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B – How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps22 November 2009Trebino R. How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy StepsPhysics World 2009;22(11):56. The history of an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by Trebino to comment on a paper which “proved” that his life’s work was wrong! Caught between a limit of 1 page and reviewers’ insistence on more detail, and finally the reviewers’ […]
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B – Can the highly cited psychiatric paper be predicted early?2 November 2009Hyett M, Parker G. Can the highly cited psychiatric paper be predicted early? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psichiatry 2009;(43):173-176. Normally, the importance of a scientific contribution is seen by citation frequency over time and time is the key factor for most of psychiatric researchers. A presentation of paper from preparation to publication is […]
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B – Common Weaknesses in Traditional Abstracts in the Social Sciences31 October 2009Hartley J, Betts L. Common Weaknesses in Traditional Abstracts in the Social Sciences Journal of the American Society for information science and technology 2009;60(10):2010-2018. An article by James Hartley on traditional abstracts “versus” structured abstracts. 100 traditional abstracts were downloaded from 53 journals in social science and evaluated. This study examines the lack of information […]
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B – The Psychology of Referencing in Psychology Journal Articles19 October 2009Safer MA, Tang R, The Psychology of Referencing in Psychology Journal Articles Perspective on Psychological Science 2009;4(1):51-53 How important is citation in research papers? Forty nine psychology empirical articles randomly selected were submitted for ratings to their authors (psycyhologists) with regards to the importance of references in their own work. A scale of 1 (slightly […]
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B – “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing”17 October 2009Since its first “unseccessful step” – the launch of the “Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials” in1992 – information gathering have become, in the past decade, more and more sophisticated. The turning point of such progress is clear when more than ten years later, technical, medical and scientific journals had nearly them all their online […]
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B – Does analysis using “last observation carried forward” introduce bias in dementia research?15 October 2009Does analysis using “last observation carried forward”introduce bias in dementia research? CMAJ • October 2008;179 (8). doi:10.1503/cmaj.080820. A very critical standpoint on a widely used analytical technique in dementia research drug trials, called ” last observation carried forward”. Patients affected by dementia who are on drug trials are followed over a period of time. When […]
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N – Opening up scholarly research12 October 2009A wiki allowing academics to summarise and discuss published papers has launched in October 2009. AcaWiki makes use of semantic web technology to allow organisation and sharing of summaries, as well as user profiles, comments, discussion, tagging and RSS feeds. Users can summarise their own or others’ research or literature reviews. Inspired partly by the […]
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N – JAMA revises without correction9 October 2009An editorial in JAMA published online by its editors that outlined the journal’s revised policy on investigating conflicts of interest was replaced by a milder version, without an erratum or notice of retraction, reports Udo Schuklenk on his ethics blog (http://ethxblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/jama-follow-up.html). The editorial was also changed in all biomedical databases. This follows heavy criticism of […]
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N – Iranian minister’s articles retracted8 October 2009Three journals will retract papers coauthored by Iran’s science and education minister, Kamran Daneshjou, Nature reports (2009;461:578-9, doi:10.1038/461578a). Nature found that substantial text of a paper in Engineering with Computers (2009;25:191-206, doi:10.1007/s00366-008-0118-x) were identical to a paper by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D (2002;35:2676-86, doi:10.1088/0022-3727/35/20/331). Papers by the same coauthors in […]
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N – Green frog for Nobel laureates8 October 2009Since 1976, winners of Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry have been inducted into the Order of the Ever Smiling and Jumping Little Green Frog on 13 December. In the hall for the festivities (food, drink, and singing Swedish songs) is a two metre tall paper mâché frog. The laureates are awarded a small metal […]
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B – Globalizing Science Publishing3 October 2009Wieland G. Globalizing Science Publishing (Editorial). Science 2009;325 (21):920 DOI: 10.1126/science.1178378 Publishing in scientific journals is the most common and powerful means to disseminate new research findings. But, visibility and credibility require publishing in journals that are included in global indexing databases such as those of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The central question […]
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N – viXra takes on arXiv2 October 2009viXra.org is an open repository that will post all papers “regardless of quality, quantity, or sanity,” Physics World reports. arXiv.org, the popular physics preprint server, screens submissions “to ensure that all the uploaded preprints are of at least ‘refereeable’ quality,” and authors must have approval of a recognised endorser, and unamed moderators check for quality. […]
