Plagiarism may take place in any scientific journals despite currently employed anti-plagiarism tools. The absence of widely acceptable definitions of research misconduct and reliance solely on similarity checks do not allow journal editors to prevent most complex cases of recycling of scientific information and wasteful, or ‘predatory,’ publishing. This article analyses Scopus-based publication activity and evidence on poor writing, lack of related training, emerging anti-plagiarism strategies, and new forms of massive wasting of resources by publishing largely recycled items, which evade the ‘red flags’ of similarity checks. In some non-Anglophone countries ‘copy-and-paste’ writing still plagues pre- and postgraduate education. Poor research management, absence of courses on publication ethics, and limited access to quality sources confound plagiarism as a cross-cultural and multidisciplinary phenomenon. Over the past decade, the advent of anti-plagiarism software checks has helped uncover elementary forms of textual recycling across journals. But such a tool alone proves inefficient for preventing complex forms of plagiarism. Recent mass retractions of plagiarized articles by reputable open-access journals point to critical deficiencies of current anti-plagiarism software that do not recognize manipulative paraphrasing and editing. Manipulative editing also finds its way to predatory journals, ignoring the adherence to publication ethics and accommodating nonsense plagiarized items. The evolving preventive strategies are increasingly relying on intelligent (semantic) digital technologies, comprehensively evaluating texts, keywords, graphics, and reference lists. It is the right time to enforce adherence to global editorial guidance and implement a comprehensive anti-plagiarism strategy by helping all stakeholders of scholarly communication.
Education* ; Ethics ; Information Storage and Retrieval ; Plagiarism* ; Publications ; Recycling ; Retraction of Publication as Topic ; Scientific Misconduct ; Writing

Numerous quantitative indicators are currently available for evaluating research productivity. No single metric is suitable for comprehensive evaluation of the author-level impact. The choice of particular metrics depends on the purpose and context of the evaluation. The aim of this article is to overview some of the widely employed author impact metrics and highlight perspectives of their optimal use. The h-index is one of the most popular metrics for research evaluation, which is easy to calculate and understandable for non-experts. It is automatically displayed on researcher and author profiles on citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Its main advantage relates to the combined approach to the quantification of publication and citation counts. This index is increasingly cited globally. Being an appropriate indicator of publication and citation activity of highly productive and successfully promoted authors, the h-index has been criticized primarily for disadvantaging early career researchers and authors with a few indexed publications. Numerous variants of the index have been proposed to overcome its limitations. Alternative metrics have also emerged to highlight ‘societal impact.’ However, each of these traditional and alternative metrics has its own drawbacks, necessitating careful analyses of the context of social attention and value of publication and citation sets. Perspectives of the optimal use of researcher and author metrics is dependent on evaluation purposes and compounded by information sourced from various global, national, and specialist bibliographic databases.
Bibliometrics ; Databases, Bibliographic ; Efficiency ; Publications ; Specialization

Specialist bibliographic databases offer essential online tools for researchers and authors who work on specific subjects and perform comprehensive and systematic syntheses of evidence. This article presents examples of the established specialist databases, which may be of interest to those engaged in multidisciplinary science communication. Access to most specialist databases is through subscription schemes and membership in professional associations. Several aggregators of information and database vendors, such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest, facilitate advanced searches supported by specialist keyword thesauri. Searches of items through specialist databases are complementary to those through multidisciplinary research platforms, such as PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Familiarizing with the functional characteristics of biomedical and nonbiomedical bibliographic search tools is mandatory for researchers, authors, editors, and publishers. The database users are offered updates of the indexed journal lists, abstracts, author profiles, and links to other metadata. Editors and publishers may find particularly useful source selection criteria and apply for coverage of their peer-reviewed journals and grey literature sources. These criteria are aimed at accepting relevant sources with established editorial policies and quality controls.
*Databases, Bibliographic ; Databases, Factual ; Editorial Policies ; Humans ; Information Storage and Retrieval ; Periodicals as Topic ; Publishing