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B – Publishing elite against impact factor5 October 2016Callaway E. Beat it, impact factor! Publishing elite turns against controversial metric. Nature 2016;535(7611):210-211 Senior staff at societies and leading journals want to end inappropriate use of impact factor. They say that the measure is a broad-brush indicator of a journal’s output and it should not be used as a proxy for the quality of […]
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B – Content and phrasing in titles4 October 2016Kerans ME, Murray A, Sabatè S. Content and phrasing in titles of original research and review articles in 2015: range of practice in four clinical journals. Publications 2016;4(2),11(doi: 10.3390/publications402011) This study aimed to learn more about titles in clinical medicine today and to develop an efficient, reliable way to study titles over time and on the […]
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B – Photoshopping science4 October 2016Patterson K. Is photoshopping science universally wrong? The Conversation June 1, 2016 Photoshop has become a proprietary eponym for image manipulation, and manipulation of scientific images is universally unethical. Scientists rely on a vast array of technologies to capture, measure, test, display and communicate their research. Raw scientific data needs to be detected or discovered and […]
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B – Readability of academic blogs4 October 2016Hartley J, Cabanac G. Are two authors better than one? Can writing in pairs affect the readability of academic blogs? Scientometrics 2016 The literature on academic writing suggests that writing in pairs leads to more readable papers than writing alone. The authors wondered whether academic blog posts written alone or in pairs would vary in […]
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B – Ghostwriting in drug marketing4 October 2016Matheson A. Ghostwriting: the importance of definition and its place in contemporary drug marketing. BMJ 2016;354:i4578(doi: 10.1136/bmj.i4578) During the past decade, the pharmaceutical publications industry has campaigned to persuade medicine, journals, ethicists, and the media that it is opposed to ghostwriting. Yet ghostwriting remains widespread in industry financed medical journal literature. The author describes how the […]
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B – Self-citation rates higher for men23 September 2016Singh Chawla D. Self-citation rates higher for men. Nature 2016;535:212 Men cite their own papers 56% more than women on average, according to an analysis of 1.5 million studies published between 1779 and 2011. The analysis looked at papers across disciplines in the digital library JSTOR and found that men’s self-citation rate had risen to […]
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B – OA bibliography23 September 2016Bailey CW, Jr. Transforming scholarly publishing through open access: a bibliography. Digital Scholarship 2010 This publication with over 1,100 references provides in-depth coverage of published journal articles, books, and other textual works about the open access movement. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.htm
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B – Gold OA sustainability23 September 2016Mellon Foundation. Pay it forward. Investigating a sustainable model of open access article processing charges for large North American research institutions. 185p. A major study conducted by the University of California, Davis, and the California Digital Library, the Pay-It-Forward project, addressed the financial ramifications for the types of research institutions whose affiliated scholars generate a […]
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B – Predatory journals23 September 2016Beall J. Best practices for scholarly authors in the age of predatory journals. Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England 2016;98(2):77-79(doi: 10.1308/rcsann.2016.0056) The author discusses one recent phenomenon that has arisen from the open access movement: that of ‘predatory publishers’. These are individuals or companies that use the open access financial system (author pays, […]
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B – PhD thesis: being more open23 September 2016Burrough-Boenisch J. PhD thesis: being more open about PhD papers. Nature 2016;536:274(doi: 10.1038/536274b) In the Netherlands, a PhD thesis is published before the viva voce exam with an ISBN identifier and is later posted online. Advantages over the traditional monograph thesis include: it is quick and easy to write; feedback from the papers’ reviewers can […]
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B – Data exchange standards for peer review23 September 2016Paglione LD, Lawrence RN. Data exchange standards to support and acknowledge peer-review activity. Learned Publishing 2015;328:309-316(doi: 10.1087/20150411) A Working Group on Peer Review Service, facilitated by CASRAI, was created to develop a data model and citation standard for peer-review activity that can be used to support both existing and new review models. Standardized citation structures […]
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N – invited reproducibility paper3 August 2016The journal Information Systems has introduced a new article type: the invited reproducibility paper. Directly addressing the lack of reproducibility in science, the journal, published by Elsevier, is inviting authors to co-author a report of a verified reproduced experiment. All code and data is made available on Mendeley Data. You can read more on the […]
