Professor Yuehong (Helen) Zhang is the Managing Editor of Bio-Design and Manufacturing. Previously she was the Chief Editor of Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE, and Vice-President of the Society of China University Journals. She had served as a council member of ALPSP (2011–2016) and a Crossref Board Member (2014–2017). She received COPE’s first grant awarded in China in 2011 and has published many papers focused on anti-plagiarism policies in different disciplines, including several short papers in Nature and the book Against Plagiarism: A Guide for Editors and Authors. Recently she was invited to write a paper on academic integrity by the journal Forensic Sciences Research, in which she proposed a new idea – the academic integrity awareness index:
This is a fantastic idea and a great interview by Scholarly Kitchen. We have included links to 5 related items.
“The academic integrity awareness index covers several aspects, including education, transparent policy, standardized responsibility, group awareness, and industry supervision. It could be used to create cultural consciousness of research integrity as the bottom line in the academic world. Moreover, it can be measured exponentially, as we tried to demonstrate in this investigation.”
How did the idea of an academic integrity awareness index come to you?
In September, 2021, at the first Chongqing University Webinar on Research Integrity, Dr. Elisabeth Bik, science integrity volunteer, Dr. Nandita Quaderi, Editor-in-Chief of Web of Science at Clarivate, and I shared our opinions on the topic of academic integrity. My presentation was mainly based on an article “The next steps in academic integrity — education, awareness, norms, duty and law” that we have recently published in Forensic Sciences Research. In order to write the article, we completed a series of surveys in order to observe the awareness level of research integrity among the six continents of world. After the survey, the concept of an “academic integrity awareness index” started to form in my mind, and I hope there will be more discussions across the linked spheres of publishing and research on this proposal.
