Chapter 4 Case Studies

Pranathi Vadlamani
20 Sept 2016
Case Study 4.4
Although Bella Nassar needs to increase her experience in the area of external professional
involvement in order to have a higher chance to be considered for associate professor with
tenure, I would not advise her to accept the position on the peer review board of the online openaccess journal in psychology. Especially after Bella Nassar has received information from a
current member about the journals practice of pressuring those who submit articles to cite
publications that have previously appeared in the journal. The journals attempt to falsely
increase its impact factor in this manner strikes me as shady more than unusual. While there may
not be real harm associated with this practice, it is unethical in my opinion to falsely improve
ones image when there are better, more impactful journals. I would tell Bella as such and advise
her to seek other external professional involvement opportunities. If she does indeed have an
impressive professional portfolio, she should not have too much of a problem finding another,
more morally upstanding journal to expand her external involvement.
Case Study 4.5
Dr. Sullivan seemed to have contributed a significant idea in the sense that he designed an
experiment for the project that Demetri was working on. Most publication guidelines include the
phrase significant idea and/or mention one of the requirements for authorship as experiment
design. As Demetris mentor, I would agree with him that Dr. Sullivan does indeed need to be
acknowledged in the manuscript. Whether that be in as a coauthor or in the acknowledgements
section depends on the contribution of his experimental design. If Dr. Sullivan merely suggested
Demetri to run a simple experiment such as running a gel as an extension of already existing
experiments, I would say that Dr. Sullivan needs to be mentioned in the acknowledgements
section. If, however, Dr. Sullivans experimental design involved an entire assay separate from
the experiments that Demetri has already run then I would decide that Dr. Sullivan deserves to be
a coauthor.