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What is the one fact humanity needs to know?
What is the one fact humanity needs to know?
“If civilisation was destroyed, what scientific information would you pass on to the survivors?”
Is mass authorship destroying the credibility of papers?
The rise in ‘kilo-authors’ and ‘gift authorship’ is causing the academy to rethink how it assesses the worth of academic publications.
Papers with shorter titles get more citations
Intriguing correlation mined from 140,000 papers.
Men are more likely than women to engage in self-citation
[11]A new study found that 31% of men engage in self-citation, compared to only 21% of women.
Biohackers gear up for genome editing
Amateurs are ready and able to try the CRISPR technique for rewriting genes.
No substitute for good research management
You can’t measure human skills the way you do engineering systems, Robert Dingwall and Mary Byrne McDonnell observe.
The question of data integrity in Article-Level Metrics
As interest in and use of article-level metrics grows, it is critical to ensure secure and reliable data that is trustworthy and can be used by all.
SciCombinator
Discover the most talked about and the latest scientific content, sorted by Altmetric scores and topics.
Rise of the citizen scientist
From the oceans to the soil, technology is changing the part that amateurs can play in research. But this greater involvement raises concerns that must be addressed.
Too much of a good thing? An observational study of prolific authors
Institutions and funders should be alert to unfeasibly prolific authors when measuring and creating incentives for researcher productivity.
Increasing disparities between resource inputs and outcomes, as measured by certain health deliverables, in biomedical research
Increasing disparities between resource inputs and outcomes, as measured by certain health deliverables, in biomedical research
Paper showing that increasing research investments, resulting in an increasing knowledge base, have not yielded comparative gains in certain health outcomes over the last five decades. [Closed Access]
Collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise
Interdisciplinarity is often framed as an unquestioned good within and beyond the academy, one to be encouraged by funders and research institutions alike. And yet there is little research on how interdisciplinary projects actually work—and do not work—in practice.
Whose brains are draining?
Poor countries often complain that their best minds are draining away—and for the most part they are right. The poorer the country, the larger the proportion of inventors who push off.
Jump paywalls, score academic research for free, share it without being busted
Jump paywalls, score academic research for free, share it without being busted
At Chaos Communication Camp 2015, a researcher explained how to jump paywalls, obtain academic research and freely share that research without getting arrested.
Citations? Great. But have you got the 't factor'?
Proposed Twitter-based altmetric would treat retweets like citations.
Increasing fusions between universities
An increasing number of universities fuse. This is shown by a recent report of the European University Association. [in GERMAN]
Courts refuse scientists' bids to prevent retractions
US judges dismiss injunctions against journals.
Academics seek to challenge 'web of avarice' in scientific publishing
Academics are challenging the control of a select group of publishing houses over scientific journals.
Many hands make light work
Many hands make light work
Open science will be one of the priorities of the Dutch presidency of the European Union in 2016.
64 more papers retracted for fake reviews, this time from Springer journals
Springer is pulling another 64 articles from 10 journals after finding evidence of faked peer reviews, bringing the total number of retractions from the phenomenon north of 230.
Leaving the EU would drive away talented foreign scientists
A Brexit would put the UK’s academic success at risk as European research stars go elsewhere.
Science isn't broken
"If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result."
What science can tell us about bad science
What recent research says about fraud, errors, and other dismaying academic problems.
Time to fix patents
Today’s patent regime operates in the name of progress. Instead, it sets innovation back. Time to fix it.
Better than riches
The involvement of online discussion sites in the identification of errors, anomalies and worse in the published literature continues to demonstrate the usefulness of post-publication review. It also highlights the ambiguous power of anonymity.
Why it strengthens research?
[21]New analysis of interdisciplinary collaboration across the UK research landscape highlights important questions about how we organise, fund and assess research.
Science hackathons for developing interdisciplinary research and collaborations
Science hackathons for developing interdisciplinary research and collaborations
Science hackathons can help academics, particularly those in the early stage of their careers, to build collaborations and write research proposals.