BackgroundAlthough the peer review process is believed to ensure scientific rigor, enhance research quality, and improve manuscript clarity, many investigators are concerned that the process is too slow, too expensive, too unreliable, and too static. In this feasibility study, we sought to survey corresponding authors of recently published clinical research studies on the speed and efficiency of the publication process.MethodsWeb-based survey of corresponding authors of a 20% random sample of clinical research studies in MEDLINE-indexed journals with Ovid MEDLINE entry dates (...) between December 1 and 15, 2016. Survey addressed perceived manuscript importance before first submission, approximate first submission and final acceptance dates, and total number of journal submissions, external peer reviews, external peer reviewers, and revisions requested, as well as whether authors would have considered publicly sharing their manuscript on an online platform instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal.ResultsOf 1780 surveys distributed, 27 corresponding authors opted out or requested that we stop emailing them and 149 emails failed (e.g., emails that bounced n = 64, returned with an away from office message n = 70, or were changed/incorrect n = 15), leaving 1604 respondents, of which 337 completed the survey (21.0%). Respondents and non-respondents were similar with respect to study type and publication journals’ impact factor, although non-respondent authors had more publications (p = 0.03). Among respondents, the median impact factor of the publications’ journal was 2.7 (interquartile range (IQR), 2.0–3.6) and corresponding authors’ median h-index and number of publications was 9 (IQR, 3–20) and 27 (IQR, 10–77), respectively. The median time from first submission to journal acceptance and publication was 5 months (IQR, 3–8) and 7 months (IQR, 5–12), respectively. Most respondents (62.0%, n = 209) rated the importance of their research as a 4 or 5 (5-point scale) prior to submission. Median number of journal submissions was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviews was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviewers was 3 (IQR, 2–4), and revisions requested was 1 (IQR, 1–1). Sharing manuscripts to a public online platform, instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal, would have been considered by 55.2% (n = 186) of respondents.ConclusionCorresponding authors have high perceptions of their research and reported requiring few manuscript submissions prior to journal acceptance, most commonly by lower impact factor journals. (shrink)

The papers by Nancy Kass, Ruth Faden, and colleagues describe an ethical imperative to study clinical care as it is being delivered. The goal of learning from each patient is attractive, but integrating research and clinical practice is not easy. The authors suggest that the bioethical framework in use for the past forty years to oversee clinical research may be as much an impediment to the development of a learning health care system as a means of protecting the interests of (...) patients. This framework draws a bright line between clinical research and clinical care activities, subjecting clinical research to institutional review and ongoing oversight while assuming that clinical care is conducted primarily in the interests of patients and not in need of additional ethical oversight. The authors identify five characteristics that have been used to distinguish the two activities, and they conclude that none succeed. The practical implications of this conclusion are left unspecified, however. Should ethical oversight simply be eliminated for these kinds of research activities on the grounds that oversight is not mandated for clinical care and the two cannot be distinguished? (shrink)

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that processes and generates natural language text, offering human-like responses to a wide range of questions and prompts. Five days after its re...

Feminism compels us to reconceptualize aesthetic inquiries, as it erases the boundaries between the traditional realm of aesthetics-value judgments and personal pleasures-and the historical and social contexts that generate those judgments and pleasures. In the visual arts section of our annotated bibliography, we try to suggest the breadth of feminist interventions in the field of aesthetics in the past twenty years.

Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In (...) the following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

Immigration politics are almost universally characterized by their complexity, their ability to raise public passions, and misinformation, often based on generalizations and stereotypes. Recently, immigration has been intrinsically linked to crime, and public agendas have squarely focused on security issues as nativist political forces have successfully created a prominent image of migrants as threats to public security. This article argues that immigrant participation in criminal markets should be studied at the local level, where micro-criminal economies often dominated by migrants actually (...) develop. By examining criminal activity at its base, the article investigates the nature of power in these markets. Specifically, it examines migrant crime in four cities and compares it to migrant integration in regular labour markets. By doing so, the article studies levels of migrant autonomy in both criminal and regular markets and argues that this autonomy indicates whether migrant crime is entrepreneurial or a sign of social deviance. (shrink)

Although James Gustafson's use of the Christian Bible and tradition is not fully displayed in the essays published here, Bible and tradition are a crucial part of a composite rationale, which includes experience and the sciences, for his theocentric ethics. Gustafson's theocentric ethics employs the sciences to back, inform, and correct the Christian tradition and offers grounds for respecting the natural piety and morality of “nonreligious” persons while explaining and justifying why Christians draw on major themes and metaphors from their (...) tradition that should penetrate their piety and morality. His proposal should reorient the thinking of theological ethics more than it has thus far. (shrink)

Ethics and Advocacy considers the connections and differences between critical reflection or moral arguments or narratives and advocacy for particular issues regarding justice and moral behavior and dispositions. The chapters in this volume share an interest in overcoming polarizing division that does not enable fruitful give-and-take discussion and even possible persuasive justifications. The authors all believe that both ethics and advocacy are important and should inform each other, but each offers a divergent point of view on the way forward to (...) these agreed-upon ends. Our shared goal is to avoid academic withdrawal and to speak relevantly to the important issues of our day while halting--or at least mitigating--the disruptive discourse--almost shouting--that characterizes our polarized current society. (shrink)

This volume includes chapters from an exciting group of scholars at the cutting edge of their fields to present a multi-disciplinary look at how international law shapes behavior. Contributors present overviews of the progress established fields have made in analyzing questions of interest, as well as speculations on the questions or insights that emerging methods might raise. In some chapters, there is a focus on how a particular method might raise or help answer questions, while others focus on a particular (...) international law topic by drawing from a variety of fields through a multi-method approach to highlight how these fields may come together in a single project. Still others use behavioral insights as a form of critique to highlight the blind spots and related mistakes in more traditional analyses of the law. Throughout this volume, authors present creative, insightful, challenges to traditional international law scholarship. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of essays concerned with the morality of hu man treatment of nonhuman animals. The contributors take very different approaches to their topics and come to widely divergent conclusions. The goal of the volume as a whole is to shed a brighter light upon an aspect of human life-our relations with the other animals-that has recently seen a great increase in interest and in the generation of heat. The discussions and debates contained herein are addressed by (...) the contributors to each other, to the general public, and to the academic world, especially the biological, philosophical, and political parts of that world. The essays are organized into eight sections by topics, each sec tion beginning with a brief introduction linking the papers and the sec tions to one another. There is also a general introduction and an Epilog that suggests alternate possible ways of organizing the material. The first two sections are concerned with the place of animals in the human world: Section I with the ways humans view animals in literature, philosophy, and other parts of human culture, and Section II with the place of animals in human legal and moral community. The next three sections concern comparisons between human and nonhuman animals: Section III on the rights and wrongs of killing, Section IV on the humanity of animals and the animality of humans, and Section V on questions of the conflict of human and animal interests. (shrink)

I want, this morning, to talk about wants, about how what we want makes us who we are, and how some ways of understanding our own wants and the wants of others shape our lives both personally and politically. There are five parts, respectively personal, political, personal, political, personal.

_The Limits of Utilitarianism _ was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Many philosophers have argued that utilitarianism is an unacceptable moral theory and that promoting the general welfare is at best only one of the legitimate goals of public policy. Utilitarian principles seem to place no limits on the extent to which society may legitimately interfere with (...) a person's liberties - provided that such actions can be shown to promote the long-term welfare of its members. These issues have played a central role in discussions of utilitarianism since the time of Bentham and Mill. Despite criticisms, utilitarianism remains the most influential and widely accepted moral theory of recent times. In this volume contemporary philosophers address four aspects of utilitarianism: the principle of utility; utilitarianism vis-à-vis contractarianism; welfare; and voluntary cooperation and helping others. The editors provide an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that covers all books and articles published in utilitarianism since 1930. (shrink)

Objectivity is discussed as the underlying ethic of news reporting with an exploration of its origins. A content analysis of the general news reports in six selected U.S. daily newspapers found that objectivity was not widely practiced in 1865?1874, was common in 1905?1914, and normative by 1925?1984. Incidence of objective reporting was evidently not influenced by the introduction of the telegraph and wire services, and there is also no apparent difference between news reports of New York City newspapers and those (...) of other cities. (shrink)