Another unsavoury book from "Nova Science Publishers"
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.)
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.)
nbutb01 - 2012-12-20 22:35
