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N – Editor quits after hoax6 July 2009The editor of an open access journal has quit after a fake computer generated paper passed the journal’s peer review process and was accepted. The Open Information Science Journal (www.bentham.org/open/toiscij/) would have charged the authors $800 to publish the hoax, which was submitted under false names. The authors claim to have wanted to test the […]
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N – Indian journal’s integrity questioned6 July 2009An academic has branded the Indian journal Scientific Medicine (www.scientificmedicineonline.org) a “scam,” according to reports in the BMJ. A publicity email sent by a student representative wrongly listed Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, Gavin Yamey, a senior editor at PloS Medicine, and others, as members of the editorial board. The student says that he tried […]
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N – A pedant and proud6 July 2009“Pedant is not a term I choose, but nor is it one that I any longer regard as the insult that is generally intended,” writes Oliver Kamm, in an introduction to his new column on the English language in the Times. The column will prescribe usage because “language needs its protectors because it is not […]
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N – Help for developing world authors6 July 2009Free editorial feedback for authors in the developing world is being provided by students from leading academic institutions in Canada, Europe, and the United States, reports Naomi Antony on SciDev.Net. SciEdit (www.jyi.org/sciedit) adapts texts in accordance with the editorial standards of journals such as Nature. SciEdit is the brainchild of the Journal of Young Investigators, […]
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N – Editors must cover climate change6 July 2009That editors must do more to encourage articles about climate change was a recurring theme at the World Conference of Science Journalists, according to Sian Lewis of SciDev.Net. The problem is that climate change is “tomorrow’s story, or next year’s—but not today’s.” International climate talks, such as the UNFCCC Conference of Parties meetings and the […]
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B – A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures5 July 2009Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Chute R, 2009 A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures. PLoS ONE 2009;4(6): e6022. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006022 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006022 An interesting analysis on 39 different kinds of indicators to assess scholarly impact in science.A part from the traditional citation counts, and the common Journal Impact Factor (that should […]
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B – Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs2 July 2009Allen L, Jones C, Dolby K, Lynn D, Walport M. Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs. PLoS ONE 2009;4(6): e5910. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005910 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005910 The evaluation of research quality is always a hot issue. This article shows that relying solely on bibliometric indicators can lead to evaluation […]
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N – Publisher censors sexuality article26 June 2009Taylor and Francis has prevented an article on pederasty from being published in the Journal of Homosexuality (www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J082), blogged Harvey Marcovitch on bmj.com. The article had been accepted before the publisher acquired the journal. Advance online publication of the abstract of the article caused uproar after a conservative US pressure group made “the baseless accusation […]
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N – Google affects the brain26 June 2009The act of searching with Google changes patterns of cognition, research has shown. An exploratory study of people aged 55-76 found that internet searching may engage neural circuitry that is not activated while reading text pages, in people with prior computer and internet search experience. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain […]
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B – I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number21 June 2009Bourne PE, Fink JL. I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number. PLoS Comput Biol. 2008 4(12): e1000247. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000247http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000247 The idea of having our scholarly output properly characterized is not out of reach, since the articles we write are already identified uniquely by a Digital Object Identifier (DOI; discussed further below). A book or […]
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Sharing medical research data. Whose rights and who’s right?9 June 2009Greenhalgh, T. Sharing medical research data. Whose rights and who’s right? BMJ 2009;338:b1499 A set of objections to Groves’ article “Managing UK research data for future use”, which include issues with data interpretation when it is “cleaved” from the context in which it was collected and/or the people who supplied it and interpreted it, and […]
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Managing UK research data for future use9 June 2009Groves, T. Managing UK research data for future use. BMJ 2009 338: b1252 The BMJ has recently joined a host of other journals in encouraging authors to make raw research data available to others. Authors are being asked to include a data sharing statement at the end of their original research articles. The statement will […]
