of this study does suggest that the study concerns perceptions of Chemistry Teachers' Characteristics …in Senior Secondary Schools, when we cannot assume that chemistry teachers in the Abakaliki Education Zone of Ebonyi State can stand for chemistry teachers more widely. Indeed some of the issues raised as motivating the need for the study are clearly not issues that would apply in all other educational contexts – that is the 'situation', which is said to be responsible for the "production of half backed [half-baked?] graduate Chemistry educators" in Nigeria, will not apply everywhere. Whilst the title could be read as promising more general findings than were possible in the study, Igwe's abstract is quite explicit about the specific population sampled.

A limited focus?

Another obvious limitation is that whilst pupils' perceptions of their teachers are very important, it does not offer a full picture. Pupils may feel the need to give positive reviews, or may have idealistic conceptions. Indeed, assuming that voluntary, informed consent was given (which would mean that students knew they could decline to take part in the research without fear of sanctions) it is of note that every one of the 30 students targeted in each of the ten schools agreed to complete the survey,

"The 300 copies of the instrument were distributed to the respondents who completed them for retrieval on the spot to avoid loss and may be some element of bias from the respondents. The administration and collection were done by the researcher and five trained research assistants. Maximum return was made of the instrument."

Igwe, 2017, p.4

To get a 100% return on a survey is pretty rare, and if normal ethical procedures were followed (with the voluntary nature of the activity made clear) then this suggests these students were highly motivated to appease adults working in the education system.

But we might ask how student perceptions of teacher characteristics actually relate to teacher characteristics?

For example, observations of the chemistry classes taught by these teachers could possibly give a very different impression of those teachers than that offered by the student ratings in the survey. (Another chemistry teacher may well be able to distinguish teacher confidence or bravado from subject mastery when a learner is not well placed to do so.) Teacher self-reports could also offer a different account of their 'Interest, Attitude and Subject Mastery', as could evaluations by their school managers. Arguably, a study that collected data from multiple sources would offer the possibility of 'triangulating' between sources.

However, Igwe, is explicit about the limited focus of the study, and other complementary strands of research could be carried out to follow-up on the study. So, although the specific choice of focus is a limitation, this does not negate the potential value of the study.

Research questions

Although I recognise a serious and well-motivated study, there is one aspect of Igwe's study which seemed rather bizarre. The study has three research questions (which are well-reflected in the title of the study) and a hypothesis which I suspect will likely surprise some readers.

That is not a good thing. At least, I always taught research students that unlike in a thriller or 'who done it?' story, where a surprise may engage and amuse a reader, a research report or thesis is best written to avoid such surprises. The research report is an argument that needs to flow though the account – if a reader is surprised at something the researcher reports doing then the author has probably forgotten to properly introduce or explain something earlier in the report.

Here are the research questions and hypotheses:

"Research Questions

The following research questions guided the study, thus:

How do students perceive teachers' interest in the teaching of chemistry?

How do students perceive teachers' attitude towards the teaching of chemistry?

How do students perceive teachers' mastery of the subjects in the teaching of chemistry?

Hypotheses
The following null hypothesis was tested at 0.05 alpha levels, thus:
HO1 There is no significant difference in the mean ratings of male and female students on their perception of chemistry teachers' characteristics in the teaching of chemistry."

Igwe, 2017, p.3

A surprising hypothesis?

A hypothesis – now where did that come from?

Now, I am certainly not criticising a researcher for looking for gender differences in research. (That would be hypocritical as I looked for such differences in my own M.Sc. thesis, and published on gender differences in teacher-student interactions in physics classes, gender differences in students' interests in different science topics on stating secondary school, and links between pupil perceptions of (i) science-relatedness and (ii) gender-appropriateness of careers.)

There might often be good reasons in studies to look for gender differences. But these reasons should be stated up-front. As part of the conceptual framework motivating the study, researchers should explain that based on their informal observations, or on anecdotal evidence, or (better) drawing upon explicit theoretical considerations, or that informed by the findings of other related studies – or whatever reason there might – there are good reasons to check for gender differences.

The flow of research (Underlying image from Taber, 2013) The arrows can be read as 'inform(s)'.

Perhaps Igwe had such reasons, but there seems to be no mention of 'gender' as a relevant variable prior to the presentation of the hypothesis: not even a concerning dream, or signs in the patterns of tea leaves. 5 To some extent, this is reinforced by the choice of the null hypothesis – that no such difference will be found. Even if it makes no substantive difference to a study whether a hypothesis is framed in terms of there being a difference or not, psychologically the study seems to have looked for a lack of significant difference regarding a variable which was not thought to have any relevance.

Misuse of statistics

It is important for researchers not to test for effects that are not motivated in their studies. Statistical significance tells a researcher something is unlikely to happen just by chance – but it still might. Just as someone buying a lottery ticket is unlikely to win the lottery – but they might. Logically a small proportion of all the positive statistical results in the literature are 'false positives' because unlikely things do happen by chance – just not that often. 6 The researcher should not (metaphorically!) go round buying up lots of lottery tickets, and then seeing an occasional win as something more than chance.

No alarms and no surprises

And what was found?

"From the result of analysis … the null hypothesis is accepted which means that there is no significant difference in the mean ratings of male and female students in their perception of chemistry teachers' characteristics (interest, attitude and subject mastery) in the teaching of chemistry."

Igwe, 2017, p.6

This is like hypothesising, without any motivation, that the amount of alkali needed to neutralise a certain amount of acid will not depend on the eye colour of the researcher; experimentally confirming this is the case; and then seeking to publish the results as a new contribution to knowledge.

Why did Igwe look for gender difference (or more strictly, look for no gender difference)?

  • A genuine relevant motivation missing from the paper?
  • An imperative to test for something (anything)?
  • Advice that journals are more likely to publish studies using statistical testing?
  • Noticing that a lot of studies do test for gender differences (whether there seems a good reason to do so or not)?

This seems to be an obvious point for peer reviewers and the editor to raise: asking the author to either (a) explain why it makes sense to test for gender differences in this study – or (b) to drop the hypothesis from the paper. It seems they did not notice this, and readers are simply left to wonder – just as you would if a newspaper headline was 'Earthquake latest' and then the related news story was simply that, as usual, no earthquakes had been reported.

Work cited:


Footnotes:

1 The term paradigm became widely used in this sense after Kuhn's (1970) work although he later acknowledged criticisms of the ambiguous way he used the term, in particular as learning about a field through working through standard examples, paradigms, and the wider set of shared norms and values that develop in an established field which he later termed 'disciplinary matrix'. In psychology research 'paradigm' may be used in the more specific sense of an established research design/protocol.

2 There are at least three ways of explaining why a lot of research in the social science seems more chaotic and less structured to outsiders than most research in the natural sciences.

  • a) Ontology. Perhaps the things studied in the natural sciences really exist, and some of those in the social sciences are epiphenomena and do not reflect fundamental, 'real', things. There may be some of that sometimes, but if so I think it is a matter of degree (that is, scientists have not been beyond studying the ether or phlogiston), because of the third option (c).
  • b) The social sciences are not as mature as many areas of the natural sciences and so are sill 'pre-paradigmatic'. I am sure there is sometimes an element of this: any new field will take time to focus in on reliable and productive ways of making sense of its domain.
  • c) The complexity of the phenomena. Social phenomena are inherently more complex, often involving feedback loops between participants' behaviours and feelings and beliefs (including about the research, the researcher, etc.)

Whilst (a) and (b) may sometimes be pertinent, I think (c) is often especially relevant to this question.

3 An alternative approach that has gained some credence is to allow authors to publish, but then invite reader reviews which will also be published – and so allowing a public conversation to develop so readers can see the original work, criticism, responses to those criticisms, and so forth, and make their own judgements. To date this has only become common practice in a few fields.

Another approach for empirical work is for authors to submit research designs to journals for peer review – once a design has been accepted by the journal, the journal agrees to publish the resulting study as long as the agreed protocol has been followed. (This is seen as helping to avoid the distorting bias in the literature towards 'positive' results as studies with 'negative' results may seem less interesting and so less likely to be accepted in prestige journals.) Again, this is not the norm (yet) in most fields.

4 The statistic has a maximum value of 1, which would indicate that the items were all equivalent, so 0.88 seems a high value, till we note that a high value of alpha is a common artefact of including a large number of items.

However, playing Devil's advocate, I might suggest that the high overall value of alpha could suggest that the three scales

  • students' perception of teachers' interest in the teaching of chemistry;
  • students' perception of teachers' attitude towards the teaching of chemistry;
  • students' perception of teachers' mastery of the subject in the teaching of chemistry

are all tapping into a single underlying factor that might be something like

  • my view of whether my chemistry teacher is a good teacher

or even

  • how much I like my chemistry teacher

5 Actually the discrimination made is between male and female students – it is not clear what question students were asked to determine 'gender', and whether other response options were available, or whether students could decline to respond to this item.

6 Our intuition might be that only a small proportion of reported positive results are false positives, because, of course, positive results reflect things unlikely to happen by chance. However if, as is widely believed in many fields, there is a bias to reporting positive results, this can distort the picture.

Imagine someone looking for factors that influence classroom learning. Consider that 50 variables are identified to test, such as teacher eye colour, classroom wall colour, type of classroom window frames, what the teacher has for breakfast, the day of the week that the teacher was born, the number of letters in the teacher's forename, the gender of the student who sits nearest the fire extinguisher, and various other variables which are not theoretically motivated to be considered likely to have an effect. With a confidence level of p[robability] ≤ 0.05 it is likely that there will be a very small number of positive findings JUST BY CHANCE. That is, if you look across enough unlikely events, it is likely some of them will happen. There is unlikely to be a thunderstorm on any particular day. Yet there will likely be a thunderstorm some day in the next year. If a report is written and published which ONLY discusses a positive finding then the true statistical context is missing, and a likely situation is presented as unlikely to be due to chance.

Move over Mendeleev, here comes the new Mendel

Seeking the islets of Filipenka Henadzi

Keith S. Taber

"new chemical elements with atomic numbers 72-75 and 108-111 are supposedly revealed, and also it is shown that for heavy elements starting with hafnium, the nuclei of atoms contain a larger number of protons than is generally accepted"

Henadzi, 2019, p.2

Somehow I managed to miss a 2019 paper bringing into doubt the periodic table that is widely used in chemistry. It was suggested that many of the heavier elements actually have higher atomic numbers (proton numbers) than had long been assumed, with the consequence that when these elements are correctly re-positioned it reveals two runs of elements that should be in the periodic table, but which till now have not been identified by chemists.

According to Henadzi we need to update the periodic table and look for eight missing elements (original image by Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

Henadzi (2019) suggests that "I would like to name groups of elements with the numbers 72-75 and 108-111 [that is, those not yet identified that should have these numbers], the islets of Filipenka Henadzi."

The orginal Mendeleev

This is a bit like being taken back to when Dmitri Mendeleev first proposed his periodic table and had the courage to organise elements according to patterns in their properties, even though this left gaps that Mendeleev predicted would be occupied by elements yet to be discovered. The success of (at least some) of his predictions is surely the main reason why he is considered the 'father' of the periodic table, even though others were experimenting with similar schemes.

Now it has been suggested that we still have a lot of work to do to get the periodic table right, and that the version that chemists have used (with some minor variations) for many decades is simply wrong. This major claim (which would surely be considered worthy of the Nobel prize if found correct) was not published in Nature or Science or one of the prestigious chemistry journals published by learned societies such as the Royal Society of Chemistry, but in an obscure journal that I suspect many chemists have never heard of.

The original Mendel

This is reminiscent of the story of Mendel's famous experiments with inheritance in pea plants. Mendel's experiments are now seen as seminal in establishing core ideas of genetics. But Mendel's research was ignored for many years.

He presented his results at meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in 1865 and then published them in a local German language journal – and his ideas were ignored. Only after other scientists rediscovered 'his' principles in 1900, long after his death, was his work also rediscovered.

Moreover, the discussion of this major challenge to accepted chemistry (and physics if I have understood the paper) is buried in an appendix of a paper which is mostly about the crystal structures of metals. It seems the appendix includes a translation of work previously published in Russian, explaining why, oddly, a section part way through the appendix begins "This article sets out the views on the classification of all known chemical elements, those fundamental components of which the Earth and the entire Universe consists".

Calling out 'predatory' journals

I have been reading some papers in a journal that I believed, on the basis of its misleading title and website details, was an example of a poor-quality 'predatory journal'. That is, a journal which encourages submissions simply to be able to charge a publication fee (currently $1519, according to the website), without doing the proper job of editorial scrutiny. I wanted to test this initial evaluation by looking at the quality of some of the work published.

One of the papers I decided to read, partly because the topic looked of particular interest, was 'Nature of Chemical Elements' (Henadzi, 2019). Most of the paper is concerned with the crystal structures of metals, and presenting a new model to explain why metals have the structure they do. This is related to the number of electrons per atom that can be considered to be in the conduction band – something that was illustrated with a simple diagram that unfortunately, to my reading at least, was not sufficiently elaborated.1

The two options referred to seem to refer to n-type (movement of electrons) and p-type (movement of electrons that can be conceptualised as movement of a {relatively} positive hole, as in semi-conductor materials) – Figure 1 from Henadzi, 2019: p2

However, what really got my attention was the proposal for revising the periodic table and seeking eight new elements that chemists have so far missed.

Beyond Chadwick

Henadzi tells readers that

"The innovation of this work is that in the table of elements constructed according to the Mendeleyev's law and Van-den- Broek's rule [in effect that atomic number in the periodic table = proton number], new chemical elements with atomic numbers 72-75 and 108-111 are supposedly revealed, and also it is shown that for heavy elements starting with hafnium, the nuclei of atoms contain a larger number of protons than is generally accepted. Perhaps the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics missed some solutions because the atomic nucleus in calculations is taken as a point."

Henadzi, 2019, p.4

Henadzi explains

"When considering the results of measuring the charges of nuclei or atomic numbers by James Chadwick, I noticed that the charge of the core of platinum is rather equal not to 78, but to 82, which corresponds to the developed table. For almost 30 years I have raised the question of the repetition of measurements of the charges of atomic nuclei, since uranium is probably more charged than accepted, and it is used at nuclear power plants."

Henadzi, 2019, p.4

Now Chadwick is most famous for discovering the neutron – back in 1932. So he was working a long time ago, when atomic theory was still quite underdeveloped and with apparatus that would seem pretty primitive compared with the kinds of set up used today to investigate the fundamental structure of matter. That is, it is hardly surprising if his work which was seminal nearly a century ago had limitations. Henadzi however seems to feel that Chadwick's experiments accurately reveal atomic numbers more effectively than had been realised.

Sadly, Henadzi does not cite any specific papers by Chadwick in his reference list, so it is not easy to look up the original research he is discussing. But if Henadzi is suggesting that data produced almost a century ago can be interpreted as giving some elements different atomic numbers to those accepted today, the obvious question is what other work, since, establishes the accepted values, and why should it not be trusted. Henadzi does not discuss this.

Explaining a long-standing mystery

Henadzi points out that whereas for the lighter elements the mass number is about twice the atomic number (that is, the number of neutrons in a nucleus approximately matches the number of protons) as one proceeds through the period table this changes such the ratio of protons:neutrons shifts to give an increasing excess of neutrons. Henadzi also implies that this is a long standing mystery, now perhaps solved.

"Each subsequent chemical element is different from the previous in that in its core the number of protons increases by one, and the number of neutrons increases, in general, several. In the literature this strange ratio of the number of neutrons to the number of protons for any the kernel is not explained. The article proposes a model nucleus, explaining this phenomenon."

Henadzi, 2019, p.5

Now what surprised me here was not the pattern itself (something taught in school science) but the claim that the reason was not known. My, perhaps simplistic, understanding is that protons repel each other because of their similar positive electrical charges, although the strong nuclear force binds nucleons (i.e., protons and neutrons collectively) into nuclei and can overcome this.

Certainly what is taught in schools is that as the number of protons increases more neutrons are needed to be mixed in to ensure overall stability. Now I am aware that this is very much an over-simplification, what we might term a curriculum model or teaching model perhaps, but what Henadzi is basically suggesting seems to be this very point, supplemented by the idea that as the protons repel each other they are usually found at the outside of the nucleus alongside an equal number of neutrons – with any additional neutrons within.

The reason for not only putting protons on the outer shell of a large nucleus in Henadzi's model seems to relate to the stability of alpha particles (that is, clumps of two protons and two neutrons, as in the relatively stable helium nucleus). Or, at least, that was my reading of what is being suggested,

"For the construction of the [novel] atomic nucleus model, we note that with alpha-radioactivity of the helium nucleus is approximately equal to the energy.

Therefore, on the outer layer of the core shell, we place all the protons with such the same number of neutrons. At the same time, on one energy Only bosons can be in the outer shell of the alpha- particle nucleus and are. Inside the Kernel We will arrange the remaining neutrons, whose task will be weakening of electrostatic fields of repulsion of protons."

Henadzi, 2019, p.5

The lack of proper sentence structure does not help clarify the model being mooted.

Masking true atomic number

Henadzi's hypothesis seems to be that when protons are on the surface of the nucleus, the true charge, and so atomic number, of an element can be measured. But sometimes with heavier elements some of the protons leave the surface for some reason and move inside the nucleus where their charge is somehow shielded and missed when nuclear charge is measured. This is linked to the approximation of assuming that the charge on an object measured from the outside can be treated as a point charge.

This is what Henadzi suggests:

"Our nuclear charge is located on the surface, since the number of protons and the number of neutrons in the nucleus are such that protons and neutrons should be in the outer layer of the nucleus, and only neutrons inside, that is, a shell forms on the surface of the nucleus. In addition, protons must be repelled, and also attracted by an electronic fur coat. The question is whether the kernel can be considered a point in the calculations and up to what times? And the question is whether and when the proton will be inside the nucleus….if a proton gets into the nucleus for some reason, then the corresponding electron will be on the very 'low' orbit. Quantum mechanics still does not notice such electrons. Or in other words, in elements 72-75 and 108-111, some protons begin to be placed inside the nucleus and the charge of the nucleus is screened, in calculations it cannot be taken as a point."

Henadzi, 2019, p.5

So, I think Henadzi is suggesting that if a proton gets inside the nucleus, its associated electron is pulled into a very close orbit such that what is measured as nuclear charge is the real charge on the nucleus (the number of protons) partially cancelled by low lying electrons orbiting so close to the nucleus that they are within what we might call 'the observed nucleus'.

This has some similarity to the usual idea of shielding that leads to the notion of core charge. For example, a potassium atom can be modelled simplistically for some purposes as a single electron around a core charge of plus one (+19-2-8-8) as, at least as a first approximation, we can treat all the charges within the outermost N (4th) electron shell (the 19 protons and 18 electrons) as if a single composite charge at the centre of the atom. 2

Dubious physics

Whilst I suspect that the poor quality of the English and the limited detail included in this appendix may well mean I am missing part of the argument here, I am not convinced. Besides the credibility issue (how can so many scientists have missed this for so long?) which should never be seen as totally excluding unorthodox ideas (the same thing could have been asked about most revolutionary scientific breakthroughs) my understanding is that there are already some quite sophisticated models of nuclear structure which have evolved alongside programmes of emprical research and which are therefore better supported than Henadzi's somewhat speculative model.

I must confess to not understanding the relevance of the point charge issue as this assumption/simplification would seem to work with Henadzi's model – from well outside the sphere defined by the nucleus plus low lying electrons the observed charge would be the net charge as if located at a central point, so the apparent nuclear charge would indeed be less than the true nuclear charge.

But my main objection would be the way electrostatic forces are discussed and, in particular, two features of the language:

Naked protons

protons must be repelled, and also attracted by an electronic fur coat…

I was not sure what was meant by "protons must be repelled, and also attracted by an electronic fur coat". The repulsion between protons in the nucleus is balanced by the strong nuclear force – so what is this electronic 'fur coat'?

This did remind me of common alternative conceptions that school students (who have not yet learned about nuclear forces) may have, along the lines that a nucleus is held together because the repulsion between protons is balanced by their attraction to the ('orbiting') electrons. Two obvious problems with this notion are that

  • the electrons would be attracting protons out of the nucleus just as they are repelling each other (that is, these effects reinforce, not cancel), and
  • the protons are much closer to each other than to the electrons, and the magnitude of force between charges diminishes with distance.

Newton's third law and Coulomb's law would need to be dis-applied for an electronic effect to balance the protons' mutual repulsions. (On Henadzi's model the conjectured low lying electrons are presumably orbiting much closer to the nucleus than the 1s electrons in the K shell – but, even so, the proton-electron distance will be be much greater than the separation of protons in the nucleus.)3

But I may have misunderstood what Henadzi's meant here by the attraction of the fur coat and its role in the model.

A new correspondence principle?

if a proton gets into the nucleus for some reason, then the corresponding electron will be on the very 'low' orbit

Much more difficult to explain away is the suggestion that "if a proton gets into the nucleus for some reason, then the corresponding electron will be on the very 'low' orbit". Why? This is not explained, so it seems assumed readers will simply understand and agree.

In particular, I do not know what is meant by 'the corresponding electron'. This seems to imply that each proton in the nucleus has a corresponding electron. But electrons are just electrons, and as far as a proton is concerned, one electron is just like any other. All of the electrons attract, and are attracted by, all of the protons.

Confusing a teaching scheme for a mechanism?

This may not always be obvious to school level students, especially when atomic structure is taught through some kind of 'Aufbau' scheme where we add one more proton and one more electron for each consecutive element's atomic structure. That is, the hydrogen atom comprises of a proton and its 'corresponding' electron, and in moving on to helium we add another proton, with its 'corresponding' electron and some neutrons. These correspond only in the sense that to keep the atom neutral we have to add one negative charge for each positive charge. They 'correspond' in a mental accounting scheme – but not in any physical sense.

That is a conceptual scheme meant to do pedagogic work in 'building up' knowledge – but atoms themselves are just systems of fundamental particles following natural laws and are not built up by the sequential addition of components selected from some atomic construction kit. We can be misled into mistaking a pedagogic model designed to help students understand atomic structure for a representation of an actual physical process. (The nuclei of heavy elements are created in the high-energy chaos inside a star – within the plasma where it is too hot for them to capture the electrons needed to form neutral atoms.)

A similar category error (confusing a teaching scheme for a mechanism) often occurs when teachers and textbook authors draw schemes of atoms combining to form molecules (e.g., a methane molecule formed from a carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms) – it is a conceptual system to work with the psychological needs for students to have knowledge built up in manageable learning quanta – but such schemes do not reflect viable chemical processes.4

It is this kind of thinking that leads to students assuming that during homolytic bond fission each atom gets its 'own' electron back. It is not so much that this is not necessarily so, as that the notion of one of the electrons in a bond belonging to one of the atoms is a fiction.

The conservation of force conception (an alternative conception)

When asked about ionisation of atoms it is common for students to suggest that when an electron is removed from an atom (or ion) the remaining electrons are attracted more strongly because the force for the removed electron gets redistributed. It is as if within an atom each proton is taking care of attracting one electron. In this way of thinking a nucleus of a certain charge gives rise to a certain amount of force which is shared among the electrons. Removing an electron means a greater share of the force for those remaining. This all seems intuitive enough to many learners despite being at odds with basic physical principles (Taber, 1998).

I am not deducing that Henadzi, apparently a retired research scientist, shares these basic misconceptions found among students. Perhaps that is the case, but I would not be so arrogant as to diagnose this just from the quoted text. But that is my best understanding of the argument in the paper. If that is not what is meant, then I think the text needs to be clearer.

The revolution will not be televised…

In conclusion, this paper, published in what is supposedly a research journal, is unsatisfactory because (a) it makes some very major claims that if correct are extremely significant for chemistry and perhaps also physics, but (b) the claims are tucked away in an appendix, are not fully explained and justified, and do not properly cite work referred to; and the text is sprinkled with typographic errors, and seems to reflect alternative conceptions of basic science.

I very much suspect that Henadzi's revolutionary ideas are just wrong and should rightly be ignored by the scientific community, despite being published in what claims to be a peer-reviewed (self-describing 'leading international') research journal.

However, perhaps Henadzi's ideas may have merit – the peer reviewers and editor of the journal presumably thought so – in which case they are likely to be ignored anyway because the claims are tucked away in an appendix, are not fully explained and justified, and do not properly cite work referred to; and the text is sprinkled with typographic errors, and seems to reflect alternative conceptions of basic science. In this case scientific progress will be delayed (as it was when Mendel's work was missed) because of the poor presentation of revolutionary ideas.

How does the editor of a peer-reviewed journal move to a decision to publish in 4 days?
Let down by poor journal standards

So, either way, I do not criticise Henadzi for having and sharing these ideas – healthy science encompasses all sorts of wild ideas (some of which turn out not to have been so wild as first assumed) which are critiqued, tested, and judged by the community. However, Henadzi has not been well supported by the peer review process at the journal. Even if peer reviewers did not spot some of the conceptual issues that occurred to me, they should surely have noticed the incompleteness of the argument or at the very least the failures of syntax. But perhaps in order to turn the reviews around so quickly they did not read the paper carefully. And perhaps that is how the editor, Professor Nour Shafik Emam El-Gendy of the Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute, was able to move to a decision to publish four days after submission.5

If there is something interesting behind this paper, it will likely be missed because of the poor presentation and the failure of peer review to support the author in sorting the problems that obscure the case for the proposal. And if the hypothesis is as flawed as it seems, then peer review should have prevented it being published until a more convincing case could be made. Either way, this is another example of a journal rushing to publish something without proper scrutiny and concern for scientific standards.

Works cited
Footnotes:

1 My understanding of the conduction band in a metal is that due to the extensive overlap of atomic orbitals, a great many molecular orbitals are formed, mostly being quite extensive in scope ('delocalised'), and occurring with a spread of energy levels that falls within an energy band. Although strictly the molecular orbitals are at a range of different levels, the gaps between these levels are so small that at normal temperatures the 'thermal energy' available is enough for electrons to readily move between the orbitals (whereas in discrete molecules, with a modest number of molecular orbitals available, transitions usually require absorption of higher energy {visible or more often} ultraviolet radiation). So, this spread of a vast number of closely spaced energy levels is in effect a continuous band.

Given that understanding I could not make sense of these schematic diagrams. They SEEM to show the number of conduction electrons in the 'conduction band' as being located on, and moving around, a single atom. But I may be completely misreading this – as they are meant to be (cross sections through?) a tube.

"we consider a strongly simplified one- dimensional case of the conduction band. Option one: a thin closed tube, completely filled with electrons except one. The diameter of the electron is approximately equal to the diameter of the tube. With such a filling of the zone, with the local movement of the electron, there is an opposite movement of the "place" of the non-filled tube, the electron, that is, the motion of a non-negative charge. Option two: in the tube of one electron – it is possible to move only one charge – a negatively charged electron"

Henadzi, 2019, p.2

2 The shell model is a simplistic model, and for many purposes we need to use more sophisticated accounts. For example, the electrons are not strictly in concentric shells, and electronic orbitals 'interpenetrate' – so an electron considered to be in the third shell of an atom will 'sometimes' be further from the nucleus than an electron considered to be in the fourth shell. That is, a potassium 4s electron cannot be assumed to be completely/always outside of a sphere in which all the other atomic electrons (and the nucleus) are contained, so the the core cannot be considered as a point charge of +1 at the nucleus, even if this works as an approximation for some purposes. The effective nuclear charge from the perspective of the 4s electron will strictly be more than +1 as the number of shielding electrons is somewhat less than 18.

3 Whilst the model of electrons moving around the nucleus in planetary orbits may have had some heuristic value in the development of atomic theory, and may still be a useful teaching model at times (Taber, 2013), it seems it is unlikely to have the sophistication to support any further substantive developments to chemical theory.

4 It is very common for learners to think of chemistry in terms of atoms – e.g., to think of atoms as starting points for reactions; to assume that ions must derive from atoms. This way of thinking has been called the atomic ontology.

5 I find it hard to believe that any suitably qualified and conscientious referees would not raise very serious issues about this manuscript precluding publication in the form it appears in the journal. If the journal really does use peer review, as is claimed, one has to wonder who they think suitable to act as expert reviewers, and how they persuade them to write their reports so quickly.

Based on this, and other papers appearing in the journal, I suspect one of the following:

a) peer review does not actually happen, or

b) peer review is assigned to volunteers who are not experts in the field, and so are not qualified to be 'peers' in the sense intended when we talk of academic peer review, or

c) suitable reviewers are appointed, but instructed to do a very quick but light review ignoring most conceptual, logical, technical and presentation issues as long as the submission is vaguely on topic, or

di) appropriate peer reviewers are sought, but the editor does not expect authors to address reviewer concerns before approving publication, or possibly

dii) decisions to publish sub-standard work are made by administrators without reference to the peer reviews and the editor's input

A failure of peer review

A copy of a copy – or plagiarism taken to the extreme

The journal 'Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences' is a research journal which describes itself as

"a scientific, multidisciplinary journal with 1.020 Impact factor, that strongly desires to disseminate knowledge in the field of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology"

The journal has been publishing since 2017 – one of a great number of new scientific journals competing for researchers' work. As well as the quite decent impact factor for such a new journal it also claims two other metrics – a 32% acceptance rate and period from acceptance to publication of 20-30 days.

Impact factor

The usual (that is, accepted, canonical) way of measuring impact factors is in terms of the average number of times articles in a journal are cited in other articles. Usually it is calculated over a set period (say within 5 years of publication) and based only on citations in articles in a database of journals that are considered to meet quality criteria. Some journal articles may never get cited, whilst others are cited a great deal, and the impact factor reflects an average for a journal.

However, I am wary of claims of impact factors unless I see how they are derived, as I have seen journals claiming 'impact factors' that are based on a completely different set of criteria – a bit like claiming the room temperature is 300K because the display of a chemical balance indicated '300'. (See 'Publish at speed, recant at leisure'.)

The timescale of review and publication

In the past some journals took months, even years to publish a submitted manuscript. Clearly for an author the quicker the time from submission to publication the better – at least all things being equal. They are not always equal however.

It is usually considered better to publish in a recognised high status journal where work is likely to get more attention from others working in a field, and where the publication brings more prestige to the authors and their institutions. So, an author may well feel that slow publication in a 'good' journal is preferable to quicker publication in a nondescript one.

However, time from acceptance to publication is perhaps not the most useful metric to guide authors. By the time I stepped down from editing the Royal Society of Chemistry's education journal, Chemistry Education Research and Practice, it was often publishing an advanced version of an accepted article on the day I accepted it (and the final version of record within about a week or so). Yet that ignores the time a submission spends in review.

That is the time it takes for an editor to

  • screen the submission (make sure it is within the scope of the journal and includes sufficient detail for a careful evaluation),
  • identify and invite expert reviewers,
  • receive back their reports,
  • consider these and reach a decision
  • ask authors to make any revisions seen necessary
  • receive back a corrected/revised submission
  • decide whether this seems to meet the changes needed
  • and whether the revised revisions also needs to go back to reviewers
  • …

Sometimes this process can be quick – sometimes it may be drawn out with a number of cycles of revision before authors satisfy reviewers/editors and a manuscript is accepted. Expert reviewers who are highly respected in their fields are often very busy and get many request to review.

So, average time from submission to acceptance would seem to be a key metric both because it may help authors avoid journals where editors and reviewers are very slow to turn around work, and because if this period is very short then it may bring into question whether there is rigorous review.

Acceptance rate

In this regard, the journal's claimed acceptance rate, 32% looks healthy. Two thirds of material submitted to the journal is (by deduction) rejected as not suitable for publication. Assuming this figure is accurate, this does suggests that peer review is taken seriously. (One likes to trust in the honesty of others, but sadly there are many predatory journals not above being dishonest, as I have discussed in a range of postings.)

Peer review

The publisher's site certainly suggests that the publisher recognises the importance of careful peer review undertaken by "eminent reviewers", with guidance for reviewers.

"Acta Scientifica believes that, thorough peer review process is a critical factor to yield immense quality literature to be published in the journal."

https://www.actascientific.com/reviewer.php

Among the points made here, potential reviewers are guided that

"The study should possess novelty and should present the results of original research. It is required that the reported results are not published elsewhere."

The benefits of peer review are said to be

  •  "The author receives detailed and constructive feedback from experts in the field.
  •  The process can alert authors to errors or gaps in literature they may have overlooked.
  •  It can assist with making the paper more applicable to the journal readership.
  •  It may enable a discussion (between the author, reviewers, and editor) around a research field or topic.
  •  Readers can be assured that the research they are reading has been verified by subject experts." (https://www.actascientific.com/peerreview.php)

The peer review process is said to assure

  • "Submitted article is original work which has not been previously published nor is under consideration by another journal, in part or whole;
  • The article meets all applicable standards of ethics;
  • The paper is relevant to the journal's aims, scope, and readership;
  • A submitted article presents original research findings;
  • A submitted article offers a comprehensive critical review and evaluation of key literature sources for a given topic; and
  • The article is methodologically and technically sound"(https://www.actascientific.com/peerreview.php)

The publisher offers a flow chart showing the stages of the editorial and review process. The publisher also explains the advantages of the double blind peer review process (the reviewers are not told who wrote the submission, and the author is not told who reviewed their work) they operate in order to ensure "evaluation of work in the manuscripts by peers who have an expertise in the relevant field."

Checking for plagiarism

The flow chart shows that before submission are sent for review there is a screening to ensure that at least 80% of the manuscript is 'unique content' – that is, that material has not just been copied from the author's previous publications – or even someone else's

All of this seems encouraging. The impression is that Acta Scientific are genuine in their aspiration to publish quality work, and to use a rigorous peer review process to ensure this quality. This is despite the reason why I came TO be looking into their processes.

Which came first…

I recently posted in this blog about a short article in the Journal of Chemistry: Education and Research (not to be confused with the journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice) that I found to be incoherent and filled with mistakes.

When I was evaluating that article I came across another article with the same title, by the same author, in Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences. It soon became clear that these were (this was?) the same short article, published in both journals. Both articles have the same muddled language and the same errors (running words together and the like – for more details see 'Can deforestation stop indigenous groups starving?')

The chronology seems to be:

  • 14th May 2019 – da Silva submits to Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences
    • 16th May 2019 – da Silva sends the same manuscript to Journal of Chemistry: Education and Research
    20th May 2019 – Journal of Chemistry: Education and Research accepts the article for publication (4 days after submission!)
    28th May 2019 – Journal of Chemistry: Education and Research publishes the article
    7th June 2019 – Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences publishes paper
    Was da Silva frustrated with not getting his article accepted within two days of first submission? (An acceptance date for Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences is not given)

    So, the article was submitted first to Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences, but had already been published in Journal of Chemistry: Education and Research by the time it was published in Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences. Given that authors are not supposed to publish the same material in several journals, this might raise the interesting question of which journal should require the work to be retracted, and which should allow it to stand.

    A copy of a copy

    However this would be a rather pointless question, as neither of the articles can claim to be original. As I discuss in 'Can deforestation stop indigenous groups starving?', virtually the entire text is simply lifted from three prior, unacknowledged publications written by other authors – odd paragraphs have been taken from parts of more detailed papers on the topic and simply collated (in a somewhat incoherent manner) into da Silva's manuscript. Any reputable journal that spotted this would require retraction because the work is not original but is plagiarised – it is the intellectual property of other scholars.

    Why was this not spotted?

    Although the opening of the article is simply copied word for word from the abstract of a published work (which is likely to be spotted by the tool used to screen to check for 'unique content') the rest of the material (that is, more than the critical 80%) is translated from texts which are in Portuguese.

    When an expert translator produces a new version of a work in a different language, and this is done with permission, the translator is entitled to credit and the translation is considered to be a work (albeit a derivative work) in its own right. Good translations are more than mechanical substitutions, and skillful translators are much appreciated.

    However, here we have works translated, without expertise (the English is full of mistakes), presumably without permission and certainly without attribution to the original authors. The software will not have recognised the translated text as not being 'unique content'.

    However, the process of peer review is supposed to evaluate the quality of the work, and identify areas for improvement. It is difficult to believe anyone who read this very short article carefully (for either journal) could have thought it was making a coherent argument, or that it did not at least need restructuring, clarifications and corrections.

    "We ensure that all the articles published in Acta Scientific undergo integrated peer review by peers and consequent revision by authors when required."

    https://www.actascientific.com/peerreview.php

    So, despite Acta Scientific's efforts to claim careful peer review processes, and what seems a genuine aspiration to ensure article originality and quality through peer review by those with expertise in the field, somehow the journal published the copy-and-paste job that is 'The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples'.

    Of course, for peer review to work, those asked to review have to take the role seriously.

    "Acta Scientific trusts the genuine peer review process that the reviewers carry out so that it helps us to publish the content with good essence."

    https://www.actascientific.com/reviewer.php

    I would like to believe that Acta Scientific's fine claims about peer review ARE sincere, and perhaps in this case it was just that their trust was betrayed by sloppy reviewers.

    Work cited:
    • da Silva, M. A. l. G. (2019). The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples. Acta Scientific Phamaceutical Sciences, 3 (7), 20-21.
    • da Silva, M. A. G. (2019) The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples. Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice, 3 (1), 1-2

    Laboratory safety – not on the face of it

    An invalid research instrument for testing 'safety sign awareness'

    Keith S. Taber

    I was recently invited to write for the 'Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice' (not to be confused with the well-established R.S.C. Journal 'Chemistry Education Research and Practice') which describes itself as "a leading International Journal for the publication of high quality articles". It is not.

    From the Journal Homepage

    I already had reason to suspect this of being a predatory journal (one that entices authors to part with money to publish work without adhering to the usual academic standards and norms). But as I had already reached that judgement before the journal had started publishing, I decided to check out the quality of the published work.

    The current issue, at the time of writing, has five articles, only one of which is educational in nature: 'Chemistry Laboratory Safety Signs Awareness Among Undergraduate Students in Rivers State'.

    Below I describe key aspects of this study, including some points that I would have expected to have been picked-up in peer review, and therefore to have been addressed before the paper could have been published.

    Spoiler alert

    My main observation is that the research instrument used is invalid – I do not think it actually measures what the authors claim it does. (As the article is published with a open-access license1, I am able to reproduce the instrument below so you can see if you agree with me or not.)

    'Chemistry laboratory safety signs awareness among undergraduate students in Rivers State'

    A study about chemistry laboratory safety signs awareness?

    Laboratory safety is very important in chemistry education, and is certainly a suitable topic for research. A range of signs and symbols are used to warn people of different types of potential chemical hazard, so learning about these signs is important for those working in laboratories; and so investigating this aspect of learning is certainly a suitable focus for research.

    Motivating a study

    As part of a published research study authors are expected to set out the rationale for the study – to demonstrate, usually based on existing literature, that there is something of interest to investigate. This can be described as the 'conceptual framework' for the study. This is one of the aspects of a study which is usually tested in peer-review where manuscripts submitted to a journal are sent to other researchers with relevant expertise for evaluation.

    The authors of this study, Ikiroma, Chinda and Bankole, did begin by discussing aspects of laboratory safety, and reporting some previous work around this topic. They cite an earlier study that had been carried out surveying second-year science education students at Lagos State University, Nigeria, and where:

    "The result of the study revealed 100% of the respondents are not aware of the laboratory sign and symbols" 2

    Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole, 2021: 50

    This would seem a good reason to do follow-up work elsewhere.

    Research questions and hypotheses

    A study should have one or more research questions. These will be quite general in more open-ended 'discovery research' (exploratory enquiry), but need to be more specific in 'confirmatory research' such as experiments and surveys. This study had both specific research questions and null hypotheses

    "Research Questions

    1. What is the percentage awareness level of safety signs among undergraduate Chemistry students?

    2. What is the difference in awareness level of safety signs between undergraduate Chemistry Education students and Chemistry Science students?

    3. To what extent do the awareness levels of safety signs among undergraduate Chemistry students depended on Institutional types?"

    Hypotheses

    1. There is no significant difference in awareness level of safety signs between undergraduate Chemistry Education students and Chemistry Science students

    2. The awareness levels of safety signs among undergraduate Chemistry students are not significantly dependent on Institutional types."

    Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole, 2021: 50

    These specific questions and hypotheses do not seem to be motivated in the conceptual framework. That is, a reader has not been given any rationale to think that there are reasons to test for differences between these different groups. There may have been good reasons to explore these variables, but authors of research papers are usually expected to share their reasoning with reader. (This is something which one would expect to be spotted in peer review, leading to the editor asking the authors to revise their submission to demonstrate the background behind asking about these specific points.)

    It is not explained quite what 'institutional types' actually refers to. From the way results are discussed later in the paper (p.53), 'Institutional types' seems to be used here simply to mean different universities

    Sampling – how random is random?

    The sample is described as:

    "A total of 60 year three undergraduate students studying Chemistry Education (B.Sc. Ed) and Pure Chemistry (B.Sc.) were randomly drawn from three universities namely; University of Port Harcourt (Uniport), Rivers State University (RSU) and Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE) with each university contributing 20 students."

    Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole, 2021: 50

    This study was then effectively a survey where data was collected from a sample of a defined population (third undergraduate students studying chemistry education or pure chemistry in any of three named universities in one geographical area) to draw inferences about the whole population.

    Randomisation is an important process when it is not possible to collect data from the whole population of interest, as it allows statistics to be used to infer from the sample what is likely in the wider population. Ideally, authors should briefly explain how they have randomised (Taber, 2013) so readers can judge if the technique used does really give each member of the population (here one assumes 3rd year chemistry undergraduates in each of the Universities) an equal chance of being sampled. (If the authors are reading this blog, please feel free to respond to this point in the comments below: how did you go about the randomisation?)

    Usually in survey research an indication would be given of the size of the population (as a random sample of 0.1% of a population gives results with larger inherent error than a random sample of 10%). That information does not seem to be provided here.

    Even if the authors did use randomisation, presumably they did not randomise across the combined population of "year three undergraduate students studying Chemistry Education (B.Sc. Ed) and Pure Chemistry (B.Sc.)…from three universities" as they would have been very unlikely to have ended up with equal numbers from the three different institutions. So, probably this means they took (random?) samples from within each of the three sub-populations (which would be sensible to compare between them).

    It later becomes clear that of the 60 sampled students, 30 were chemistry education students and 30 straight chemistry students (p.53) – so again it seems likely that sampling was done separately for the two types of course. There does not seem to be any information on the break down between university and course, so it is possible there were 10 students in each of 6 cells, if each University offered both courses:

    chemistry educationpure chemistrytotal
    University of Port Harcourt??20
    Rivers State University??20
    Ignatius Ajuru University of Education??20
    total303060
    Sample

    Clearly this distribution potentially matters as there could be interactions between these two different variables. Consider for example that perhaps students taking pure chemistry tended to have a higher 'awareness level of safety signs' than students taking chemistry education: then (see the hypothetical example in the table below), if a sample from one university mostly comprised of pure chemistry students, and that from another university mostly of chemistry education students, then this would likely lead to finding differences between institutions in the samples even if there were no such differences between the combined student populations in the two universities. The uneven sampling from the two courses within the universities would bias the comparison between institutions.

    course 1course 2total
    University A20020
    University B101020
    Education C02020
    total303060
    A problematic sample for disentangling factors

    My best guess is the the authors appreciated that, and that all three universities taught both types of course, and the authors sampled 10 students from each course in each of the universities. Perhaps they even did it randomly – but it would be good to know how as I have found that sometimes authors who claim to have made random selections have not used a technique that would strictly support this claim. (And if a sample is not random we can have much less confidence about how it reflects the population sampled.)

    The point is that a reader of a research report should not have to guess. Often researchers (and research students) are so close to their own project that it becomes easy to assume others will know things about the work that have become taken for granted by the research team. This is where a good editor or peer reviewer can point out, and ask for, missing information that is not available to a reader.

    Ethical research?

    Sampling can also be impacted by ethics. It is one thing to select people randomly, but not all people will volunteer to help with research and it is general principle of educational research that participants should offer voluntary informed consent. Where some people agree to participate, and others do not, this may bias results if people's reasons for accepting/declining an invitation are linked to the focus of the research.

    Imagine inviting students to some research to test whether cheating (copying homework, taking reference material into examinations) can be detected by using a lie detector to questions students about their behaviours. Are those who cheat and those who are scrupulously honest likely to volunteer to take part in such research to the same extent, or might we expect most cheats to opt out?

    It is normal practice in educational research to make a brief statement that the research was carried out ethically, e.g., that participants all volunteered freely having had the purpose and nature of the research clearly explained to them. I could not find any such statement in the article, nor any requirement for authors to include this in the journal's author guidelines.

    Lack of face validity

    In research, validity is about measuring what you think you are measuring. In the school laboratory, if we saw a student completing the 'potential difference/V' column of a results table when taking readings with an ammeter we would consider the recorded results were invalid.

    I once gave a detention to a first year (Y7) student who had done something naughty that I forget now, and as we were working on a measurement topic I set her to measure the length of the corridor outside the lab. with a metre rule. Although this was an appropriate instrument, I found that she did not appreciate that in order to get a valid result she had to make sure she moved the metre stick on by the right amount (that is, one metre!) for each counted metre – instead she would move the metre stick by about half its length! Some pupils may resent being in detention and deliberately respond with sloppy work, but in this case it seemed the fault was with the teacher who had overestimated prior knowledge and consequently given an insufficiently detailed explanation of the task!

    In research we have to be confident that an instrument is measuring what it is meant to. This may mean testing and calibrating – using the instrument somewhere where we already have a good measure and checking it gives the expected answers (like checking a clock against the Greenwich pips on the radio) before using it in research to measure an unknown.

    In educational studies we can sometimes spot invalid instruments because they lack face validity – that is, 'on the face of it' an instrument does not seem suitable to do the job. Certainly when 'we' are people with relevant expertise. Consider an instrument to test understanding of trigonometry which consisted of the item: "discuss five factors which contributed to the 'industrial revolution' in eighteenth century Britain". We might suspect this could be used to measure something, but probably not understanding of trigonometry. This would be an invalid test to use for that purpose.

    Awareness level of safety signs?

    The focus of Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole's study was 'awareness level of safety signs'. Strictly this only seems to mean being aware of such signs3, but I read this to mean that the authors wanted to know if students recognised the meaning of different signs commonly used: whether they were aware what particular signs signified.

    The 'Chemistry Laboratory Test on Safety Signs' instrument:

    The authors report they used:

    A well validated and researchers['] constructed test instrument, titled, Chemistry Laboratory Test on Safety Signs (CLTSS) which had an internal reliability index of 0.94 via Cronbach Alpha was used for data collection in the study. The questions in the test required the students to match a list of 20 chemicals in column A and of nine safety signs accompanied with a short description in column B. This aimed to reduce the wrong response because the students incorrectly considered only the symbol.

    Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole, 2021: 50
    Validation

    A key question that an editor would expect peer reviewers to consider is whether the instrumentation used in research can provide valid findings. Where this is not clear in a manuscript submited to a journal, the editor should (if not rejecting the paper) ask for this to be addressed in a revision of the manuscript. Validity is clearly critical, and research should not be published it if makes claims based on invalid instrumentation.

    Therefore when reporting research instruments it is usually expected that authors explain how they tested for validity – simply stating something is well-validated does not count! Face validity might be tested by asking carefully identified experts to see if they think the instrument tests what is claimed (so here, perhaps asking university chemistry lecturers – "do you think these questions are suitable for elciiting undergraduate students' awareness levels of safety signs?").

    If an instrument passed this initial test, more detailed work would be undertaken. Here perhaps a small sample of students from a closely related poopulation to that being studied (pehaps second year chemistry students in the same universities; or third year chemistry students from another university) would be asked to complete the instrument using a 'think aloud' protocol where they explain their thinking as they answer the questions – or would be interviewed about their awareness of safety signs as well as comepleting the instrument to triangulate reponses to the instrument against interview responses.

    Cronbach's alpha measures the internal consistency of an scale (Taber, 2018), but offers no assurance of validity. (If a good set of items meant to test enjoyment of school science were used instead to measure belief in ghosts the set of items would still show the same high level of internal consistency despite being used for a totally invalid purpose.)

    Chemistry Laboratory Test on Safety Signs (Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole, 2021: 51)

    So, what the students had to do was match a chemical (name) with the appropriate hazard sign.What was being tested was knowledge of the hazards associated with laboratory chemicals (an important enough topic, but not what was promised).

    Had the signs not been labelled, then the items would have required BOTH knowing about the hazards of specific chemicals AND knowing which sign was used for the associated hazards. However, Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole had actually looked "to reduce the wrong response because the students incorrectly considered only the symbol" (emphasis added). That is, they had built into the test instrument a means to ensure it did not test awareness of 'safety signs' (what they were supposedly interested in) and only measured awareness of the hazards associated with particular substances.

    What Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankolehad tested was potentially useful and interesting – but it was not what they claimed. The paper title, the research questions, and the hypotheses (and consequently their statements of findings) were all misleading in that regard. One would have expected the editor and peer reviewers should have noticed that and required corrections before publication was considered.

    Quality assurance?

    The journal's website claims that "Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice is an international peer reviewed journal…" Peer review involves the editor rejecting poor submissions, and ensuring that the quality of what is published by arranging that experts in the field scrutinise submissions to ensure they meet quality standards. Peer reviewers are chosen for expertise related to the specific topic of the specific submission. In particular, reviewers will ask for changes where these seem to be needed, and the editor of a journal decides to publish only when she is satisfied sufficient changes have been made in response to review reports.

    Publishing poor quality work, especially work with glaring issues, reflects badly on the authors, the journal, and the editor.4

    The journal accepted the paper about 9 days after submision

    In this case the editor – Professor Nour Shafik Emam El-Gendy of the Environmental Sciences & Nanobiotechnology Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute in Egypt – appears to have taken just over a week to

    • arrange peer review,
    • receive and consider the referee reports, and
    • report back to the authors asking them for any changes she felt were needed, and (once she received any revisions that may have been requested) then
    • decide the paper was ready for publication in this supposed 'leading international journal'.

    That could be seen as impressive, but actually seems incredible.

    Peer review is not just about sorting good work from bad, it is also about supporting authors by showing them where their work needs to be improved before it is put on public display. Peer review is as much about improving work as selecting.

    I do not know if Ikiroma, Chinda & Bankole were expected to pay the standard charge for publishing – that is $999 for this journal – but, if so, I do not think they got value for money. Given the level of support they seem to have received from the peer review process, I think they should be entitled to a refund.

    Work cited:
    • Ikiroma, B., Chinda, W., & Bankole, I. S. (2021). Chemistry Laboratory Safety Signs Awareness Among Undergraduate Students in Rivers State. Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice, 5(1), 47-54.
    • Oludipe, O. S., & Etobro, B. A. (2018). Science Education Undergraduate Students' Level of Laboratory Safety Awareness. Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science, 23(4), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.9734/JESBS/2017/37461
    • Taber, K. S. (2013). Non-random thoughts about research. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 14(4), 359-362. doi: 10.1039/c3rp90009f. [Free access]
    • Taber, K. S. (2014). Ethical considerations of chemistry education research involving "human subjects". Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 15(2), 109-113. [Free access]
    • Taber, K. S. (2018). The Use of Cronbach's Alpha When Developing and Reporting Research Instruments in Science Education. Research in Science Education, 48, 1273-1296. doi:10.1007/s11165-016-9602-2

    Notes:

    1: "All works published by 'Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice' is [sic, are] under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License. This permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work provided the original work and source is appropriately cited." (https://opastonline.com/journal/journal-of-chemistry-education-research-and-practice/author-guidelines)

    2: This is indeed what these authors claim – by which they seem to mean none of the students tested reaches a score of half-marks. (I infer that from the way they report other results in the same study.) They report that, of 50 respondents,

    "21 (42%) could not identify correctly all [sic, could not identify correctly any of] the eight symbols presented in the survey. 24 (48%) was only able to identify one out of eight symbols presented, and 5 (10%) could identify just two. Thus, it is alarming to discover that *100% of the respondents are not aware of the laboratory signs and symbols"

    Oludipe & Etobro, 2018: 5

    (The asterisk seems to indicate which rows from a result table are being summed to give 100%.)

    3. If we simply wanted to test for awareness of safety signs we might think of displaying some jars of reagents and asking something like "is there any way you would know about which of these chemicals present particular risks?" or "how might we find out about special precautions we should take when working with these reagents?" and see if the respondents pointed out the safety signs printed on the labels.

    4. Journals that attract high volumes of submissions may have a team of editors to share the work. Some journals with several editors acknowledge the specific editor who handles each published study.

    I suspect that some predatory journals appoint editors who do not actually see the submissions (as it is difficult to see how qualified editors would approve some of the nonsense published in some journals), which are instead handled by administrators who may not be experts in the field (and so may not be in a position to judge the expertise of peer reviewers). If this is so, the editor should be described as an 'honorary editor' as misrepresenting a journal as edited by a subject expert is dishonest.

    Can deforestation stop indigenous groups starving?

    One should be careful with translation when plagiarising published texts

    Keith S. Taber


    The mastering of the art of deforestation is what enables the inhabitants of the Amazon not to die of hunger.


    Marcos Aurélio Gomes da Silva, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil

    I have been reading some papers in a journal that I believed, on the basis of its misleading title and website details, was an example of a poor-quality 'predatory' journal. That is, a journal which encourages submissions simply to be able to charge a publication fee, without doing the proper job of editorial scrutiny. I wanted to test this initial evaluation by looking at the quality of some of the work published.

    One of the papers I decided to read, partly because the topic looked of particular interest, was 'The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples'.

    Image by 139904 from Pixabay 

    It is important to learn and teach about the science of indigenous populations

    Indigenous science is a very important topic for science education. In part this is because of the bias in many textbook accounts of science. There are examples of European scientists being seen as discovers of organisms, processes and so on, that had been long known by indigenous peoples. It is not even that the European's re-discovered them as much as that they were informed by people who were not seen to count as serious epistemic agents. Species were often named after the person who could afford to employ collectors (often paid a pittance) to go and find specimens. This is like a more serious case of the PhD supervisor claiming the student's work as the student worked for them!

    Indigenous cultures often encompass knowledge and technologies that have worked effectively, and sustainable, for millennia but which do not count as proper science because they are not framed in terms of the accepted processes of science (being passed on orally and by example, rather than being reported in Nature or Science). Of course the situation is more nuanced that that – often indigenous cultures do not (need to) make the discriminations between science, technology, myth, ritual, art, and so forth that have allowed 'modern' science to be established as a distinct tradition and set of practices.

    But science education that ignores indigenous contributions to formal science and seems to dismiss cultural traditions and ecological knowledge offers both a distorted account of science's history, and an inherent message about differential cultural worth to children.

    That is a rather brief introduction to a massive topic, but perhaps indicates why I was keen to look at the paper in the so-called 'Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice' on 'The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples' (da Silva, 2019)

    Sloppy production values

    "The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples" had moved from submission to acceptance in 4 days, and had been published just over a week later.

    Not a lot of time for a careful peer review process

    This 'opinion article' was barely more than one page (I wondered if perhaps the journal charges authors by the word – but it seems to charge authors $999 per article), and was a mess. For example, consider the two paragraphs reproduced below: the first starts in lower case, and ends with the unexplained 'sentence', "art of dewatering: cassava"; and the second is announced as being about development (well, 'devel- opment' actually) which seems to be considered the opposite of fermentation, but then moves straight to 'deworming' which is said to be needed due to the toxic nature of some plants, and ends up explaining that deforestation is essential for the survival of indigenous people (rather contrary to the widespread view that deforestation is destroying their traditional home and culture).

    The closing three paragraphs of the article left me very confused:

    "In this sense, we  [sic – this is a single authored paper] will examine the example of the cassava root in more detail so that we can then briefly refer to other products and processes. The last section will address some of the political implications of our perspective.

    In Brazil, manioc (Manihot esculenta) is known under different names in several regions. In the south of the country, it is also called "aipim", in central Brazil, "maniva", "manaíba", "uaipi", and in the north, "macaxeira" or "carim".

    In this essay, we intend to show that, to a certain extent, companies,
    a process of invention of the Indian Indians of South America, and
    still are considerable, as businesses, until today, millions of people and institutions benefit in the Western world. We seek to provide information from a few examples regarding chemical practices and biochemical procedures for the transformation of substances that
    are unknown in Europe."

    da Silva, 2019, p.2

    My first reading of that last paragraph made me wonder if this was just the introduction to a much longer essay that had been truncated. But then I suspected it seemed to be meant as a kind of conclusion. If so, the promised brief references to 'other products and processes' seem to have been omitted after the listing of alternative names in the paragraph about manioc (cassava), whilst the 'political implications' seemed to refer to the garbled final paragraph ("…to a certain extent, companies, a process of invention of the Indian Indians of South America, and still are considerable, as businesses…").

    I suspected that the author, based in Brazil, probably did not have English as a first language, perhaps explaining the odd phrasing and incoherent prose. But this paper is published in a (supposed) research journal which should mean that the submission was read by an editor, and then evaluated by peer reviewers, and only published once the editor was convinced it met quality standards. Instead it is a short, garbled, and in places incoherent, essay.

    Plagiarism?

    But there is worse.

    da Silva's article, with the identifed sources (none of which are acknowledged) highlighted. (The paper is published with a licence that allows reproduction.)

    I found a paper in the Portuguese language journal Química Nova called 'A química dos povos indígenas da América do Sul (The chemistry of indigenous people of Southamerica)' (Soentgen &  Hilbert, 2016).  This seems to be on a very similar topic to the short article I had been trying to make sense of – but it is a much more extensive paper. The abstract is in English, and seems to be the same as the opening of da Silva's 2019 paper (see the Table below).

    That is plagiarism – intellectual theft. Da Silva does not even cite the 2016 paper as a source.

    I do not read Portuguese, and I know that Google Translate is unlikely to capture the nuances of a scholarly paper. But it is a pretty good tool for getting a basic idea of what a text is about. The start of the 2016 paper seemed quite similar to the close of da Silva's 2019 article, except for the final sentence – which seems very similar to a sentence found elsewhere in the 'New Chemistry' article.

    This same paper seemed to be the source of the odd claims about "deworming" and the desirability of deforestation in da Silva's 2019 piece. The reference to the "opposite process" (there, poisoning) makes sense in the context of the 2016 paper, as there it follows from a discussion of the use of curare in modern medicine – something borrowed from the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

    In da Silva's article the 'opposite process' becomes 'development', and this now follows a discussion of fermentation- which makes little sense. The substitution of 'deworming' and 'deforestation' as alternatives for 'poisoning' ('desenvenenamento') convert the original text into something quite surreal.

    So, in the same short passage:

    • desenvenenamento (poisoning) becomes development (desenvolvimento)
    • desenvenenamento (poisoning) becomes deworming (vermifugação – or deparasitamento)
    • desenvenenamento (poisoning) becomes deforestation (desmatamento)

    I also spotted other 'similarities' between passages in da Silva's 2019 article and the earlier publication (see the figure above and table below). However, it did not seem that da Silva had copied all of his article from Soentgena and Hilbert.

    Rather I found another publication by Pinto (possibly from 2008) which seemed to be the source of other parts of da Silva's 2019 paper. This article is published on the web, but does not seem to be a formal publication (in an academic journal or similar outlet), but rather material prepared to support a taught course. However, I found the same text incorporated in a later extensive journal review article co-written by Pinto (Almeida, Martinez & Pinto, 2017).

    This still left a section of da Silva's 2019 paper which did not seem to orignate in these two sources. I found a third Portuguese language source (Cardoso, Lobo-santos, Coelho, Ayres & Martins, 2017) which seemed to have been plagiarised as the basis of this remaining section of the article.

    As this point I had found three published sources, predating da Silva's 2019 work, which – when allowing for some variation in translation into English – seemed to be the basis of effectively the whole of da Silva's article (see the table and figure).

    Actually, I also found another publication which was even closer to, indeed virtually identical to, da Silva's article in the Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice. It seems that not content with submitting the plagiarised material as an 'opinion article' there, da Silva had also sent the same text as a 'short communication' to a completely different journal.

    (Read 'A failure of peer review: A copy of a copy – or plagiarism taken to the extreme')

    Incredible coincidence? Sloppy cheating? Or a failed attempt to scam the scammers?

    Although da Silva cited six references in his paper, these did not include Cardoso et al. (2017), Pinto (2008)/Almeida et al. (2017) or Soentgena & Hilbert (2016). Of course there is a theoretical possibility that the similarities I found were coincidences, and the odd errors were not translation issues but just mistakes by da Silva. (Mistakes that no one at the journal seems to have spotted.) It would be a very unlikely possibility. So unlikely that such an explanation seems 'beyond belief'.

    It seems that little, if anything, of da Silva's text was his own, and that his attempt to publish an article based on cutting sections from other people's work and compiling them (without any apparent logical ordering) into a new peice might have fared better if he too had taken advantage of Google Translate (which had done a pretty good job of helping me identify the Portuguese sources which da Silva seemed to have been 'borrowed' for his English language article). In cutting and pasting odd paragraphs from different sources da Silva had lost the coherence of the original works leading to odd juxtapositions and strangely incomplete sections of text. None of this seems to have been noticed by the journal editor or peer reviewers.

    Or, perhaps, I am doing da Silva an injustice.

    Perhaps he too was suspicious of the quality standards at this journal, and did a quick 'cut and paste' article, introducing some obvious sloppy errors (surely translating the same word,'desenvenenamento', incorrectly in three different ways in the same paragraph was meant as some kind of clue), just to see how rigorous the editing, peer review and production standards are?

    Given that the article was accepted and published in less than a fortnight, perhaps the plan backfired and poor da Silva found he had a rather unfortunate publication to his name before he had a chance to withdraw the paper. Unfortunate? If only because this level of plagiarism would surely be a sacking offence in most academic institutions.

    Previously published materialEnglish translation (Google Translate)The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples (2019)
    Marcos Aurélio Gomes da Silva
    The contribution of non-European cultures to science and technology, primarily to chemistry, has gained very little attentions until now.[Original was in English]The contribution of non-European cultures to science and technology, primarily to chemistry, has gained very little attentions until now.
    Especially the high technological intelligence and inventiveness of South American native populations shall be put into a different light by our contribution.Especially, the high technological intelligence and inventiveness of South American native populations shall be put into a different light by our contribution.
    The purpose of this essay is to show that mainly in the area of chemical practices the indigenous competence was considerable and has led to inventions profitable nowadays to millions of people in the western world and especially to the pharmacy corporations.The purpose of this study was to show that mainly in the area of chemical practices; the indigenous competence was considerable and has led to inventions profitable nowadays to millions of people in the western world and especially to the pharmacy corporations.
    We would like to illustrate this assumption by giving some examples of chemical practices of transformation of substances, mainly those unknown in the Old World.We would like to illustrate this assumption by giving some examples of chemical practices of transformation of substances, mainly those unknown in the old world.
    The indigenous capacity to gain and to transform substances shall be shown here by the manufacture of poisons, such as curare or the extraction of toxic substances of plants, like during the fabrication of manioc flower.The indigenous capacity to gain and to transform substances shall be shown here by the manufacture of poisons, such as curare or the extraction of toxic substances of plants, like during the fabrication of manioc flower.
    We shall mention as well other processes of multi-stage transformations and the discovery and the use of highly effective natural substances by Amazonian native populations, such as, for example, rubber, ichthyotoxic substances or psychoactive drugs.
    		We shall mention as well other processes of multi-stage transformations and the discovery and the use of highly effective natural substances by Amazonian native populations, such as, for example, rubber, ichthyotoxic substances or psychoactive drugs.
    Soentgena & Hilbert, 2016: 1141
    A partir disso, os povos indígenas da América do Sul não parecem ter contribuído para a química e a tecnologia moderna.From this, the indigenous peoples of South America do not seem to have contributed to modern chemistry and technology.The indigenous peoples of South America do not seem to have contributed to modern chemistry and technology.
    Em contraponto, existem algumas referências e observações feitas por cronistas e viajantes do período colonial a respeito da transformação, manipulação e uso de substâncias que exigem certo conhecimento químico como,6 por exemplo: as bebidas fermentadas, os corantes (pau-brasil, urucum), e os venenos (curare e timbó).In contrast, there are some references and observations made by chroniclers and travelers from the colonial period about the transformation, manipulation and use of substances that require certain chemical knowledge,6 for example: fermented beverages, dyes (pau-brasil, annatto), and poisons (curare and timbó).
    		In contrast, there are some references and observations made by chroniclers and travelers from the colonial period regarding the transformation, manipulation and use of substances that require certain chemical knowledge, such as fermented beverages, dyes (pigeon peas, Urucum), and the poisons (Curare and Timbó).
    Mesmo assim, estas populações acabam sendo identificadas como "selvagens primitivos" que ainda necessitam de amparo da civilização moderna para que possam desenvolver-se.Even so, these populations end up being identified as "primitive savages" who still need the support of modern civilization so that they can develop.Even so, these populations end up being identified as "primitive savages" who still need the support of modern civilization in order for them to develop.
    (Soentgena & Hilbert, 2016: 1141)
    A pintura corporal dos índios brasileiros foi uma das primeiras coisas que chamou a atenção do colonizador português.The body painting of Brazilian Indians was one of the first things that caught the attention of the Portuguese colonizer.  Body painting of the Brazilian Indians was one of the first things that caught the attention of the Portuguese colonizer.  
    Pero Vaz de Caminha, em sua famosa carta ao rei D.
    Manoel I, já falava de uns "pequenos ouriços que os índios traziam nas mãos e da nudeza colorida das índias.    		Pero Vaz de Caminha, in his famous letter to King D. Manoel I, already spoke of "small hedgehogs that the Indians carried in their hands and the colorful nudity of the Indians.Pero Vaz de Caminha, in his famous letter to King D. Manoel I, already talked about little hedgehogs that the Indians carried in their hands.
    Traziam alguns deles ouriços verdes, de árvores, que na cor, quase queriam parecer de castanheiros; apenas que eram mais e mais pequenos.They brought some of them green hedgehogs, from trees, which in color, almost they wanted to look like chestnut trees; only that they were smaller and smaller.They brought some of them green hedgehogs, trees, who in color almost wanted to appear of chestnut trees; just that they were more and more small.
    E os mesmos eram cheios de grãos vermelhos, pequenos, que, esmagados entre os dedos, faziam tintura muito vermelha, da que eles andavam tintos; e quando se mais molhavam mais vermelhos ficavam"And they were full of small, red grains, which, crushed between the fingers, made a very red tincture, from which they were red; and when they got more wet the redder they turned"And the same were filled with red, small [sic], which, crushed between the fingers, made very red dye from the [sic] that they walked red [sic]; and when the more they wet the more red they stayed.
    (Pinto, 2008: pp1.1-2; also Almeida, Martinez & Pinto, 2017)
    Os índios do Alto Xingú pintam a pele do corpo com desenhos de animais, pássaros e peixes.The Indians of Alto Xingu paint the skin of their bodies with drawings of animals, birds and fish.The Indians of Alto Xingú paint thebody [sic] skin with animal drawings, birds and fish.
     Estes desenhos, além de servirem para identificar o grupo social ao qual pertencem, são uma
    maneira de uní-los aos espíritos, aos quais creditam sua felicidade.    		These drawings, in addition to serving to identify the social group to which they belong, are a way to unite them with the spirits, to whom they credit their happiness.These drawings besides serving to identify the social group at thewhich [sic] they belong, are a way of unite them with the spirits, to whom they credit their happiness.
    A tinta usada por esses índios é preparada com sementes de urucu, que se colhe nos meses de maio e junho.The ink used by these Indians is prepared with annatto seeds, which are harvested in May and June.The ink used by these Indians is prepared with urucu seeds , which is collected in the monthsof [sic] May and June.
    As sementes são raladas em peneiras finas e fervidas em água para formar uma pasta.The seeds are grated into fine sieves and boiled in water to form a paste.The seeds are grated in fine [sic] and boiledwater [sic] to form a paste.
    Com esta pasta são feitas bolas que são envolvidas em folhas, e guardadas durante todo o ano para as
    cerimônias de tatuagem.    		This paste is used to make balls that are wrapped in sheets, and kept throughout the year for the
    tattoo ceremonies.    		With this paste balls are made which, involved in sheets, are stored throughout the year for the tattoo ceremonies.
    A tinta extraída do urucu também é usada para tingir os cabelos e na confecção de máscaras faciais.The dye extracted from the annatto is also used to dye hair and make facial masks.The ink extracted from Urucu is also used dyeing hair and making tion [sic] of facial masks.
    (Pinto, 2008: p.4; also Almeida, Martinez & Pinto, 2017)
    O urucu é usado modernamente para colorir manteiga, margarina, queijos, doces e pescado defumado, e o seu corante principal – a bixina – em filtros solares.  
    		Annatto is used in modern times to color butter, margarine, cheeses, sweets and smoked fish, and its main coloring – bixin – in sunscreens.Urucu is used coloring page [sic] butter, margarine, cheeses, sweets andsmoked [sic] fish, and its colorant main – bixina – in solar filters.
    (Pinto, 2008: p.4; also Almeida, Martinez & Pinto, 2017)
    Assim, foram identificados possíveis conteúdos de Química que poderiam estar relacionados com a preparação do Tarubá, como misturas, separação de misturas e processos de fermentação.  Thus, possible contents of Chemistry were identified that could be related to the preparation of Tarubá, such as mixtures, separation of mixtures and fermentation processes.  it was possible to identify possible contents of Chemistry that could be related to the preparation of Tarubá, such as mixtures, separation of mixtures and fermentation processes.
    O processo de preparação da bebida feita da mandioca ralada, envolve a separação da mistura entre o sólido da massa da mandioca e o líquido do tucupi, feito através do processo de filtração com o tipiti, instrumento tradicional indígena.The process of preparing a drink made from grated cassava involves separating the mixture between the solid of the cassava mass and the liquid from the tucupi, made through the filtration process with tipiti, a traditional indigenous instrument.The process of preparation of the beverage made from grated cassava involves the separation of the mixture between the solid of the cassava mass and the liquid of the tucupi, made through the filtration process with the tipiti, a traditional Indian instrument.
    A massa é peneirada, assada e colocada em repouso por três dias, quando ocorre o processo de fermentação, em que o açúcar, contido na mandioca, é processado pelos microrganismos e transformado em outras substâncias, como álcool e gases.The dough is sifted, baked and put to rest for three days, when the fermentation process takes place, in which the sugar, contained in the cassava, is processed by microorganisms and transformed into other substances, such as alcohol and gases.The dough is sieved, roasted and put to rest for three days, when the fermentation process occurs, in which the sugar contained in cassava is processed by microorganisms and transformed into other substances such as alcohol and gas.
    Após esse período, se adicionam água e açúcar à massa coada, estando a bebida pronta para ser consumida.After this period, water and sugar are added to the strained mass, and the drink is ready to be consumed.After this period, water and sugar are added to the batter, and the beverage is ready to be consumed.
    (Cardoso, Lobo-santos, Coelho, Ayres, Martins, 2017).
    art of dewatering: cassava
    Agora gostaríamos de voltar a atenção para o processo oposto, o desenvenenamento.  Now we would like to turn our attention to the opposite process, the poisoning.  Now we would like to turn our attention to the opposite process, the devel- opment [sic].  
    Ainda que não exija técnicas tão sofisticadas quanto a produção de substâncias, o desenvenenamento é um proce- dimento fundamental para as pessoas que vivem e queiram sobreviver na floresta tropical amazônica, tendo em vista que muitas plantas de lá produzem veneno em virtude de seu metabolismo secundário.Although it does not require such sophisticated techniques as the production of substances, poisoning is a fundamental procedure for people who live and want to survive in the Amazon rainforest, considering that many plants there produce poison due to their secondary metabolism.Although it does not require techniques as sophisticated as the production of substances, the deworming is a fundamental procedure for the people who live and want to survive in the rainforest Amazon, since many plants of there produce poison by virtue of its secondary metabolism.
    Afinal, a forma que muitas espécies de plantas possuem para evitar a mordida de insetos é a produção de recursos químicos defensivos.After all, the way that many plant species have to avoid insect bites is the production of defensive chemical resources.After all, the way that many plant species have to avoid insect bite is the production of defensive chemical resources.
    Quem quer sobreviver na floresta tropical precisa saber como neu- tralizar ou afastar essas substâncias tóxicas produzidas pelas próprias plantas.Anyone who wants to survive in the rainforest needs to know how to neutralize or remove these toxic substances produced by the plants themselves.Whoever wants to survive in the rainforest needs to know how to neutralize or ward off these toxic substances produced by the plants themselves.
    O domínio da arte do desenvenenamento é o que possibilita os habitantes da Amazônia a não morrerem de fome. Mastering the art of poisoning is what makes it possible for the inhabitants of the Amazon not to starve.The mastering of the art of deforestation is what enables the inhabitants of the Amazon not to die of hunger.
    (Soentgena & Hilbert, 2016: 1145)
    Nesse sentido, examinaremos o exemplo da raiz de mandioca de maneira mais detalhada para então, na sequência, fazermos referência sumária a outros produtos e processos.  In this sense, we will examine the cassava root example in more detail and then, in the sequence, make a brief reference to other products and processes.In this sense, we will examine the example of the cassava root in more detail so that we can then briefly refer to other products and processes.  
    A última seção tratará de algumas implicações políticas de nossa perspectiva.
    		The last section will deal with some policy implications from our perspective.The last section will address some of the political implications of our perspective.
    No Brasil, a mandioca (Manihot esculenta) é conhecida sob diversos nomes em diversas regiões.In Brazil, cassava (Manihot esculenta) is known under several names in different regions.In Brazil, manioc (Manihot esculenta) is known under different names in several regions.
    No sul do país, ela também se chama "aipim", no Brasil central, "maniva", "manaíba", "uaipi", e no norte, "macaxeira" ou "carim".In the south of the country, it is also called "casino" [sic], in central Brazil, "maniva", "manaíba", "uaipi", and in the north, "macaxeira" or "carim".In the south of the country, it is also called "aipim", in central Brazil, "maniva", "manaíba", "uaipi", and in the north, "macaxeira" or "carim".
    (Soentgena & Hilbert, 2016: 1145)
    Neste ensaio, pretendemos mostrar que, no que concerne ao conhecimento relativo às práticas químicas, a criatividade e a inteli- gência técnica dos povos indígenas da América do Sul, são compe- tências consideráveis até os dias de hoje.  
    Os povos ameríndios, em especial os da bacia amazônica, desenvolveram práticas que levaram a invenções das quais, até hoje, milhões de pessoas se beneficiam.    		In this essay, we intend to show that, with regard to knowledge related to chemical practices, creativity and technical intelligence of the indigenous peoples of South America are considerable competences to this day.  
    The Amerindian peoples, especially those from the Amazon basin, developed practices that led to inventions from which, to this day, millions of people benefit.    		In this essay, we intend to show that, to a certain extent, companies,
    a process of invention of the Indian Indians of South America, and
    still are considerable, as businesses, until today, millions of people and institutions benefit in the Western world.
    (Soentgena & Hilbert, 2016: 1141)
    Gostaríamos de documentar essas afirmações com alguns exemplos, limitando-nos a apresentar apenas produtos feitos a partir de substâncias que eram inteiramente desconhecidos na Europa.We would like to document these claims with a few examples, limiting ourselves to presenting only products made from substances that were entirely unknown in Europe.We seek to provide information from a few examples regarding chemical practices and biochemical procedures for the transformation of substances that
    are [sic!] unknown in Europe.
    (Soentgena & Hilbert, 2016: 1142)
    Text of da Silva's 2019 article (in its published sequence) is juxtaposed against material that seems to have been used as unacknowledged sources (paragraphs have been broken up to aid comparisons).

    Works cited:
    • Almeida, M. R., Martinez, S. T &  Pinto, A. C.(2017) Química de Produtos Naturais: Plantas que Testemunham Histórias. Revista Virtual de Química, 9 (3), 1117-1153.
    • Cardoso, A.M.C., Lobo-santos, V., Coelho, A.C.S., Ayres, J.L., Martins, M.M.M.(2017) O Processo de preparação da bebida indígena tarubá como tema gerado para o ensino de química. 57th Congresso Brasileiro de Química. http://www.abq.org.br/cbq/2017/trabalhos/6/11577-25032.html
    • da Silva, M. A. G. (2019) The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples. Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice, 3 (1), pp.1-2
    • Pinto, A. C. (2008) Corantes naturais e culturas indígenas: http://www.luzimarteixeira.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/corantes-curiosidades.pdf
    • Soentgena, J. & Hilbert, K. (2016) A química dos povos indígenas da América do Sul. Química Nova, 39 (9), pp.1141-1150

    Guiding the work of palliative care

    Keith S. Taber

    I recently heard from the journal 'Archives of Palliative Care' who claim to be able to "enhance the quality" of my work. As – to the best of my knowledge – palliative care is an area of medical work seeking to make life as comfortable as possible for the terminally ill, this is not a journal I've tended to read.
    From Editorial Assistant– Archives of Palliative Care Call for paper: community engaged Dear Dr. Taber Keith S I enjoyed your recent paper with the title Secondary students' values and perceptions of science-related careers: responses to vignette-based scenarios. We would like to continue working in this area under your guidance. Would you please tell me whether you have any new manuscripts available in your area of site? Thank you for your time
    I have written back to see how the journal feels I can contribute…as surely Sherline would not have written to me to tell me she had read my work and feels it is relevant to her journal unless that is indeed true?
    Dear Sherline Thank you for your kind message. It was so good to hear that you enjoyed our article 'Secondary students' values and perceptions of science-related careers: responses to vignette-based scenarios'. It was quite a small piece of work arising from a larger collaborative project, but I was rather proud of it. It is always rewarding to hear that someone has found time to engage with the work and has got something useful from it. I was intrigued to learn that 'Archives of Palliative Care' is interested is working in this area under my guidance, as I do not think we would likely have considered the journal an obvious outlet for our work. I am not sure we have anything else worked up for submission at this time, but perhaps if you could tell me what aspects of 'Secondary students' values and perceptions of science-related careers: responses to vignette-based scenarios' you found especially relevant, and how you feel our work can best contribute to 'Archives of Palliative Care' then I could give some serious consideration to whether we might have anything yet to be worked up which it might be suitable. Best wishes

    Keith

      The article Sherline enjoyed does include some comments of young people reflecting on whether they would be comfortable in entering medicine as a career (as one of a number of focal areas of scientific work discussed in the study), but that link seems a little tenuous to think our research fits in a journal on palliative care. But perhaps Sherline will get back to me and enlighten me.

    Update:

    Sherline has indeed got back to me: On 15/07/2021 11:39, Archives of Palliative Care wrote:
    Dear Dr. Taber Keith S, Greetings!! Thank you for your immediate response towards our journal. The knowledge present in your published manuscript is so useful to future researchers . this was the reason we want to publish your manuscript in our journal. Awaiting for your response. Best Regards,
    This response remains at a very general level, indeed the kind of repsonses that Sherline could have made even if she was not an honest person, and had not even read the article ('Secondary students' values and perceptions of science-related careers: responses to vignette-based scenarios') she had claimed to have enjoyed so much. So, I remain unconvinced, but await clarification of how my work is relevant.
    Dear Sherline Thank you for your comments. It is obviously gratifying that you see so much of value in our work, and flattering that you want to publish a manuscript from me in your journal 'on spec' (that is, without even seeing what I might write). I imagine I could write something developing my thoughts further on this topic, but do you really feel that this would fit in your journal? (And would it not be a matter for referees to evaluate the relevance and quality of the work in peer review – or do you include invited papers?) Of course, I would like to contribute if that were viable, if I were to be persuaded that my work was relevant to your readers, but I am busy with other ongoing writing and despite your very kind evaluation of my recent work I would need some convincing that there really is a good fit with Archives of Palliative Care. Best wishes Keith
    Sadly, whilst my initial response to the invitation was that this was an entirely incongruent request as anything I could write would not be relevant to the journal, as I composed this response I started to actually think about how I could devleop something building on the the publsihed work which might exlpore how young people might feel about going to work in palliative care medicine… Perhaps there would be a role for me in enticing submissions for dodgy journals?

    Read about 'Secondary students' values and perceptions of science-related careers: responses to vignette-based scenarios'

    Read about journals and poor academic practice

    Read about more examples of illogical connections between published work and invitations from journals and conferences

    Opinion is divided on the value of expert reviewers

    Should academic journals carefully select suitable subject experts to review manuscripts submitted for review? Opinion is divided on the subject

    Keith S. Taber

    Edmund, Lord Blackadder seeks to charter Captain Redbeard Rum's ship

    Edmund: I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.

    Rum: Opinion is divided on the subject.

    Edmund: Oh, really?

    Rum: Yahs. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn't. *

    Dear JAMME/AMSE International OCSCO World Press

    Thank you for your invitation (26th April 2021, repeated 27th April 2021, and repeated again 28th April 2021), the "Notification from the ICI Publishers Panel system", to review a manuscript with the title:

    "Identification of Complex Product Systems R&D Supply Chain Critical Success Factors Using Interpretive Structural Modelling (Case Study: Aviation Industries Organization, Iran)"

    Accepting a review assignment without an abstract

    I see you wish me to "kindly critically evaluate this manuscript via ICI Publishers Panel" – which seems to be a portal for journals without their own on-line system for handling manuscript submissions and reviewing.

    I note that you have not sent me an abstract, and that the only way I can access this manuscript is by going to the panel website and registering with the system.

    Two opinions on identifying experts

    I can only guess why you think I might know something about product systems R&D supply chains, and/or have some expertise in structural modelling, and/or have specialist knowledge of the aviation industry. It seems 'opinion is divided on the subject' of how journals should identify and assign reviewers. The old school approach involves keeping a database of experts in a field, with details of their research interests and specialist areas of knowledge. I assume that is not how International OCSCO World Press chooses to operate as if you checked out potential reviewers to find our their areas of expertise, then you would not be bothering me with this inappropriately directed request.

    One idea that crosses my mind is perhaps you operate on a familiar scamming mode of sending out multiple invitations to lists of email addresses to entice some arbitrary respondents (academics, and perhaps arbitrary people with email) to respond by signing up for your panel so you have their information. Generally such scams work by sending out enough copies of an email that simply by chance a few respondents find the invitation is actually relevant to their work and understandably assume they are being invited in a principled way (that is, in the way competent and honest publishers work). Your approach would seem to be either a very incompetent or a very dishonest way of working – either way you will appreciate why I decline to join your panel.

    The journal office does not wish to be contacted

    I notice that your email is "noreply@indexcopernicus.com" so I imagine you are not going to bother to read this reply.** (Although if I post it online, you may come across it – or at least others searching for information about your requests might).

    That would explain the repeated requests, as you would not have noticed my auto-response suggesting that "Invitations to write, edit, chair, talk, lecture, review, evaluate, collaborate, etc., in areas that are clearly well outside my own limited areas of academic expertise (such as can be determined from the most cursory web search) will be treated as spam – regardless of any attempts to praise my non-existent contributions in these areas (e.g., https://science-education-research.com/keith-s-taber-acclaimed-polymath-apparently/)". It also means you likely did not notice that "If you send out your invitations from an email address that rejects responses or is not monitored for replies, and so miss this response, I will assume that you appreciate why I would choose to treat any follow-up messages accordingly".

    Do submitting authors appreciate how the journal works?

    I wonder if there really is a paper called "Identification of Complex Product Systems R&D Supply Chain Critical Success Factors Using Interpretive Structural Modelling (Case Study: Aviation Industries Organization, Iran)" which has been submitted somewhere for review. Perhaps to the 'Archives of Materials Science and Engineering' or the 'Journal of Achievements in Materials and Manufacturing Engineering' (i.e., JAMME /AMSE ?) I must admit to never having previously heard of these journals, although clearly you do not feel that disqualifies me as being a suitable expert to evaluate work in them.

    If so, I wonder if the author(s) of "Identification of Complex Product Systems R&D Supply Chain Critical Success Factors…" are aware that they have sent their work to a publisher that has decided not to adopt the traditional approach associated with high status journals of taking the time to identify referees with genuine expertise related to the submitted manuscript?

    [Read about 'peer review' – the system used by academic journals to evaluate submissions]

    [Read about:'Journals and poor academic practice']

    Review request to 'Dear Reviewer' inviting a 'sign up' to do some arbitrary unremunerated work

    * 'Potato' episode from Blackadder II (BBC Comedy show), written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton

    ** The only reponses to my reply so far have been two further repeats of the original invitation sent the following day (29/04/2021) and 04/05/2021.

    A special waiver for my paper in 'The Educaitonal Review, USA'

    I have been critical in this blog and elsewhere about the behaviour of predatory journals that use dishonest methods and/or which short-cut proper peer review to attract business. I just received an invitation that at first sight seemed to fit into this category, although on closer inspection  I suspect is actually something more sinister.

    The message was as follows:

    As the screen-shot above shows, the email was from er@cutablw.com, but the email was set up to send replies to education@hillpublisher.com. That seems odd as the email is from a completely different domain name (and from a time zone ahead of the UK, so not the US) – a common indicator of some kind of scam.

    Another predatory journal?

    At face value I was being asked to submit a paper for publication, by November 10th for publication on November 16th, apparently with no peer review and so avoiding all that delay and extra work of modifying a perfectly good paper in order to meet the misjudged and idiosyncratic suggestion of reviewers who clearly have not read the work carefully and do not really understand the topic. Well, sometimes it seems like that – but if we want the credit of publishing in peer reviewed outlets then the cost is peer review.

    [Read about 'Peer review in academic publishing']

    This was not the first invitation of that kind I had received, so 'The Educational Review, USA' (or if you prefer, 'The Educaitonal [sic] Review, USA') seemed to be just another predatory journal, albeit one which was considerate enough to apparently be "dedicated to improve [my] paper's impact".

    The logic of such journals is that academics have to publish to get promoted, sometimes to keep their jobs, and even to get appointed in the first place, so they will surely pay good money for publication. If the focus of the journal is to maximise income, then it needs to publish as many papers as possible, and peer review would just get in the way by slowing things down and even losing some contributions. The logic here is to persuade an author of an easy publication, so they are prepared to pay a substantial fee.

    [Read more about 'Predatory journals']

    Yet here I was being offered a waiver.

    So, was this one of those offers that I would find had finished yesterday and my paper could still be published but at cost, or was the offer only available on my third publication, or was some other condition attached? Well, there was at least one condition attached: I had to submit my paper by replying to education@hillpublisher.com.

    There was still a credible explanation: sometimes when journals are relatively new, or not getting much interest, they may try to increase their impact by inviting and publishing well-established authors (which perhaps increases internet traffic, or reassures other authors that this is a decent journal). So, offering waivers to particular authors at specific times might still be a tactic that is consistent with an overall strategy to maximise income by selling publication.

    I learnt more

    The email had a link to find out more. I went where angels fear to click. This led me to the webpages of 'The Educational Review, USA' published monthly by Hill Publishing Group with the ISSN identification shown in the email.

    I was able to find from the website that normally being published in that journal would lead to a fee (f0r someone in a high income country) of $400 for a paper up to 15 pages, with a further charge of $50 for each additional page. Given my verbose nature, the waiver being offered would save me many hundreds of US dollars. If I had something ready to publish, and was not sure where to send it, or was worried it might be too weak to survive peer review, then this was looking like a good option.

    A waiver on peer review?

    However, I was also able to find on the website details of the peer review process. After initial screening,

    an Associate Editor with appropriate expertise in the subject area or study design… is responsible for identifying at least 2 external peer reviewers with expertise in the topic or specialty [sic, speciality] of the paper. The peer review process may require 2 to 4 weeks before the decision is reached…
    After the authors submit their revision, the manuscript undergoes another peer-review, or it will be sent to the Editor-in-Chief for a final decision, if appropriate.

    This did not sound so different to a serious journal, one that actually sought to only publish work of reasonable quality.

    So perhaps by avoiding the on-line submission and replying directly to education@hillpublisher.com I not only got a waiver on the fee, but avoided peer review altogether. Sometimes even decent journals publish invited contributions identified as such without full peer review. This would normally be an article from an especially distinguished scholar. Obviously [sic] my status as a giant in the field (I was being enticed to think) meant I was being asked to make an invited contribution that would not need peer review.

    Some kind of scam?

    But I am fairly sure this is actually some kind of scam, although I've not yet worked out how this is meant to work to the scammer's advantage – unless after I submit my paper I twill hen get told there will be a fee after all. Apart form the different domain name of the actual sender, I also noticed a redirect on the link to find out more.

    The embedded link was to http://i7q.cn/5LFrGY – a form of address which both shortens the full URL, and in doing so also hides any domain information. Although it did take me to the Hill Publishing Company (where there does indeed seem to be a Jim Morrison operating, spoiling my illusion that the scammer worked alongside Janis and Jimi and Sandy, and maybe even Elvis), only after being redirected from a page telling me

    出错啦！！ 您访问的内容不存在或被安全软件禁止了…

    which Google Scholar kindly suggested might mean

    Something went wrong! ! The content you are visiting does not exist or is banned by security software…

    Another clue is that although replying to education@hillpublisher.com seems to be sending a message to the Hill Publishing Group, the journal's actual email address is edu@hillpublisher.com. Now it is certainly possible for organisations to have multiple email addresses assigned to the same department (e.g., journal), but a websearch suggests education@hillpublisher.com is not used publicly anywhere – although, intriguingly the 'The Educational Review, USA' seems to have previously used the email address education@hillpublishing.org.

    A definite scam?

    So this looks like a definite scam. Even quite unsophisticated schemes of this kind can be effective as if enough emails addresses are targeted, then even a very tiny response rate may be productive. But would serious scholars really believe that they might be able to get their work published in a research journal without peer review, and in less than a week after submission? Sadly there are enough journals out there which seem to have little concern for academic standards and are just about extracting money from authors by making such offers that this approach could have been seen as quite convincing.

    The state of academic publishing has become so degraded that it has become difficult to distinguish a genuine invitation to pay to publish without regard to quality standards, from actual criminal activity!

     

     

     

     

    The chemistry curriculum, mental health, and self-regulation

    Keith S. Taber

    Dear [Assistant Editor]

    Thank you for your message about the special Issue entitled "Mental Health Intervention and Self-Regulation in Childhood and Adolescents", to be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

    I am honoured, of course, that you think that, based on my expertise in this field, I could make an excellent contribution.

    I was, however, rather unsure on what grounds that you considered I have expertise in "the field" – assuming the field you refer to here is one of Mental Health, Self-Regulation, Environmental Research, or Public Health.

    Whilst I am very happy to be contacted in relation to the expertise I do actually have, the lack of any obvious basis for your evaluation of my expertise in relation to this particular special issue theme made me suspect that your message is really just direct marketing for your business rather than a genuine attempt to reach out to a scholar engaged in relevant work. I have been subjected to my fair share of shoddy approaches of that kind (https://science-education-research.com/academic-standards/journals-and-poor-academic-practice/).  

    So, I have done a search to see if I could find the earlier message that you refer to. I find that in your previous message you had explained that you ("we", so I assume you and Profs. Pichardo Martínez and Romero López) thought that I could make an excellent contribution based on my expertise and my paper "Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge", published in 'Foundations of Chemistry'.

     I would like to think that you were really impressed with 'Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge' and could see some obvious link between this work and the topic of how self-regulation can become a fundamental element that underlies much of the behaviour, both adapted and maladaptive, which develops during childhood and adolescence. Sadly, I am not seeing the connection.

    Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, in which case I would be very happy to hear from you, or from one of Prof. Pichardo Martínez or Prof. Romero López, about how you see my expertise as potentially offering insight into the special issue.

    If I do not hear back from you with a feasible explanation, then I will simply conclude your messages are dishonest and that you see no more connection between my paper and your journal issue than I do, and this is yet another example of a journal that does not adhere to normal academic standards of conduct (presenting itself as if a serious scholarly endeavour whilst actually treating academic publishing as no more than selling a commodity).

    I look forward to hearing what you found so interesting and pertinent about "Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge". I would be very pleased to find my cynicism is misplaced and that your approach was truthful: that you have indeed studied my paper and found something of genuine interest in my analysis of the presentation of chemistry concepts in the English school curriculum that you feel suggests I am in a position to make an original contribution about the influence of self-regulation on the personal, social, and academic development of children and adolescents. I look forward to your reflections on my paper.  

    Best wishes

    Keith

                            On 22/10/2020 12:10, [Assistant Editor] wrote:  

    Dear Dr. Taber,

We contacted you on 10th of August, regarding a Special Issue entitled "Mental Health Intervention and Self-Regulation in Childhood and Adolescents", to be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601, IF 2.849). Prof. Dr. M. Carmen Pichardo Martínez and Prof. Dr. Miriam Romero-López are serving as Guest Editors for this issue. Based on your expertise in this field, we think you could make an excellent contribution.

The main objective of this Special Issue is to explore how self-regulation can become a fundamental element that underlies much of the behavior, both adapted and maladaptive, which develops during childhood and adolescence. In general, this Issue aims to collect original contributions that work on issues related to the influence of self-regulation on the personal, social, and academic development of children and adolescents.

...


We look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

...
Assistant Editor

          On 10/08/2020 11:02, [Assistant Editor] wrote:  

    Dear Dr. Taber,

The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601, IF 2.849) is currently running a Special Issue entitled "Mental Health Intervention and Self-Regulation in Childhood and Adolescents". Prof. Dr. M. Carmen Pichardo Martínez and Prof. Dr. Miriam Romero-López are serving as Guest Editors for this issue. We think you could make an excellent contribution based on your expertise and your following paper:

Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge. FOUNDATIONS OF CHEMISTRY 2020, 22, 309-334.

The main objective of this Special Issue is to explore how self-regulation can become a fundamental element that underlies much of the behavior, both adapted and maladaptive, which develops during childhood and adolescence.

...
We look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,
...
Assistant Editor

    Update: a response to my letter

    Dear [Assistant Editor]

    Thank you for getting back to me.

    I am surprised that you found 'some contents related to learning behaviours in children in [my] published work "Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge"' as the paper was a philosophical analysis of some aspects of a curriculum document in relation to canonical disciplinary knowledge. I do not recall any specific content that was substantially about learning behaviours in children.

    However, I am pleased that you were able to find something of interest in your reading of the paper.

    Best wishes

    Keith

          On 10/08/2020 11:02, [Assistant Editor] wrote:  

    Dear Dr. Taber,

Thank you for your kind feedback.

We found that there are some contents related to learning behaviors in children in your published work "Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge". We now understand that there may be a deviation between them.

We are sorry if this Special Issue does not fit into the scope of your research.

Kind regards,
...
Assistant Editor

    At least the journal did me the courtesy of replying, and behaving politely. I chose to ignore the 'disclaimer' that "You may not copy this message in its entirety or in part, or disclose its contents to anyone" as I am not prepared to receive unsolicited emails on that basis. If people do not wish me to share their messages then they have the option of not bothering me in the first place. [Read: "It's a secret conference invitation: pass it on…"]

    Alternative Conceptions, the Learning of Chemistry, and the Journal of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products

    Keith S. Taber

    Image by silviarita from Pixabay
     
    I am currently waiting to hear back from 'the editorial team' at the 'Journal of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products' (Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Eleni Skaltsa, University of Athens) who wish to discuss some points arising from my article Alternative Conceptions and the Learning of Chemistry with me.
     
    On 09/09/2020 11:00, Prof Keith S Taber wrote:
    Dear Journal of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products Editorial Team
     
    Thank you for your email.
     
    I am pleased that you found my article "Alternative Conceptions and the Learning of Chemistry", both interesting and informative.
     
    I understand you seek clarification on a few points in the article. If you are able to send me your questions, I will seek to answers them as best I can.
     
    Best wishes
     
    Keith
     
    Or so they write.*
     
    I'd be happy to discuss anything arising from their reading of my article. Academics are usually happy to talk about their own work, as these correspondents are presumably aware.

    Not a  cynic…

     
    A cynic might suspect that 'the editorial team' of the 'Journal of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products' (published by an organisation called Hilaris SRL based in Brussels) are really only interested in getting a submission from me, along with the €1705 (!)  article processing charge (APC).
     
    After all, the editorial team of a respectable journal would not use such an approach just as a ruse, would they? So, if the editorial team of the  'Journal of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products' considers itself a respectable journal… Surely, Prof. Skaltsa and her colleagues would not do anything as dishonest as claiming that they were interested in my article and wanted to discuss academics issues raised by it, simply as a pretext to try and get money out of me?

    …but a sceptic

     
    I try not to be a cynic, but as a scientist I do try to maintain a sceptical attitude – and I would not be that surprised if Prof. Skaltsa knows nothing about the message sent out by the journal on behalf of the 'editorial team' that she leads. (I would not be surprised because I have seen precisely this situation with another journal behaving in a predatory way.)
     
    I do not think I have any expertise in Pharmacognosy and Natural Products, but the journal has a generous range of types of contributions they consider**, so perhaps if they are prepared to waive the APC in exchange for my offering consultation on the topic of alternative conceptions and the learning of chemistry I could consider writing something for them. Perhaps a letter to the editor about honesty in dealings with the scholarly community?
     
     
     
    * On 09/09/2020 09:02, Pharmacognosy Natural Products wrote:

    Dear Dr. Prof. Keith S. Taber,

    We read your article entitled "Alternative Conceptions and the Learning of Chemistry", which is interesting and informative.

    We would like to discuss few points regarding the above publication and also, we are inviting you kindly give us your new work for publication.

    If you are interested, please reply.

    Thank you and Regards,

    Editorial Team

    Journal of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products

    Brussels, Belgium

     
    ** According to the journal website, the publisher accepts the following kinds of submission:

    • original articles,
    • reviews,
    • abstracts,
    • addendums,
    • announcements,
    • article-commentaries,
    • book reviews,
    • rapid communications,
    • letters to the editor,
    • annual meeting abstracts,
    • conference proceedings,
    • calendars,
    • case-reports,
    • corrections,
    • discussions,
    • meeting-reports,
    • news,
    • obituaries,
    • orations,
    • product reviews,
    • hypotheses and
    • analyses.

    Read more about 'Journals and poor academic practice'

     

    An invitation from the publishing Mafia?

    Keith S. Taber

    Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay 

    Another sign of the challenges to academic integrity that has been the theme of several recent blogs:

    I copy below the text of an email I recently received. This is a genuine message (i.e., I reproduce the text exactly as I received it.)

    What I am not sure about is

    • is it a serious request for me to be involved in academic malpractice?
    • is it a scam, that seems to be a scheme to get around proper peer review, but if I respond I will soon find I am being blackmailed with a threat to reveal my being complicit in such a scheme, or
    • is it a joke?

    It seems a lot of effort to go to if it is just a joke (the website looks like it has had some time and effort spent on it), but when I got to the organisation name at the bottom, I found am being approached by an organisation calling itself 'journals-mafia'!

    "Keith S Taber

    Are you an editor of the journal or a member of editorial board?
    If so, we propose a big profit for you and your journal.
    The profit is from 1,000 up to 10,000 dollars per a month.

    It is necessary to publish articles.
    The same work that you do, but you can get more money doing this with us.

    My company works in the markets of Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, China and Iran.
    We publish a lot of articles.
    There is much more demand than we can publish.
    We do not have enough journals in which we can publish all the articles.

    That is why we are searching more and more journals for publication every day.
    We will share our profits with you.

    An alternative option is to buy your journal.
    If your journal does not bring you joy no longer, we will buy it.

    The scheme of our work is simple:

    1. The author writes an article.

    2. The author pays us for publishing an article in a journal.

    3. We work with the text of the article; we review and edit this article making it of excellent quality.

    4. We check the quality of English language.

    5. We format an article according to the requirements of a journal.

    6. We send an article to the editor of the journal.

    7. The article is published.

    8. We share our profit with the editor of the journal.

    Win – Win – Win.
    All the parties are satisfied.

    We work with a huge amount [sic] of articles.
    We work not only with people who need a publication.
    We also work with the universities and scientific organizations, which give us from 10 to 100 articles.

    We have several companies.
    This makes it possible not to attract the attention of scientific databases as well as controlling and regulating organizations.

    We know how Scopus and Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) work.
    We earn money and do not draw their attention.
    More details will be provided below.

    My goal is to monopolize publication market of Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. All the publications must go through my companies, through my journals or partner journals.

    How will we build our joint business?
    The options are possible:

    1. For high ranking journals.

    2. For low ranking journals.

    3. For predatory journals.

    A high ranking journal.
    We prepare an article adhering to all journal's requirements.
    The quality of the article is excellent.
    We put 1 article from our region for one issue.
    Thus, we provide from 1 to 5 articles for an issue (no more than one article from one country):
    one is from Russia, one – from Azerbaijan, one – from China, one – from Kazakhstan, etc.
    This will not cause any suspicion. Any journal is interested to publish articles from different countries.
    The article is under review.
    We correct and edit the article taking into the account the reviewers' comments and remarks.
    The article is published.
    The profit is shared.

    Low ranking journals.
    We prepare an article adhering to all journal's requirements.
    We put several article for one issue.
    If we do not want to attract attention, to work for years and to raise the journal's ranking, then we send from 1 to 15 articles for one issue (no more than three articles from one country).
    All the articles should undergo the review stage.
    We have our own team of reviewers (more than 100 reviewers from around the world).
    We can review the articles by our reviewers.
    We correct and edit the article taking into the account the reviewers' comments and remarks.
    If you follow the process,
    this will not cause any suspicion.
    The article is published.
    The profit is shared.
    In this case, the editor of a journal agrees not to publish articles from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan bypassing us. All scientists of these countries pass only through us.
    Profit is divided.

    Predatory journals.
    If you have exactly decided that you want to get a lot of money.
    In this case, the journal will be removed from the Scopus base in the future.
    In this case, we take the articles in hundreds or thousands.
    And publish them.
    In this case, the editor of a journal agrees not to publish articles from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan bypassing us. All scientists of these countries pass only through us.
    Profit is divided.

    Business is working like this. It is reliable and approved by time.

    If you have any ideas, please, write to me.
    If you are interested, please, write to me.

    Additional important information.
    We care not only for our reputation, but also for the reputation of our partners and clients.
    We are several companies registered in different countries.
    There are different kinds of activity of our companies according to official documents. It depends on the inquiries of our clients and partners.
    Under individual requests, new companies can be established or existing companies registered several years ago can be used.
    The purpose of invoice and the subject of the contract can be formulated individually.
    We pay journals in any ways that are convenient for them: PayPal, electronic money, bank cards, bank accounts, without a contract, under a contract, SWIFT, etc.

    Nataliya"

    Read more about 'Journals and poor academic practice'

    First published 19th May 2018 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/

    The Editorial Board of Medical Imaging Process & Technology

    A response to an invitation to join an editorial board for a medical imaging journal

    Keith S. Taber

    Image by VSRao from Pixabay 

    The invitation

    On 23/04/2018 20:06, EnPress Publisher wrote:

    "… We have read your recent article, "Student Conceptions of Ionic Bonding: Patterns of thinking across three European contexts" published in International Journal of Science Education. We feel that this article is of high academic value. Therefore, we would like to invite you to join the Editorial Board of Medical Imaging Process & Technology…"

    The response

    Thank you very much for the invitation to join the editorial board of Medical Imaging Process & Technology. This is clearly an important field, where a top quality academic journal could be of great importance.

    It is an honour to be invited to join the editorial team alongside such respected colleagues as Dr. Oleg V. Gradov (Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics of Russian Academy of Sciences); Prof. Boris Arkadievich Kobrinskii (Medicine Institute of the Federal Research Center "Computer Science and Control" of the Russian Academy of Sciences and N.I. Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University); Dr. Vedat Goral (Istanbul Medipol University School of Medicine); Mr. Atef Rawhan Abdulsameea Abdulraqeb (Vladimir State University); Dr. Marzia Cottini (Niguarda Hospital); Dr. Alexander Georgiev Otsetov (Umeå University); Dr. Farzaneh Rahmani (Tehran University of Medical Sciences); Dr. Michael El Boghdady (Ninewells Hospital and Medical School); Prof. Francesco Izzo (National Cancer Institute of Naples); Prof. Vural Fidan (Yunus Emre Gov Hospital); Dr. Kaiser J. Giri (Islamic University of Science & Technology); Prof. Yung-Yao  Chen (National Taipei University of Technology); Prof. Wei-Yen Hsu (National Chung Cheng University); and Mohammad Naderan (Tehran University of Medical Sciences).

    Given the importance of this field, I recognise the need to ensure that the academic literature in the field is of the highest standard, and so to recruit appropriate expertise to support the editorial work of the journal. Indeed, as an editor myself, I have become very concerned about the lack of quality in the procedures adopted by some of the many new journals that are appearing ( and I have commented on this: doi:10.1039/C7RP90012K free access at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/rp/c7rp90012k#!divAbstract ). I trust that Medical Imaging Process & Technology will be adopting the highest scholarly standards in its peer review procedures, and in the choice of editorial board members to oversee the process?

    I should also thank you for your kind comments about our paper in International Journal of Science Education reporting on patterns of student conceptions of the the chemistry topic of ionic bonding. It is good to know you feel this work is of high academic value. Hopefully the work will influence teaching practice in high schools. As you have taken the time to read the paper, and been so impressed, I would be very interested in knowing what aspects of the paper you felt were of most value – if you would be prepared to share your thoughts. I would imagine that you are very busy with your work on Medical Imaging Process & Technology, so I am impressed that you took the time to read our paper in the International Journal of Science Education.

    I must also ask, as I am slightly at a loss to understand, what specific aspects of my scholarly work in science education led you to conclude that I would be suitable to join the editorial board of Medical Imaging Process & Technology and work alongside noted experts in that field.

    Whilst it is an honour to be asked, you will appreciate that I can only give this serious consideration if persuaded that someone working in my field, with my academic background, could make a genuine and relevant contribution to the journal. It would not be a good use of my time otherwise, and, more importantly, it would not reflect well on Medical Imaging Process & Technology if it was considered by potential authors and reviewers that some members of the Editorial Board did not have sufficient expertise in the field of the journal. I am sure you are very careful in selecting potential Editorial Board members, so appreciate you must have a strong rationale for inviting me, but at the moment I do not fully understand why a scholar known for exploring aspects of teaching and learning in science would be a strong candidate to guide a journal in this somewhat different field.

    I look forward to your response.

    Best wishes

    Keith


    I await a reply…

    Read more about 'Journals and poor academic practice'

    First published 30th April 2018 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/