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?
Fraud, bureaucracy and an obsession with quantity over quality still hold Chinese science back
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…
Two researchers today launch a game that captures this anarchic spirit. Board-game fans Caezar Al-Jassar, a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and Kuly Heer, a clinical psychologist, have designed the card game Lab Wars to represent the scientific rat race, with extra sabotage.
Scientists make greater use of online workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk, but practice raises concerns
We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What's the hold-up?
Solitude often holds negative connotations. Yet, solitude in science it is not necessarily a bad thing.
We interviewed Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare to discuss Collections, a new, free resource developed by the figshare team, and how researchers can use this.
Common compliance situations can get good researchers into trouble, warn James M. DuBois and colleagues.
Experts preaching the ‘truth’ on healthy eating or cancer cures are not immune to the murky worlds of politics and commerce.
The fast-moving field of gene-drive research provides an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the science, says Kevin Esvelt.
Making proclamations about the scientific enterprise based on sparse employment and career data about junior scientists has become a common endeavor. But this approach is fundamentally flawed.
A confidential internal email has come into my hands, from Bristol University, regarding the UK’s national negotiations with Elsevier. I think it’s of general interest.
A new study of a novel undergraduate program at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, has found that giving college freshmen the opportunity to do research as part of their coursework significantly increases their chances of completing college and graduating with a science degree.
New data confirming lower success rates for African-Americans prompt pilot studies
Science has never been more powerful, but it is under attack.
Science appears to be in something of an evolutionary cul-de-sac, mired in poor methodology and misguided objectives that have changed only for the worse.
Science has become a lot bigger and faster. Join us now to make it better! Participate @ «We Scientists Shape Science»Eventforum, Berne, 26/27 January 2017
Examining the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority.
Integration of lab notebook tool will help researchers enrich their data and make it more suitable for reuse
Jerome Ravetz has been one of the UK’s foremost philosophers of science for more than 50 years. Here, he reflects on the troubles facing contemporary science. He argues that the roots of science’s crisis have been ignored for too long. Quality control has failed to keep pace with the growth of science.
Many recent clinical and preclinical studies appear to be irreproducible; their results cannot be verified by outside researchers. This is problematic for not only scientific reasons but legal ones: patents grounded in irreproducible research appear to fail their constitutional bargain of property rights in exchange for working disclosures of inventions.
A Study of Gender Differences in Contributorship.
A list of 10 rules with researchers in mind: researchers having some knowledge of statistics, possibly with one or more statisticians available in their building, or possibly with a healthy do-it-yourself attitude and a handful of statistical packages on their laptops.
This study outlines the development of a gender index, focused on gender roles and institutionalised gender, using secondary survey data from the Canadian Labour Force survey. Using this index we then examined the distribution of gender index scores among men and women, and changes in gender roles among male and female labour force participants between 1997 and 2014.
