You want a letter? You write it for me
A few years back, I asked two colleagues for letters of support for my grant proposal. One colleague drafted a letter personally. The other, citing heavy time pressures, asked me to draft the letter myself.
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Illumina bid to beat cancer with DNA tests
The DNA sequencing giant will launch a new company, Grail, to develop blood tests to detect cancer.
Unexpected, a video by the Royal Society
Fellow of the Royal Society and future President of the Royal Statistical Society, Sir David Spiegelhalter visits Dr Nicole Janz to discuss reproducibility in scientific publications.
For female scientists, mixed funding results at US agencies
A new study by a congressional watchdog agency finds that female scientists are less likely than men to receive research grants from the U.S. government.
When teamwork doesn't work for women
New evidence suggests that the underrepresentation of women reflects a systemic bias in that marketplace: a failure to give women full credit for collaborative work done with men.
Funding for key data resources in jeopardy
Several widely used biology databases supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute are facing unsettling change.
3250 CHF für einen Uni-Abschluss
Zu faul, keine Zeit, nicht fähig: Wie rasch Studierende im Web Ghostwriter für den Uni-Abschluss finden. Wie teuer das ist. Und warum die Institute dagegen machtlos sind.
Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum
Peer-review platforms built around online pre-print repositories spread to astrophysics.
Should scientific papers be anonymous?
When it comes to protecting the scientific literature from bias, the safeguards that academics now use are sorely inadequate.
Big ideas for better science
We asked four researchers who made the news in 2015 what they would change about how science gets done.
Why Preventing Cancer Is Not the Priority in Drug Development
There’s more money to be made investing in drugs that will extend cancer patients’ lives by a few months than in drugs that would prevent cancer in the first place.
Why science's universal language is a problem for research
The vast majority of scientific papers today are published in English. What gets lost when other languages get left out?
Die Wissenschaft - eine weltfremde Künstlerwerkstatt
Die Menschheit steht vor großen Herausforderungen. Doch das Wissenschaftssystem bleibt starr. Das muss sich ändern.
Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery
Scientists perform a tiny subset of all possible experiments. What characterizes the experiments they choose? And what are the consequences of those choices for the pace of scientific discovery?
Research and education budgets in shambles in Denmark and Finland
Recent changes in the political landscape in Northern Europe have brought some new policies that are less supportive of science and education than previously.
Reproducible research practices and transparency across the biomedical literature
Reproducible research practices and transparency across the biomedical literature
Replication studies are rare and only a few had their data included in a subsequent systematic review or meta-analysis.
The most interesting recent scientific news
Edge annual question: what do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important?
Publishers to require ORCID identifiers for authors
A group of seven publishers has announced that they will begin requiring authors to use an ORCID identifier (iD) during the publication process.
The science to look out for in 2016
Space missions, carbon capture and gravitational waves are set to shape the year.
Dutch lead European push to flip journals to open access
Academic consortia urge faster changes in scholarly publishing.
Why researchers keep citing retracted papers
Some papers cite the retracted work to examine the retraction itself. Others may simply be pointing out that the findings of a withdrawn paper have been proven false.
Gender breakdown at course level
The proportion of male and female students varies widely across different subjects in UK universities.
The unsung heroes of scientific software
Creators of computer programs that underpin experiments don’t always get their due — so the website Depsy is trying to track the impact of research code.
Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016
Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016 by Jeffrey Beall, January 5, 2016. Each year at this time I formally release my updated list of predatory publishers. Because the list is now very la…
Study show that elite scientists really do hold back science
Scientists can be stubborn. They can use their gravitas to steamroll new ideas. Which means those new ideas often only prevail when older scientists die.
Altmetric's top 100 research articles in 2015
What academic research caught the public imagination in 2015? Altmetric has pulled together our annual list of the research that has attracted the most online attention in the past year.
What's in a journal name?
Scientists debate the merits of deleting journal names from their publication lists.
Transparent peer review at Nature Communications
Starting Jan 2016 Nature Communications will publish peer reviews alongside with the paper.
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