One of the authors pointed me to the interesting paper below, which contains a proposal meant to improve the reliability of scientific research (specifically in some areas such as social science or biomedicine). Could this proposal work if, say, it were strongly supported by scholarly associations and funding agencies? Note the authors’ use of “Crises …
A few months ago, I wrote a short description of how we make our papers replicable in the lab. One problem with this process is that for complex pipelines, it’s not always obvious how to connect a number in the paper to the steps in the pipeline that produced it — there are lots of …
Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail to a student whose committee I’m on; they were asking me about a comment their advisor had made that they shouldn’t put a result in a paper because “It’ll confuse the reviewer.” One thing to keep in mind is that communicating the results _is_ important. “It’ll confuse the reviewer” …
A colleague just e-mailed me to ask me how I felt about journal impact factor being such a big part of the Academic Ranking of World Universities – they say that 20% of the ranking weight comes from # of papers published in Nature and Science. So what do I think? On evaluations I’m really …
If the title of this blog post made you click on it, I owe you an apology. All others, that is, those who got here via perfectly legitimate reasons, such as checking this blog with bated breath every morning–only to be disappointed yet again … bear with me. Here I’ll tell you why I’m writing …
In a provocative op-ed that appeared in The Guardian, Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman says that he and his scientific team will “avoid” luxury journals, and he “encourage[s] others to do likewise”. In effect, Prof. Schekman is calling for scientists to boycott Science, Nature, and Cell, probably the three most prestigious scientific journals in the world. …
On Tuesday, as part of open access week I participated in a panel “Publishing, Authoring, and Teaching in the Evolving Open Access Environment: A Panel Discussion“. While this is not a word for word write-up, this is more or less the gist of what I said. When I was asked whether I would be willing …
A recent article from the economist, “Trouble at the lab” published 10/19/2013, claims that the scientific process is failing due to a number of factors such as the drive to publish in high quantities, the lack of publication of negative data, improper statistical analyses, and poor peer review. This failing, The Economist claims, is leading …