-
N – Arab world far from knowledge society11 January 2010Arab states have made progress in technology and research, but there is still a long way to go before the region becomes a knowledge society, according to a report described in a scidev.net article. Arab Knowledge Report 2009: Towards Productive Intercommunication for Knowledge (www.mbrfoundation.ae/English/Documents/AKR-2009-En/AKR-English.pdf), proposes ways of filling what it says are numerous gaps in […]
-
N – Open access good for Africa11 January 2010“The open access movement removes barriers to academic literature and offers opportunities to participate in the wider research and teaching community, ensuring that Africa does not end up on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide,'” writes Joseph Juma Musakali, in an article on www.scidev.net. There are also many open access journals, including those in […]
-
B – The GPP2 guidelines8 January 2010Graf C, Battisti WP, Bridges D, Bruce-Winkler V, Conaty JM, Ellison JM, Field EA, Gurr JA, Marx ME, Patel M, Sanes-Miller C, Yarker YE; International Society for Medical Publication Professionals. Research Methods & Reporting. Good publication practice for communicating company sponsored medical research: the GPP2 guidelines. BMJ 2009 Nov 27;339:b4330. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b4330 Good Publication Practice […]
-
N – Uniform form for competing interests7 January 2010The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has agreed a standardised format for the reporting of competing interests in biomedical research papers, to better help readers understand the relationship between authors and commercial entities that may have an interest in the information reported. The goal is to make the process of disclosure uniform and easy; […]
-
N – Rap about physics7 January 2010On 30 November experiments resumed at the Large Hadron Collider, and although the LHC Rap has been around for some time, it seems apt to flag it up now. The rap is the brainchild of Katherine McAlpine, at the time working in the CERN press office. When Michigan State University announced that it would be […]
-
N – Backslash backslash a mistake7 January 2010Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the UK scientist who created the World Wide Web, has admitted that two slashes at the front of a web addresses is pointless, the Telegraph reports. Sir Tim, now director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees the web’s development, said that if he had his time again he would leave […]
-
N – The end of impact factors . . . and journals?7 January 2010“Something has just happened that will almost certainly end the tyranny of impact factors and may well mark another step towards the extinction of most scientific journals,” the former editor of the BMJ Richard Smith has blogged on bmj.com. He thinks that “article level metrics,” information attached to each article in the publications of the […]
-
N – Scientific American gets female editor7 January 2010Scientific American, the 164 year old magazine, appointed Mariette DiChristina, its first female editor in chief, in December, the Guardian reports. She is the eighth editor in chief at the magazine, which has published articles by more than 140 Nobel laureate authors, including Albert Einstein and Francis Crick, and was acquired by Nature Publishing Group […]
-
N – Living in a world of euphemism7 January 2010Pre-emptive editing by lawyers “forces us to live in a world of euphemism,” said Tracey Brown, managing director of Sense About Science, at a recent panel discussion about English libel law. “Even if you win you could still lose £100 000 and a year or two of your career,” said the science writer Simon Singh, […]
-
N – Tweeter satirises top stylebook6 January 2010A user of Twitter, the microblogging site (www.twitter.com), has amassed more than 80000 followers, amused by it’s satirising of the AP Stylebook, dubbed “the journalist’s bible” by Associated Press (www.apstylebook.com). The user @FakeAPStylebook has amused followers with tweets such as “While it’s tempting to call them ‘baristi’ because of the Italian roots, the plural of […]
-
N – New words are not awesome6 January 2010“The stickler-advocated rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation slow the speed of change and allow the language to remain united,” writes David Mitchell in the Guardian, dismissing the annual list of new words that have entered the Oxford English Dictionary (3 Jan, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/03/david-mitchell-english-language-grammar). “Staycation,” “tweetup,” “bossnapping,” and “unfriend” are some of the new entries. But […]
-
N – Write for peer reviewers6 January 2010“The real readers that matter are the peer reviewers. Peer reviewers are specialists and for them to get excited, you’re going to be speaking a language that is not necessarily accessible to the average reader,” Judith Swan tells Bob Grant, in the Scientist (2009;23:65). Other tips include starting with the results section, and getting the […]
