Publishing and Journals
purepedantry | October 13, 2008Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli have an article in PLoS suggesting that because the emphasis in scientific publishing is too much on the big positive results in the big journal, many results are going to be wrong. (Remember that Ioannidis published another paper saying that many results are going to be wrong on purely statistical grounds.) They borrow an idea from economics called the winner's curse.
Basically, the winner's curse is the idea than in some auctions with imperfect information, the winner will overpay. Applied to science, it means that when you have big…
purepedantry | October 31, 2007
I don't know if you caught it on these two posts, but I have started to add the Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research Icon whenever I am analyzing a peer-reviewed paper specifically.
These icons were created by bloggers, including Sciblings Dave Munger, Mike Dunford, and John Wilkins, with the intent of clearly delineating when we are talking about peer-reviewed research, with the general aim of improving the quality of reportage on this research.
If you are a blogger and use peer-reviewed research, I encourage you to check out their site to see how you can include these buttons. Here are the…
purepedantry | October 3, 2007Check out this useful piece of freeware -- Publish or Perish -- that calculates the impact factors of particular individuals, journals, or articles based on info from Google Scholar. Since it is Google Scholar rather than PubMed it should work just as well for social sciences people as natural sciences people.
Hat-tip: Crooked Timber
purepedantry | August 23, 2007This is genius.
These guys are proposing that we construct Fantasy Journals -- drafted sets of journal articles -- at meetings and scientific gatherings sort of like Fantasy Football. Each player would get access to say all the papers to be presented at the meeting (or a more limited number if that is too many). Your journal is selected from that number, and the winner is determined at the next year's meeting by the citation numbers for your papers.
Bergstrom et al. list the possible benefits:
This is a game that one would win by being good at picking the soon-to-be hot papers. Our lab…
purepedantry | May 18, 2007A new journal for case reports only, The Journal of Medical Case Reports, has spawned an discussion at The Scientist about whether we should even have case reports in journals:
Does the medical literature need more case studies? A new journal is betting it does, even as editors at other journals say the answer is no.
Historically, case reports have proven extremely valuable to clinicians faced with diseases they knew little about. But in an age where countries spend more on research than ever before investigating both rare and common diseases, some experts argue that the obscure nature of…