conducting research literature reviews from paper to the internet

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Conducting Research Literature Reviews From the Internet to Paper

• Arlene Fink - UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
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See what’s new to this edition by selecting the Features tab on this page. Should you need additional information or have questions regarding the HEOA information provided for this title, including what is new to this edition, please email [email protected] . Please include your name, contact information, and the name of the title for which you would like more information. For information on the HEOA, please go to http://ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/hea08/index.html .

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“Fink’s tone, level, and style is very approachable and understandable which makes it ideal for my students, most of whom are new to the process of literature reviews.”

“This book provides rich, useful, details on conducting literature review & constructing evidenced based reviews.”

All of the information in this book was a duplicate of the books adopted.

Excellent content and easy to follow for novice researchers.

NEW TO THIS EDITION: 

• Nearly 100 new online research examples and references from the social, behavioral, and health sciences
• Updated case studies using major online databases such as the Web of Science
• More qualitative research examples and guidelines and checklists for evaluating their quality
• An explanation of how “meta-synthesis” is used to interpret and combine the results of qualitative studies
• A brand new glossary of key terms to assist readers in learning about literature reviews 
• A discussion of how to account for an article’s impact by interpreting its altmetrics , including attention scores, donut diagrams, and Twitter demographics 
• Additional examples of how to write up reviews and how others have done it
• Expansion of the exercises at the end of the chapter to vary difficulty and include more online searching
• An introduction to the GRADE system to evaluate the “risk of bias” in each research article

KEY FEATURES: 

• Step-by-step procedures and visual examples help readers master every aspect of conducting the literature review process
• Online examples and case studies bring the literature review process to life
• End-of-chapter exercises help readers master key concepts and skills  

Sample Materials & Chapters

Chapter 1: Reviewing the Literature: Why? For Whom? How?

Chapter 2: Searching and Screening: The Practical Screen and Methodological Qual

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• Preface 1. Reviewing the Literature: Why? For Whom? How? A Reader's Guide Purpose of This Chapter What is a Research Literature Review? Why Do One? Gaining Control: Experiments and Observations Choosing an Online Bibliographic Database Systematic, Explicit, Comprehensive, and Reproducible: Four Key Words Changing the Course of the Search Supplementing the Online Search Organizing the Research Literature: Building a Virtual Filing Cabinet Summary of Key Points Exercises Online Literature Reviews General References Notes 2. Searching and Screening: The Practical Screen and Methodological Quality (
• Part 1: Research Design and Sampling) A Reader's Guide Purpose of This Chapter Search Screen 1: Practical Screen Search Screen 2: Methodological Quality Screening Criteria--
• Part 1: Research Design and Sampling Summary of Key Points Exercises General References 3. Searching and Screening: Methodological Quality (
• Part 2: Data Collection, Interventions, Analysis, Results, and Conclusions) A Reader's Guide Purpose of This Chapter Data Collection and Data Sources: Methods and Measures Interventions and Programs: Reviewing the Research Literature to Find Out What Works Information Analysis: Statistical Methods in the Research Literature Summary of Key Points Exercises General References 4. Doing the Review A Reader's Guide Purpose of This Chapter Types of Information: Methods and Content Eligibility and Actuality Reliable and Valid Reviews Uniform Data Collection: The Literature Review Survey Questionnaire Uniform Data Collection: Definitions and More Pilot Testing the Review Process Establishing Validity Monitoring Quality Summary of Key Points Exercises 5. What Did You Find? Synthesizing Results Purpose of This Chapter Now That You Have Done It, What Do You Do With It? Descriptive Syntheses or Reviews Meta-Analysis Meta-Analyses in Practice: Examples Descriptive Review Versus Meta-Analysis Summary of Key Points Exercises Notes General References Index About the Author.
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Conducting Research Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper Third Edition

There is a newer edition of this item:.

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The Third Edition of Conducting Literature Reviews: From the Internet to Paper provides readers with an accessible but in-depth look at how to synthesize research literature. Bestselling author Arlene Fink shows researchers how to justify the need for and significance of research, and explain a study’s findings.

Key Updates to the Third Edition

• Presents nearly a hundred new online examples and references from the social, behavioral, and health sciences
• Offers a revised and updated list of online articles databases
• Includes case studies in the use of major online databases
• Expands the exercises at the end of the chapter to include more online searching
• Clarifies some of the basic concepts of research that are essential in making judgments about the quality of research methods
• Incorporates more examples and clearer explanations of the differences between research design validity (internal and external) and measurement validity
• Introduces the major formal systems for evaluating the literature’s methodological quality
• Provides more qualitative research examples and information on how to evaluate their quality
• Illustrates in greater detail how to write up reviews and how others have done it
• Contains nearly 100 Power Point Slides linked to each of the five chapters available at www.sagepub.com/fink3einstr qualified instructors who adopt the book

The text also discusses the use of Boolean operators for simple and advanced searches, tells readers how to use bibliographic software to organize literature reviews and search "The Virtual File Cabinet.”

Intended Audience

This text is for graduate students in the social science, health, educational, and business fields. It is also appropriate for anyone who design and manage public and private agencies, conduct research studies, and/or prepare strategic plans and grant proposals.

• ISBN-10 9781412971898
• ISBN-13 978-1412971898
• Edition Third Edition
• Publisher SAGE Publications, Inc
• Publication date March 26, 2009
• Language English
• Dimensions 6.25 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
• Print length 272 pages
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1412971896
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ SAGE Publications, Inc; Third Edition (March 26, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781412971898
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1412971898
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
• #395 in Science Bibliographies & Indexes
• #1,500 in Scientific Research
• #3,190 in Social Sciences Research

About the author

Arlene fink.

Arlene Fink, Ph.D. was born in the Bronx. She likes to think that you can take the lady out of the Bronx, but you cannot take the Bronx out of the lady. Bronx ladies are aggressive about the truth. Arlene likes to beleive that her books are forceful in their reliance on the use of only the best avaialble evidence to improve health, education, and well-being. Her books are easy to read and follow, using a unique combination of online and print teaching methods. Arlene is the author of over 130 peer-reviewed articles and 15 books. She is on the faculty of the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She is President of the Langley Research Insititute, a non profit social research organization, has been an expert witmness, has consulted widely and has been an integral part of national and international projects.

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• NATURE INDEX
• 01 May 2024

Plagiarism in peer-review reports could be the ‘tip of the iceberg’

• Jackson Ryan 0

Jackson Ryan is a freelance science journalist in Sydney, Australia.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Time pressures and a lack of confidence could be prompting reviewers to plagiarize text in their reports. Credit: Thomas Reimer/Zoonar via Alamy

Mikołaj Piniewski is a researcher to whom PhD students and collaborators turn when they need to revise or refine a manuscript. The hydrologist, at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, has a keen eye for problems in text — a skill that came in handy last year when he encountered some suspicious writing in peer-review reports of his own paper.

Last May, when Piniewski was reading the peer-review feedback that he and his co-authors had received for a manuscript they’d submitted to an environmental-science journal, alarm bells started ringing in his head. Comments by two of the three reviewers were vague and lacked substance, so Piniewski decided to run a Google search, looking at specific phrases and quotes the reviewers had used.

To his surprise, he found the comments were identical to those that were already available on the Internet, in multiple open-access review reports from publishers such as MDPI and PLOS. “I was speechless,” says Piniewski. The revelation caused him to go back to another manuscript that he had submitted a few months earlier, and dig out the peer-review reports he received for that. He found more plagiarized text. After e-mailing several collaborators, he assembled a team to dig deeper.

Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers

The team published the results of its investigation in Scientometrics in February 1 , examining dozens of cases of apparent plagiarism in peer-review reports, identifying the use of identical phrases across reports prepared for 19 journals. The team discovered exact quotes duplicated across 50 publications, saying that the findings are just “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to misconduct in the peer-review system.

Dorothy Bishop, a former neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who has turned her attention to investigating research misconduct, was “favourably impressed” by the team’s analysis. “I felt the way they approached it was quite useful and might be a guide for other people trying to pin this stuff down,” she says.

Peer review under review

Piniewski and his colleagues conducted three analyses. First, they uploaded five peer-review reports from the two manuscripts that his laboratory had submitted to a rudimentary online plagiarism-detection tool . The reports had 44–100% similarity to previously published online content. Links were provided to the sources in which duplications were found.

The researchers drilled down further. They broke one of the suspicious peer-review reports down to fragments of one to three sentences each and searched for them on Google. In seconds, the search engine returned a number of hits: the exact phrases appeared in 22 open peer-review reports, published between 2021 and 2023.

The final analysis provided the most worrying results. They took a single quote — 43 words long and featuring multiple language errors, including incorrect capitalization — and pasted it into Google. The search revealed that the quote, or variants of it, had been used in 50 peer-review reports.

Predominantly, these reports were from journals published by MDPI, PLOS and Elsevier, and the team found that the amount of duplication increased year-on-year between 2021 and 2023. Whether this is because of an increase in the number of open-access peer-review reports during this time or an indication of a growing problem is unclear — but Piniewski thinks that it could be a little bit of both.

Why would a peer reviewer use plagiarized text in their report? The team says that some might be attempting to save time , whereas others could be motivated by a lack of confidence in their writing ability, for example, if they aren’t fluent in English.

The team notes that there are instances that might not represent misconduct. “A tolerable rephrasing of your own words from a different review? I think that’s fine,” says Piniewski. “But I imagine that most of these cases we found are actually something else.”

The source of the problem

Duplication and manipulation of peer-review reports is not a new phenomenon. “I think it’s now increasingly recognized that the manipulation of the peer-review process, which was recognized around 2010, was probably an indication of paper mills operating at that point,” says Jennifer Byrne, director of biobanking at New South Wales Health in Sydney, Australia, who also studies research integrity in scientific literature.

Paper mills — organizations that churn out fake research papers and sell authorships to turn a profit — have been known to tamper with reviews to push manuscripts through to publication, says Byrne.

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science

However, when Bishop looked at Piniewski’s case, she could not find any overt evidence of paper-mill activity. Rather, she suspects that journal editors might be involved in cases of peer-review-report duplication and suggests studying the track records of those who’ve allowed inadequate or plagiarized reports to proliferate.

Piniewski’s team is also concerned about the rise of duplications as generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes easier to access . Although his team didn’t look for signs of AI use, its ability to quickly ingest and rephrase large swathes of text is seen as an emerging issue.

A preprint posted in March 2 showed evidence of researchers using AI chatbots to assist with peer review, identifying specific adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports .

Bishop isn’t as concerned as Piniewski about AI-generated reports, saying that it’s easy to distinguish between AI-generated text and legitimate reviewer commentary. “The beautiful thing about peer review,” she says, is that it is “one thing you couldn’t do a credible job with AI”.

Preventing plagiarism

Publishers seem to be taking action. Bethany Baker, a media-relations manager at PLOS, who is based in Cambridge, UK, told Nature Index that the PLOS Publication Ethics team “is investigating the concerns raised in the Scientometrics article about potential plagiarism in peer reviews”.

How big is science’s fake-paper problem?

An Elsevier representative told Nature Index that the publisher “can confirm that this matter has been brought to our attention and we are conducting an investigation”.

In a statement, the MDPI Research Integrity and Publication Ethics Team said that it has been made aware of potential misconduct by reviewers in its journals and is “actively addressing and investigating this issue”. It did not confirm whether this was related to the Scientometrics article.

One proposed solution to the problem is ensuring that all submitted reviews are checked using plagiarism-detection software. In 2022, exploratory work by Adam Day, a data scientist at Sage Publications, based in Thousand Oaks, California, identified duplicated text in peer-review reports that might be suggestive of paper-mill activity. Day offered a similar solution of using anti-plagiarism software , such as Turnitin.

Piniewski expects the problem to get worse in the coming years, but he hasn’t received any unusual peer-review reports since those that originally sparked his research. Still, he says that he’s now even more vigilant. “If something unusual occurs, I will spot it.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01312-0

Piniewski, M., Jarić, I., Koutsoyiannis, D. & Kundzewicz, Z. W. Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04960-1 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Liang, W. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.07183 (2024).

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