Elsevier & Information Literacy
It’s easy to use “read a scholarly article” as a shorthand for “consume reputable information”. In many cases, it’s a viable shorthand. However, as more and more articles are presented digitally and divorced from their context, students will need to learn more skepticism and rely on critical thinking rather than visual cues to determine scholarly content.
This imperative becomes clearer when we consider the breaking news of Elsevier’s numerous publicity journals, paid for by Merck. Read more at Forbes.
Between 2002 and 2005, Elsevier created a “scholarly journal”, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine as a promotion for Merck in return for an undisclosed sum of money. The ‘journal’ hit many of the key identifiers that suggest an unbiased scholarly journal to an observer: ISSN, editorial statement, publisher’s reputation, article formats. Copies were distributed to doctors, and no affiliation with Merck was made public anywhere in the publication until the fifth issue.
As the story developed, Elsevier confirmed six other questionable journals. All have now ceased publication, and Elsevier believes the situation was confined to Australian publications. However, they did not disclose whether any companies other than Merck had paid for similar journals.
Elsevier has reviewed their standards in the intervening years and now vows to disclose sponsorship more carefully in the future.
While on the one hand, this seems like a distant problem from a college campus, since the journals were not listed by Medline or ScienceDirect, and thus were unlikely to be used by students, on the other hand it’s a call to better develop students’ information literacy skills for the sake of their future information needs.
As many science students will be health professionals and all students will be health care consumers, it will be important for students to be able to not only to distinguish a scholarly journal from a popular source, but also to look keenly at articles and publications themselves.
Tags: elsevier, information literacy