A well-formulated research question should incorporate the components of a ‘problem’, an ‘intervention’, a ‘control’, and an ‘outcome’—at least according to the PICO mnemonic. The utility of this format, however, has been said to be limited to clinical studies that pose ‘which’ questions demanding correlational study designs. In contrast, its suitability for descriptive approaches outside of clinical investigations has been doubted. This paper disagrees with the alleged limitations of PICO. Instead, it argues that the scheme can be used universally for every scientific endeavour in any discipline with all study designs. This argument draws from four abstract components common to every research, namely, a research object, a theory/method, a (null) hypothesis, and the goal of knowledge generation. Various examples of how highly heterogenous studies from different disciplines can be grounded in the single scheme of PICO are offered. The finding implies that PICO is indeed a universal technique that can be used for teaching academic writing in any discipline, beyond clinical settings, regardless of a preferred study design.

International exchange programmes have been previously conceptualised based on the ‘opinion leader model’. It expects participants to form positive attitudes towards the host country, and to become influential back home. However, the micro-processes through which this goal can be achieved remain undertheorised. Drawing from Interaction Ritual Theory, this article argues that international exchanges consist of a chain of rituals. They strategically immerse targeted individuals into personal experiences with a shared focus on the host country, transforming the latter into a symbol charged with emotional energy and (strategically devisable) cognitive content. The symbol (now affectively and cognitively laden) is then recurrently invoked to re-circulate through the networks of the participants. A case study of a programme in which the symbol ‘Poland’ became systematically charged with the content of ‘multiculturality’ illustrates this proposition. Practical and theoretical implications (e.g. for the literature on socialisation, norm-diffusion, and face-to-face diplomacy) in international relations are discussed.

Editormetrics analyse the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. However, such analyses would best rely on open, structured and machine-readable data on editors and editorial boards, whose availability still remains rare. To address this shortcoming, the project Open Editors collects data about academic journal editors on a large scale and structures them into a single dataset. It does so by scraping the websites of 6.090 journals from 17 publishers, thereby structuring publicly available information (names, affiliations, editorial roles etc.) about 478.563 researchers. The project will iterate this webscraping procedure annually to enable insights into the changes of editorial boards over time. All codes and data are made available at GitHub, while the result is browsable at a dedicated website (https://openeditors.ooir.org). This dataset carries wide-ranging implications for meta-scientific investigations into the landscape of scholarly publications, including for bibliometric analyses, and allows for critical inquiries into the representation of diversity and inclusivity. It also contributes to the goal of expanding linked open data within science to evaluate and reflect on the scholarly publication process.

Summary How do governments select their public diplomacy targets? Officials can shake hands with important allies’ presidents, they can honour writers from far-away states, or they can visit slums to meet victims of violence. This article proposes a conceptual typology of strategic publics based on two dimensions: the strategic importance of the represented polity; and the individual’s power position. The variables are parallel to universal psychological dimensions of social cognition — that is, warmth and competence — and they are combined with diplomatic theories revolving around the primacy of representation. Six ideal types of strategic publics are defined and exemplified. The typology integrates governmental and non-governmental, foreign and domestic, and elite and non-elite publics. In addition, the article proposes a three-level heuristic device that facilitates the analysis of cases with multiple publics. The proposed analytical tools seek to stimulate future efforts to refine conceptualizations of strategic publics.

PurposeHow to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality flaws. This paper tries to fill this gap with an alternative approach.Design/methodology/approachThe content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo were first used to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 15 journals. Second, the publishers' websites were scraped to fetch their portfolios and, thus, their “true” journal counts.FindingsThe outcome is a list of the 100 largest publishers comprising 28.060 scholarly journals, with the largest publishing 3.763 journals, and the smallest carrying 76 titles. The usual “oligopoly” of major publishing companies leads the list, but it also contains 17 university presses from the Global South, and, surprisingly, 31 predatory publishers that together publish 4.606 journals.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional data sources could be used to mitigate remaining biases; it is difficult to disambiguate publisher names and their imprints; and the dataset carries a non-uniform distribution, thus risking the omission of data points in the lower range.Practical implicationsThe dataset can serve as a useful basis for comprehensive meta-scientific surveys on the publisher-level.Originality/valueThe catalogue can be deemed more inclusive and diverse than other ones because many of the publishers would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. The list is freely accessible and invites regular updates. The approach used here (webscraping) has seldomly been used in meta-scientific surveys.

Why do post-Soviet de facto states (such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia) regularly interact with remote Pacific islands or Latin American countries, even though they are not bound by any meaningful political, economic or military ties? This article argues that the diplomatic relationship management amounts to a strategy of external legitimacy-building through stigma rejection and ontological security-attainment. This diplomatic practice creates positively tinged social affiliations, whereby the unrecognized entities aim to have their identity as ‘normal’ states affirmed. It renders the international society’s stigma ineffective, thus facilitating a potential exit from the stigma. By illuminating the performative aspects behind the de facto states’ quest for recognition, this article uncovers the de facto states’ agency and analytically emancipates them from the structural factor of ‘Russia-as-a-great-power’. It also contributes to the literature of ontological security by highlighting how positive (rather than conflictual) relationships, and how transformed (rather than stable) identities can be conducive to its attainment. This article generally highlights the need to analyse de facto states’ foreign relations more holistically than previously done.

Editormetrics analyses the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. Such analyses would best rely on open, structured, and machine-readable data about editors and editorial boards, which still remains rare. To address this shortcoming, the project Open Editors collects data about academic journal editors on a large scale and structures them into a single dataset. It does so by scraping the websites of 7,352 journals from 26 publishers (including predatory ones), thereby structuring publicly available information (names, affiliations, editorial roles, ORCID etc.) about 594,580 researchers. The dataset shows that journals and publishers are immensely heterogeneous in terms of editorial board sizes, regional diversity, and editorial role labels. All codes and data are made available at Zenodo, while the result is browsable at a dedicated website (https://openeditors.ooir.org). This dataset carries implications for both practical purposes of research evaluation and for meta-scientific investigations into the landscape of scholarly publications, and allows for critical inquiries regarding the representation of diversity and inclusivity across academia.

There has been a proliferation of new research discovery tools that aid scientists in finding relevant publications. To obtain a general overview of this development, this article generates a conceptual typology of all possible research discovery tools by drawing from the information-theoretical concepts of redundancy/variety. Bibliometric links between scholarly publications can thus exhibit ‘redundancy’ (i.e. expectable linkages between academic works) or ‘variety’ (i.e. original co-occurrence patterns). On the redundancy-reproducing end of the typology are machines that harness extant co-citations or keyword queries, such as academic search engines and paper recommender systems. The variety end of the spectrum harbours services that enable categorial browsing or that suggest publications randomly, such as journals’ tables of contents or random paper bots. The typology has implications for understanding how the design of research discovery platforms may ultimately shape aggregate citational networks of science.