Abstract
To gain insight into changes of scholarly journals’ recommendations, we conducted a systematic review of studies that analysed journals’ Instructions to Authors (ItAs). We summarised results of 153 studies, and meta-analysed how often ItAs addressed: 1) authorship, 2) conflicts of interest, 3) data sharing, 4) ethics approval, 5) funding disclosure, and 6) International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts. For each topic we found large between-study heterogeneity. Here, we show six factors that explained most of that heterogeneity: 1) time (addressing of topics generally increased over time), 2) country (large differences found between countries), 3) database indexation (large differences found between databases), 4) impact factor (topics were more often addressed in highest than in lowest impact factor journals), 5) discipline (topics were more often addressed in Health Sciences than in other disciplines), and 6) sub-discipline (topics were more often addressed in general than in sub-disciplinary journals).
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 5840 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Nature Communications |
Volume | 12 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 5 Oct 2021 |
Funding
We would like to thank Ana Utrobičić for her help with developing the search strategy. We would like to thank Anna Tordai for help with data extraction and translation of articles in Hungarian and French, Sjors de Heuvel for an article in Japanese, Lionel Dias for articles in Spanish and Portuguese, Yong Hu for an article in Chinese, and Natalia Lee for an article in Korean. Finally, we would like to thank Bianca Kramer for her help in search strategies to extract number of publications in Crossref, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. This study was a part of the Elsevier funded project Fostering Transparent and Responsible Conduct of Research: What can Journals do? The work of AJ was supported by the Croatian National Science Foundation (HRZZ IP-2018-01-4729).