Tag Archives: science publishing

Poo and Shit, Revisited

Correspondent Bob has provided an interesting update on some research I did on relative publication rates back in 2010: Just as a follow up to your Poo vs Shit analysis, a PubMed search today (11 April 2013) reveals that Shit … Continue reading

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Do These Stripes Make My Nanoparticles Look Weird?

There’s something interesting happening in the staid world of peer review these days, and a recent set of posts on another site renewed my hope that it could be a positive trend. Raphaël Lévy at the University of Liverpool starts … Continue reading

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Decoding ENCODE

Today, a scientific collaboration called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) published some of its data. When I say “collaboration,” I mean more than 400 scientists working in 32 different labs, and when I say “some of its data,” I … Continue reading

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Cool Project, Odd Name

Researchers in France have just published a description of a new tool for ecological scientists. As Nature Methods explains in an accompanying press package: Animals disperse from their habitats for a variety of reasons, including environmental change and habitat fragmentation … Continue reading

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Open Access vs. Local Politics

Someone just asked me what I thought of Michael Eisen’s op-ed piece that came out in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Eisen wrote about a new bill in Congress that would roll back a NIH policy … Continue reading

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Who’s More Productive? No, How.

There’s a common belief that science shouldn’t try to answer “why” questions. Instead, it should focus on what it’s good at: answering “how” questions. I wondered whether that was really true, so I compared the relative productivity of Who, What, … Continue reading

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Middlemen, Marketing, and a Modest Proposal

During the heady days of the dot-com bubble, “disintermediation” was one of the hot buzzwords. E-commerce proponents proclaimed the death of stores, the shortening of supply chains, and the impending arrival of a new world in which producers sold their … Continue reading

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Readbacks and Researchers

Recently, there’s been a major debate in the online science journalism community about a common but little-discussed practice in the news business: readbacks. That’s what we call the article excerpts journalists sometimes send to sources ahead of publication, during the … Continue reading

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Accentuate the Negative

When a clinical trial fails, everybody loses: the patients who participated hoping to benefit, the patients who didn’t participate but hoped to get the promising new drug once it hit the market, the researchers who dedicated thousands of hours of … Continue reading

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Elsevier Makes Good: Original Wakefield Takedown Now Free

Awhile back, I blogged about a particularly insidious glitch in the biomedical literature, in which a fraudulent study that caused enormous harm was available for free, while a contemporary – and strikingly prescient – commentary that eviscerated that study was … Continue reading

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