Research
Articles by the CSDisseminate team and collaborators
Long, Drown, & El Amin (2023)
Purpose: The present study examined the effect of open access (OA) status on scholarly and societal metrics of impact (citation counts and altmetric scores, respectively) across manuscripts published in the ASHA Journals.
Method: 3,419 manuscripts published in four active ASHA journals were grouped across three access statuses based on their availability to the public: Gold OA, Green OA, and Closed Access. Two linear mixed-effects models tested the effects of OA status on citation counts and altmetric scores of manuscripts.
Results: Both Green OA and Gold OA significantly predicted a 2.70 and 5.21 respective increase in citation counts compared to Closed Access manuscripts (p < .001). Gold OA was estimated to predict a 25.7-point significant increase in altmetric scores (p < .001), but Green OA was only marginally significant (p = 0.068) in predicting a 1.44 increase in altmetric scores relative to Closed Access manuscripts.
Discussion: CSD research that is fully open receives more online attention and overall, more scientific attention than research that is paywalled or available through Green OA methods. Additional research is needed to understand secondary variables affecting these and other scholarly and societal metrics of impact across studies in CSD. Ongoing support and incentives to reduce the inequities of OA publishing are critical for continued scientific advancement.
El Amin, Borders, Long, Keller, & Kearney (2023)
Purpose: Open science is a collection of practices that seek to improve the accessibility, transparency, and replicability of science. Though these practices have garnered interest in related fields, it remains unclear whether open science practices have been adopted in the field of communication sciences and disorders (CSD). This study aimed to survey the knowledge, implementation, and perceived benefits and barriers of open science practices in CSD.
Method: An online survey was disseminated to researchers in the United States actively engaged in CSD research. Four core open science practices were examined: Pre-Registration, Self-Archiving, Gold Open Access, and Open Data. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression models.
Results: Two hundred and twenty-two participants met the inclusion criteria. Most participants were doctoral students (38%) or assistant professors (24%) at R1 institutions (58%). Participants reported low knowledge of pre-registration and gold open access. There was, however, a high level of desire to learn more for all practices. Implementation of open science practices was also low, most notably for pre-registration, gold open access, and open data (<25%). Predictors of knowledge and participation, as well as perceived barriers to implementation, are discussed.
Conclusion: Though participation in open science appears low in the field of CSD, participants expressed a strong desire to learn more in order to engage in these practices in the future.
Shroeder, Gaeta, El Amin, Chow & Borders (2022)
Purpose: To improve the credibility, reproducibility, and clinical utility of research findings, many scientific fields are implementing transparent and open research practices. Such open science practices include researchers making their data publicly available and preregistering their hypotheses and analyses. A way to enhance the adoption of open science practices is for journals to encourage or require submitting authors to participate in such practices. Accordingly, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Journals Program has recently announced their intention to promote open science practices. Here, we quantitatively assess the extent to which several journals in communication sciences and disorders (CSD) encourage or require participation in several open science practices by using the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Factor metric.
Method: TOP Factors were assessed for 34 CSD journals, as well as several journals in related fields. TOP Factors measure the level of implementation across 10 open science–related practices (e.g., data transparency, analysis plan preregistration, and replication) for a total possible score of 29 points.
Results: Collectively, CSD journals had very low TOP Factors (M = 1.4, range: 0–8). The related fields of Psychology (M = 4.0), Rehabilitation (M = 3.2), Linguistics (M = 1.7), and Education (M = 1.6) also had low scores, though Psychology and Rehabilitation had higher scores than CSD.
Conclusion: CSD journals currently have low levels of encouraging or requiring participation in open science practices, which may impede adoption.
Pfeiffer, Long, & El Amin (2022)
Restricted access to journals can make it challenging for clinicians to keep up with new research. Check out this ASHA Leader article to learn about five free, legal ways to read what you need.
Gaeta, Pfeiffer, & Kearney (2022)
In this Audiology Today article, we describe ways in which researchers and clinicians in communication sciences and disorders can promote transparency and improve accessibility through two open-science practices: open access and self-archiving.