EASE

Author: EASE Secretary

  • EDITORIAL PROCESS

    The PLoS Medicine Editors, Krishna S. 2006. Drug Development Papers in PLoS Medicine: How We Try to Spot a Winner. PLoS Med 3(12): e547
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030547

    Editors ask several general questions about any submitted paper: how important is the research question (both globally and in relation to the journal’s audience); what is the likelihood of the conclusions holding up over time (and when is it worth publishing preliminary results that would be important if confirmed but where confirmation is uncertain); and, for a highly selective general medical journal, do the results represent a substantial advance—be it in understanding pathogenesis, suggesting treatment options, or having implications for public health. The editors of PloS Medicine here discuss their strategy in deciding which drug development papers are appropriate for publication in a general medical journal.

    http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030547

  • ETHICAL ISSUES

    Boyd EA, Bero LA. 2006. Improving the use of research evidence in guideline development: 4. Managing conflicts of interests.
    Health Res Policy Syst. 4: 16

    The World Health Organization (WHO) has recognised the need to use more rigorous processes to ensure that health care recommendations are informed by the best available research evidence. Literature on conflicts of interest was reviewed to search the best way to obtain complete and accurate disclosures on financial ties and other competing interests.
    The paper considers how to manage conflict of interests and how to enforce appropriate policies.

    http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1693552

  • ETHICAL ISSUES

    Grindlinger B. 2006. Can I quote you on that? J Clin Invest. November 1; 116(11): 2832.
    doi: 10.1172/JCI30295.

    Research findings can be distorted in the lay press. Journalists and scientists must share the responsibilities of better explaining and interpreting science in an accessible and meaningful context for nonspecialist readers.

    http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17080184

  • PUBLISHING

    M Nyström, M Merkel, L Ahrenberg , P Zweigenbaum, H Petersson, H Åhlfeldt. 2006 Creating a medical English-Swedish dictionary using interactive word alignment BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 6:35

    This article reports a novel method for translating medical dictionaries by combining electronic word extraction and automated alignment. This method pernmits to rapidly generate a medical terminology dictionary. This research which also identifies inconsistencies in currently used terminology systems was performed in a Swedish-English dictionary with 31,000 entries.

    http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/6/35

  • ECONOMICS AND FUNDING

    HM Treasury, 2006. Investing in Britain’s potential: Building our long-term future, Cm 6984.

    The mechanism for allocating science funding in the UK is to move away from peer review to a measure based on research income, postgraduate research student data and bibliometrics. For other disciplines, including mathematics and statistics, funding is going to be based on a “significantly reduced, light-touch peer review process informed by a range of discipline-specific indicators”. The new system for science, engineering and technology will be phased in between September 2010 and August 2014.

  • PUBLISHING

    S. K. Ritter, 2006, Making the Cover, Chemical and Engineering News, 84(45): 24-27.

    This piece describes how eye-catching journal covers are surviving in the age of the Internet, at least in chemistry, and briefly discusses the surrounding ethical issues and how they are used to promote articles.

  • ECONOMICS AND FUNDING

    K. Douglas and D. L. Roth, 2006, Looming Threats to Society Journals, Chemical Engineering News 84(47): 82-84.

    The authors, librarians at the California Institute of Technology, warn learned society publishers, such as the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry, that high quality is not enough to secure their position and that libraries will be taking cost effectiveness into account. Further, they suggest that it looks bad for learned society publishers to be seen to align themselves with commercial publishers rather than the research communities they serve, for example on the subject of open access.

  • PUBLISHING

    The PLoS Medicine Editors. 2006. Are we publishing “the right stuff”? PLoS Med 3(11): e512.

    The editors of PLOS Medicine wonder whether they, as editors, are publishing the right stuff in their journal on the basis of the findings of a major study estimating the likely trends in global morbidity and mortality. This editorial critically considers what editors should be publishing and the proportion of research on different diseases appearing in a general medical journal.

    http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030512

  • ETHICAL ISSUES

    Johnson C. 2006 Repetitive, Duplicate, and Redundant Publications: A Review for Authors and Readers. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. 29(7): 505-509

    This editorial defines and discusses a range of terminology, relevant to the repetitive, duplicate and redundant scientific literature. It also assesses the affect of these publications on science as a whole, asking the questions: What is wrong with duplicate publication, why do people do it, when is duplicate publication acceptable and who is responsible? The article concludes with discussion on prevention and policy making.

    http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0161-4754/PIIS0161475406001825.pdf

  • PUBLISHING

    Fyfe A. 2006. Information revolution: William Chambers, the publishing pioneer. Endeavour. 30(4):120-125

    This general-interest article reviews the contribution of William Chambers (1800–1883), who was one of the first science publishers to take advantage of steam power and new machinery in the 19th century to reach a national market, reaching a broad readership from all parts of society. The article is part of the Science in the Industrial Revolution series.

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&

    _cdi=5857&_pubType=J&_auth=y&_acct=C000050221&_

    version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f20b3af935

    34a865961379e5cd8855c3

  • PUBLISHING

    Swan A. 2006. Open Access. What has been going on? High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine. 13. October

    Overview of what happened on the Open Access (OA) scene in the last two years. Facts and figures concerning publishers, funding organizations, charities, academic and research institutions as well as the authors’ attidutes regarding citation patterns and self archiving practices in this ever changing publication arena. The paper contains a list of very useful links to the most up-dated documents and declarations on Open Access.

    http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/13/papers/1/

  • RESEARCH EVALUATION

    Godin B. 2006. On the origins of bibliometrics. Scientometrics 68 (1): 109-133.

    This article is very interesting since it highlights an undoubtedly unusual issue: the origins of bibliometrics. In the field of scientometrics, based on statistics on science, bibliometrics is a subfield concerned with measuring the output side of science. According to most “histories”, in the 1950s the pioneers of bibliometrics were mainly D.J.D. Price and Eugene Garfield. However, in the early 1900s, psychologists began collecting statistics on their discipline so that the systematic counting of publications originated with psychologists. Publications came to be counted in addresses, reviews and histories of psychology for several decades. The aim was to contribute to the advancement of psychology. This is a pioneering work that shoud be taken into consideration.

    http://www.springerlink.com/content/133852nn77213414/?p=3070990f95884a138c42291645cc262c&pi=5