Arun H. S. Kumar
Editor in Chief, Journal of Natural Science, Biology and Medicine, Ireland.
10.4103/0976-9668.116963
The expanding availability of scientific journals (print and online) has significantly enhanced the number of scientific manuscripts published every year and I believe this trend will continue to grow exponentially. The peer pressure to publish and the associated academic gains with the concurrent availability of expanding numbers of scientific journals have caused a slow rise in the polluters of scientific research. It is indeed alarming to note that less than 30% of peer-reviewed data published in scientific journals are reproducible, which I believe is a very conservative estimate and the actual scientific literature reproducibility index may be much lower. In any analytical term, this is a very poor efficiency rate and is worrying. This slow expansion of scientific literature pollution (infollution) awaits a big bang, the impact of which will shake up the institutes of scientific research. Hence, it is timely that everyone involved in the field of scientific journalism critically reviews to evaluate the adequacies of the current practices to prevent any big bang. This necessitates thinking if the current peer-review systems are appropriate. What are the measures we can adopt to prevent infollution.Read more…