N.O. Mchedlov-Petrossyan
Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv

ETHICAL ASPECT OF THE SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS AT CONDITIONS OF THE INFORMATION BURST

Abstract: The ethical problems arising during the publication of scientific articles are listed and briefly considered. The author tried to stress on the new peculiarities resulting from the today’s information burst. The ethics of the authorship and coauthorship, of the reviewing process and the cooperation with the editorial boards is successively discussed. Special attention is paid to such issues as citation and citation indexes, in particular the h-index, and the impact factors, IF, of scientific journals. Finally, the ethical aspects of the evaluation of the scientists basing on the numerical characteristics of their publication activity are discussed. To the author’s viewpoint, the main problem consists in the failing ability of the scientific community and even more so officials/bureaucrats to estimate the actual scientific value of the publications. The statistical data reflecting the total number of published works, citations, IF of the journals, etc., are interesting and useful, but none of them should be used as a sole criterion of the productivity of a scientist.

Language of article: russian

Herald of the NAS of Ukraine. 2014. №8. P. 1–102