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N – UK libel law risks patient harm6 January 2010A Danish radiologist says that the lives of patients are being put at risk because libel laws are preventing doctors and scientists from speaking in public about their clinical experiences, writes Zosia Kmietowicz in the BMJ (2009;339:b5615). Henrik Thomsen, professor at the University of Copenhagen, is being pursued in the High Court in London by […]
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B – The textual characteristics of traditional and Open Access scientific journals are similar6 January 2010Verspoor K, Cohen KB, Hunter L. The textual characteristics of traditional and Open Access scientific journals are similar. BMC Bioinformatics 2009,10:183 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-183 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/183 The authors collected two sets of documents, one consisting only of Open Access publications and the other consisting only of traditional journal publications. Surface linguistic structures were examined (incidence of conjunctions, negation, […]
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N – European university presses fold5 January 2010University presses in Europe are facing funding cuts, with one press having closed and others cutting back on the number of titles they’re publishing, and a European university press association is being planned, reports Kent Anderson in the blog The Scholarly Kitchen (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/11/11/european-university-presses-fold-consolidate-in-economic-downturn/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitchen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29). Middlesex University Press closed at the end of last year (www.mupress.co.uk). Forty […]
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N – Cell highlights proteins and genes5 January 2010The journal Cell has piloted technology that highlights proteins, genes, and small molecules in research articles. Clicking on these entities opens pop-up windows that contain relevant contextual information, with additional links (http://beta.cell.com/index.php/2009/11/reflect). The project was developed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. Sean O’Donoghue, coordinator, said, “We wanted to design a system that […]
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B – On the need to distinguish between author and journal self-citations.4 January 2010Hartley J. On the need to distinguish betwen author and journal self-citations.Scientometrics 2009;81(3):787-788. Prof. James Hartley, on this ‘letter to the Editor’, with regard to his book on Academic Writing & Publishing tries to make clear the ambiguity of a term he used to indicate those concurring elements that, put together, determine the impact factor […]
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B – Never mind the impact factor: colleagues know better!4 January 2010Hartley J. Never mind the impact factor: colleagues know better!Publication databases disc 77Keele University In this article Prof. James Hartley, points the finger to the present system and standards of evaluation narrowly based on publication metrics (impact factors, citation rates etc.); his view is that the authors themselves are better judges of their own work […]
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B – “Down’s syndrome” or “Down syndrome”?23 December 2009Jana N, Barik S, Arora N. Current use of medical eponyms–a need for global uniformity in scientific publications. BMC Med Res Methodol 2009;9:18. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/9/18 Eponym indicates the name of a person after whom something, such as a discovery, is named. Eponyms are widely used in medicine, i.e. Alzheimer disease, Williams syndrome or Australia antigen. Nonetheless […]
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B – Personal knowledge management The role of Web 2.0 tools for managing knowledge at individual and organisational levels20 December 2009Razmerita L., Kirchner K., Sudzina F. Personal knowledge management The role of Web 2.0 tools for managing knowledge at individual and organisational levels. Online Information Review 2009;33(6):1021-1039. www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm Knowledge Management differs from Personal Knowledge Management. PKM is the individual knowledge that socialize itself through social interaction or better still through the Social Web or otherwise […]
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A slippery slope13 December 2009Editorial. A slippery slope. Nature 2009; 462(7274):699http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7274/pdf/462699b.pdf After what appears to be an “arbitrary and ad hoc” decision to cancel a funding committee-approved, animal-use committee-approved study using baboons to test an anthrax vaccine by Oklahoma State University president Burns Hargis, the influence of the university’s wealthy donors on research decisions is questioned.
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A question of integrity13 December 2009Editorial. A question of integrity. Nature 2009; 462(7274):699 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7274/pdf/462699b.pdf This editorial highlights allegations of plagiarism against the authors of research papers in which members of the Iranian government were co-authors. The possible causes of this are speculated upon, one being the strong cultural expectation that officials have a strong academic background. Importantly it is noted […]
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B – Systematic Differences in Impact across Publication Tracks at PNAS7 December 2009Rand DG, Pfeiffer T, Systematic Differences in Impact across Publication Tracks at PNAS. PLoS ONE 2009; 4(12): e8092. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008092 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008092 Citation data can be used to evaluate the editorial policies and procedures of scientific journals. This analysis in PNAS explores the consequences of differences in editor and referee selection, and demonstrates that different editorial procedures […]
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B – Taking Care of Digital Collections and Data3 December 2009Angevaare I. Taking Care of Digital Collections and Data: ‘Curation’ and Organisational Choices for Research Libraries. Liber Quarterly. 2009(19)1 http://liber.library.uu.nl/This article is a useful introduction to digital curation and preservation. It explores the types of digital information research libraries typically deal with and what factors might influence libraries’ decisions to take on the work of […]
