Addressing the vexed issue of authorship and author order: A discussion paper

Promoting the Sustainable Improvement of Educational Empirical Research Quality: What Kinds of Collaborative Production Relationships Make Sense?

With the transformation of the knowledge production model, the research system of educational research is becoming more extensive, and academic collaboration has become an important productive method of promoting the sustainable development of educational empirical research. Given this situation, what kinds of relationships will sustainably improve educational empirical research output quality? Taking the influence of educational empirical research article as an example, we selected 4610 empirical research articles in 15 education journals for analysis, published between the years of 2015 and 2020. In the sustainable development progress of educational empirical research, the optimal scale phenomenon has been verified in cooperative research. Identity collaboration, institutional collaboration, international collaboration, and discipline collaboration were all found to have a strongly significant influence on the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research output quality. Meanwhile, the output quality of educational empirical research is affected by the heterogeneity of the number of cooperators and cooperating identities. These findings suggest that the optimal proportion of teacher–student collaboration should be 2–3, and the optimal scale of colleague collaboration should be 3–4. Compared with teacher–student collaboration, colleague collaboration, including cross-organization and interdisciplinary collaboration, was more conductive to enhancing the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research outcome quality. According to these findings, it is reasonable to believe that, in the process of the sustainable development of educational empirical research, fine-guidance-style teacher–student collaboration and small-scale, cross-unit colleague collaboration should be promoted; meanwhile, strengthening the collaboration between normal universities, optimizing the quality of international collaboration, and promoting pedagogy intersection with other disciplines are also critical to promote the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research outcome quality.

CRediT for authors of articles published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association

To help ensure that authors of articles published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) receive appropriate recognition for their contributions and to make individual author roles more transparent to readers, JMLA articles will begin including Author Contribution statements using the Contributor Role Taxonomy.

An integrative review of threshold concepts in doctoral education: Implications for PhD nursing programs

OBJECTIVE

To critically analyze published research addressing threshold concepts in doctoral education, explore factors affecting conceptual threshold crossing by doctoral students, and consider the application of these findings in doctoral nursing education.

BACKGROUND

Mastery of concepts specific to the research-focused doctorate is critical in order for doctoral students to become independent researchers. These threshold concepts can be challenging, or troublesome, and students may find themselves 'stuck' during the learning journey. Engaging with troublesome concepts may place a student in a state of liminality, a transitory space of uncertainty.

DESIGN

An integrative approach was adopted for this review.

DATA SOURCES

A combination of keywords was used to search PubMed, CINAHL Plus, PsycINFO, ProQuest Search, Education Research Complete, Scopus, and Science Direct for literature published through July 2019.

REVIEW METHODS

Integrative review methods described by Whittemore and Knafl (2005) were used to review and analyze a total of 20 qualitative studies identified based upon specific inclusion criteria.

RESULTS

The majority of identified threshold concepts emerge during the development stage of research, indicating a need for strategies to support students with navigation of the liminal spaces encountered early in the doctoral journey. Factors affecting conceptual threshold crossing include student writing development, presence of community, and faculty influences.

CONCLUSION

Doctoral program strategies are needed to support how to both teach and learn threshold concepts within safe spaces. Recommendations for strategies to develop student writing, support community building, and cultivate faculty-student relationships in doctoral nursing programs are provided. More intentionally incorporating threshold concept strategies into doctoral level nursing education has the potential to support both graduation rates and successful career transition to maintain a steady pipeline of nurse scientists.

Funding acknowledgements in scientific publications: A literature review

The topic of acknowledgements has produced abundant research since the 1970s, though, as previous studies point out, the value of acknowledgements has not yet been demonstrated and further research is limited by lack of conceptualization. This study focuses on funding acknowledgements (FAs), considering that funding represents an important input in the scientific process. In this context, 183 scientific publications retrieved from Scopus from the 1970s until June 2020 were analyzed, with the aim of systematizing conceptually this body of research and contributing to a theory of acknowledgements. Results are summarized into the following main themes: the meaning of FAs; data sources for acknowledgements; the process of funding; association of funding with productivity, impact, and collaboration; and other aspects affected by funding. The literature reviewed shows that a theory of acknowledgements based on the reward triangle, as in previous studies, is unable to capture the extreme complexity of the scientific activity affecting and being affected by FAs. Funding bodies appear as clear and influential actors in the scientific communication system, making important decisions on the research that is supported, and influencing the type of knowledge produced. Funding agencies hold a responsibility regarding the data that they may collect on their programs, as well as the normalization policies they need to develop so that funded authors can reference with less ambiguity the financial source of their projects. Finally, the need to assess the impact of research funding beyond the scientific community that is, the societal impact, is also addressed.