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University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence
The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But what does “excellence” mean? Does it in fact mean anything at all? And is the pervasive narrative of excellence and competition a good thing?
PrePubMed
PrePubMed indexes preprints from arXiv q-bio, PeerJ Preprints, Figshare, bioRxiv, and F1000Research.
Schrödinger’s panda
Fraud, bureaucracy and an obsession with quantity over quality still hold Chinese science back
Research universities form a new lobby organization
The Guild of European Research Intensive Universities will officially be launched in November
Plan to synthesize human genome elicits mixed response
Some admire project's ambition; others say it hasn't justified its aims.
Let's talk about preprint servers
After ASAPbio, Cell Press CEO Emilie Marcus was left with many questions about preprint servers and her company's policy towards them.
A new complementary index for analyzing research performance
A researcher collaborating with many groups will normally have more papers (and thus higher citations and h-index) than a researcher spending all his/her time working alone or in a small group. While analyzing an author’s research merit, it is therefore not enough to consider only the collective impact of the published papers, it is also necessary to quantify his/her share in the impact. For this quantification, here I propose the I-index which is defined as an author’s percentage share in the total citations that his/her papers have attracted.
Open-access journal eLife gets £25 million boost
Biology's big funders announce investment will continue to 2022.
What does scientific reproducibility mean, anyway?
The current movement to replicate results is crippled by a lack of agreement about the very nature of the word “replication” and its synonyms.
What does research reproducibility mean?
The language and conceptual framework of “research reproducibility” are nonstandard and unsettled across the sciences. In this Perspective, we review an array of explicit and implicit definitions of reproducibility and related terminology, and discuss how to avoid potential misunderstandings when these terms are used as a surrogate for “truth.”
Government slammed for losing track of its own research
Government can't say how many policy studies it paid for or published, report reveals.
Sci-Hub: What It Is and Why It Matters
The controversies surrounding Sci-Hub touch on many hot-button topics in librarianship. This primer lays out multiple perspectives on the issues.
Does mobility boost early scientific careers?
Young scientists are expected to change country and jobs every few years on average to get a chance to progress their academic career. Mobility in science stems from a long tradition. It is favoured for bringing very enriching experiences. But post docs and their scientific work do not always benefit from mobility. Here, EuroScientist looks into how being on the move every few years affects the life of researchers and looks at ways of enhancing work/life balance.
Most scientists believe there is a crisis in reproducibility
Placing trust in science can be easier when findings are confirmed, but a new survey finds that most scientists believe there is a reproducibility "crisis."
The developing world needs basic research too
The establishment of an agency in Indonesia that will support 'frontier research' is a welcome development, argues Dyna Rochmyaningsih.
EU’s Bold Open Science Recommendations Strike a Nerve
In their response to the EU’s Competitiveness Council’s Conclusions of May 27, 2016, the publishers expressed numerous deep concerns.
After meeting Nobel laureates, French president backs off ‘suicidal’ science cuts
The Natural Selection of Bad Science
The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favor them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing - no deliberate cheating nor loafing - by scientists, only that publication is a principle factor for career advancement.
Why aren’t there more women in science? The industry structure is sexist
Women outnumber men in a raft of science courses – but when they start their careers, they find many insurmountable barriers.
Why ‘context’ is important for research
Discovery is the pathway to context. Context of an article is all about how research fits into increasingly complex domains, and using structured networks to decipher its value. With the power of the internet at our disposal, putting research in context should be of key importance in a world where there is ever more research being published that is impossible to manually filter.
Switzerland does well in competitiveness ranking
Switzerland has come in second in the annual competitiveness ranking published by the IMD World Competitiveness Center in Lausanne.
Sci-Hub: What It Is and Why It Matters
The controversies surrounding Sci-Hub touch on many hot-button topics in librarianship. This primer lays out multiple perspectives on the issues.