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N – Paradigm shift for clichés2 October 2009“Holy grail” is “the mother of all bad science clichés, the worst offender,” according to wired.com, which reports that Nature has banned the phrase. These cliché police found 2.6 million Google hits for the overused phrase in articles related to disciplines such as physics, climate change, cancer research, and plant biology. They also abhor the […]
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N – Nature v science in cartoon2 October 2009The site PhD Comics has two strips devoted to the rivalry between the top science journals Science and Nature. The first compares the journals, joking at the way journals express impact factors to multiple decimal places (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1199). The second is a cynical take on the financial aspects of publishing at the pinnacle (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1200).
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N – Live peer review by blog1 October 2009An organic chemist commented “WTF is going on here?” on an unrelated post in the blog Totally Synthetic, after seeing a paper in a respected chemistry journal that didn’t make sense (http://totallysynthetic.com/blog/?p=1896). The paper, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, claimed that the strong reductant sodium hydride could act as an oxidant in […]
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N – Journals should police citations1 October 2009Journals should require corresponding authors to formally acknowledge that they take responsibility for the completeness, accuracy, and interpretation of a manuscript’s references, a BMJ editorial argues (2009;339:b2049). Inappropriate citation in articles can be replicated, leading to “bias, amplification, and invention,” disrupting scientific progress. A linked study gives examples of serious consequences of bad citations (2009;339:b2680). […]
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N – BMJ reforms research publishing1 October 2009From January 2010 the BMJ will publish all original research articles first online, with no word limit and open access to the full text. The print journal will contain only abridged, single page abstracts of about 550 words, called “BMJ pico,” which are supplied by authors according to templates provided for each study design (http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/authors/article-submission/bmj-pico-abridged-research-articles). […]
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N – Headline is a bum job30 September 2009The subeditors on the Daily Express newspaper must have cringed when they saw that a headline on a two page feature in one edition read “Can Dec anally match Ant?” the Guardian reports (www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2009/sep/01/express-ant-dec-headline-error). The slip occurred because when the original headline, “Can Dec finally match Ant?” was changed to “Can Dec at last match […]
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N – Plagiarist chairs conference30 September 2009Doctors have called for a boycott of a conference that is to be chaired by a proved plagiarist, the BMJ reports (2009;339:b3545). The fifth annual meeting of the International Academy of Perinatal Medicine is being chaired by Asim Kurjak, who was found guilty of scientific misconduct in 2007. Zagreb University did not sanction him. Harvey […]
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N – Scientist sued over missing data30 September 2009A company is suing a researcher who it accuses of committing more than five years of research fraud, it said in a lawsuit filed in a US federal court, reported in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_641304.html). The company is suing Pittsburgh University for failing to properly supervise the research. Onconome, a privately owned biotechnology company, says […]
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N – Professor faces censure over data30 September 2009A UK doctor who authored a paper about an osteoporosis drug is to face a General Medical Council hearing over accusations that he falsely declared that he had seen all the data, the BMJ reports (2009;339:b3990). Richard Eastell was research director in Sheffield when the study was submitted to the Journal of Bone and Mineral […]
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N – Search for the phoniest formula30 September 2009Newspapers often feature mathematical formulas that purport to calculate the perfect biscuit, the perfect marriage, the perfect joke, and so on, complains the science writer Simon Singh in the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/sep/02/perfect-formula-festival-science). These pseudoequations are usually thinly veiled public relations activity, which “demeans mathematics and science by giving the impression that academics waste their time on […]
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N – PLoS archives ghostwriting documents30 September 2009A US federal court has forced the release of about 1500 documents detailing how articles that include marketing messages written by ghostwriters but attributed to academics are strategically placed in the medical literature. PLoS Medicine acted in litigation against hormone manufacturers by women who developed breast cancer. The journal argued that documents identified during preparation […]
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N – Journal or blog?30 September 2009Researchers need better guidance on the value of different communication channels, the Research Information Network has concluded in a report based on literature review, bibliometric analysis, focus groups, interviews, and an online survey (www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/communicating-knowledge-how-and-why-researchers-pu). Conferences, blogs, and social networking tools are competing with scholarly journals for researchers’ work. “If funders and policymakers want to encourage […]
