n-but-b : New books under the blog

Recently, I came across a new title from Nova Publishers which struck me as suspicious from the start: "Genetics researcher biographical sketches and research summaries", edited by Lyndsay E. Hewitt and John W. O'Neil (2012), ISBN 978-1-61942-647-4. I already wrote about some quality issues with books from "Nova Science Publishers" earlier.

The book contains 126 chapters spread over 278 pages. About half of the type area is just white, due to spacing between chapters. The first part of the book ("Research biographies") consists of 24 biographical sketches. I am not a specialist in genetics, so I am not able to evaluate each person portrayed here, but it is easy to see that this is not the vanguard of genetics research, only a few call themselves professors, and I suppose the selection principle leading to these 24 sketches was just willingness of the persons themselves to contribute their own sketch. Even more ridiculous is the second part of the book, which has 102 abstracts, most of them less than half a page long. And for none of these "research summaries" there are sources or references. With little effort, I found out that chapters 45 through 55 are the abstracts of the papers in another book from Nova Publishers ("Advances in genetics research, Volume 1; edited by Osborne, Maria A.; New York : Nova Biomedical Books, 2010; ISBN: 978-1-60692-638-3); but there is no indication of this source. It can be supposed that the other "research summaries" have similar sources.

The performance of the editors, Lyndsay Hewitt and John O'Neil, seems poor when measured by their textual contributions to the book: The Preface (which seems the only part that could be attributed to editors) reads: "This book compiles biographical sketches of top professionals in the field of genetics research, as well as research summaries from a number of different focuses in this important field." (That's all. Not joking.)

Koros Press Limited (based in London, UK, run by Mr. Muz Shafi according to publisher's web site) started publishing biology books this year, and the first titles arrived in our library recently. We were astounded to realize that two books, "edited" by Kirk Bryant, had exactly the same content. These were:

• Encyclopaedia of genetic analysis in cell biology and molecular biology / Part 3: Theoretical analysis in genome project. Edited by Bryant, Kirk ; London (Koros Press), 2012; 280 pp.; ISBN: 978-1-78163-095-2
• Theoretical analysis in genome project. Edited by Kirk Bryant ; London (Koros Press), 2012; 280 pp.; ISBN: 1-78163-200-6 ; 978-1-78163-200-0

The price of each volume is 95 British Pound. There is no indication of authors in these volumes, so it can be supposed that Kirk Bryant is rather the author than an editor. Contents and their arrangement seem to be a little bit confused in some sections. The book title "Theoretical analysis in genome project" (odd in itself) does not fit well the contents.
This kind of repackaging of content can be described as bogus publishing. Other Koros Press titles seen were of rather low quality as well.

Inspired by a recent thread in Taxacom and by other discussions about "Nova Science Publishers, Inc.", I took a newly published biology title, chosen randomly (more or less) from several new acquisitions from this publisher in our library, and checked the content for the following questions: Does it have original content? Or just reprinted material? Does the price seem adequate?

Results are somewhat unclear (nevertheless in accordance with anecdotal insights from browsing other Nova titles in biology), and results neither point unambiguously to bogus publishing nor to high quality science publishing. It is bad style, no doubt.

The title chosen was: Primates : classification, evolution and behavior / Everett F. Hughes ... eds., ISBN 978-1-62081-498-7 ; 1-62081-498-6 , New York : Nova Science Publ., 2012. This book, of moderate size (16x23 cm, 193 pp.), has five chapters, and costs 120 USD according to the publisher's website.

Two out of five chapters (no. 4 and 5) show footnotes saying that the present contribution already appeared in another book published by Nova Science recently (example: "A version of this chapter also appears in Monkeys: Biology, Behavior and Disorders, edited by Rachel M. Williams, published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. It was submitted for appropriate modifications in an effort to encourage wider dissemination of research.").

Using Biological Abstract as well as Google Scholar and a generic web search engine, I could not find evidence of previously published versions of the five chapters, except as indicated for chapters 4 and 5. The first author of chapter II published a paper with seemingly similar bibliographic data in an Elsevier journal (Neurología. 2012; 27: 354-369): four out of five authors are the same in both publications; and the title of chapter II in the present book appears as a subtitle of the journal article; but the content of the publications is clearly different.

Most authors in the present book have affiliations in Spain or the U.S. When taking first author and senior author from the first chapter, I found that they either do not have their own web pages with CV and publications list, or these pages are very much outdated.

There is no jacket text or blurb. The Preface consists of little more than verbatim repetitions of the abstracts of the five chapters; however these paragraphs are not marked as citations, and in cases where the authors of a chapter used a first person wording, the preface authors do so as well ("Within the hominoid specimens dissected by us ..."). The names of the editors, who are supposed to have collated the preface, only occur at the book cover and title page. There is no evidence of any kind of review process implemented by the publisher.

Summarizing, the book does have original scientific content, but only in part; it contains reprinted material as well. Publishers and editors display a dubious approach to scientific literature. The price of the book, in my eyes, does not seem adequate.

My observations only touch upon one out of several aspects of Nova's publishing activities which have been discussed elsewhere (see for example David Bade, and the Wikipedia entry "Nova Publishers" including the related "Talk" page .)

Because they are full of pesticide (which prevents mould from thriving, which would inevitable happen in a wet monsoon climate...). At least that's the only explanation I can imagine. In the library, I can scent Indian books from a distance of several meters.