Craig2026SSRDDDLS

Title

Scholars Should Report Documented Due Diligence of Literature Searches in Their Research Problem Domain
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Authors

Adam Craig, Joshua Rubin, Carl Taswell

Affiliations

Brain Health Alliance Virtual Institute, www.BHAVI.us, Ladera Ranch, California, USA.

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, searching, citing, discussing, and referencing the published literature was required for all members of scholarly communities devoted to solving real-world problems. This practice clarified what new knowledge an author contributed and its relation to what experts already knew. Visionaries hoped that information technology would allow scholars to access literature easily from around the world. Even though every researcher now has access to such search tools, the modern publish-or-perish mentality pressures authors to produce reports without using them. This environment created incentives for fabrication, plagiarism, and dismissive or ghosting literature reviews. These breaches of publishing ethics not only obtain unearned credit for fraudulent authors, but also obfuscate the work of authentic scholars. To counter the perverse incentives to ignore, disregard, or plagiarize prior work, new counter-incentives and requirements for scholarly integrity are necessary. While nonprofit Brain Health Alliance cannot impose these requirements on the rest of the academic world, we will implement them at our own journals. Recording the literature search process has long been a defining feature of systematic literature reviews, but it should also improve the transparency of any kind of scholarly communication. In particular, requiring the authors of research articles to document the search conducted and the results found will help peer reviewers and editors to hold authors accountable for dismissive and ghosting literature reviews. For this reason, Brainiacs Journal will require authors to report the literature searches performed before and during preparation of a manuscript. The Editorial Board will require reviewers to be experts already familiar with the published literature in the field, or otherwise, to repeat the authors' literature searches and compare their results to those reported in the manuscript under review. Literature searches should be reproducible, meaning that reviewers can submit the same queries as submitted by authors to the same search engines and obtain the same results from libraries with open access unrestricted by black-box algorithms. To facilitate this requirement, we will extend the FAIR Metrics module of the DREAM Ontology with classes and properties useful for recording literature searches. Publishing peer reviews, including recorded literature searches, in both human-readable and semantic reasoning engine-readable formats will enable the wider scholarly community to judge whether authors and reviewers have completed their due diligence.

KeyPhrases

Research integrity, reproducible scholarship, due diligence, literature search, provenance tracing, FAIR Metrics.

Dates

Created 2026-06-17, updated 2026-08-09, published 2026-08-09, revised 2026-09-01.

Citation

Brainiacs Journal 2026 Volume 7 Issue 3 Edoc G3A340E1D
DOI: 10.48085/G3A340E1D
NPDS: LINKS/Brainiacs/Craig2026SSRDDDLS

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