Storytelling is easy to implement in your manuscript provided you know how. Think of the six plot elements - character, setting, tension, action, climax, resolution - and the three other story essentials - main theme, chronology, purpose. You’ll soon outline the backbone of your narrative and be ready to write a paper that is concise, compelling, and easy to understand.
Right now, the overwhelming majority of peer reviewers, the scientists who scrutinize the latest studies, aren't paid for their labor. This is completely ridiculous. Peer review may be the most important part of the scientific enterprise, and it is not incentivized monetarily.
Many biologists are still reluctant to submit preprints, in part out of concern that doing so will allow others to “scoop” their work and undermine their chances of publication in a prestigious journal. I would like to rebut that concern, among others, and to share our research group’s first experience submitting a preprint manuscript.
Whatever we call it, investment in research will lead the way to important short- and long-term discoveries.
While no one is arguing for funding failure, the challenge is how we define “success.”
Ethical, organizational and economic strengths and weaknesses of funder open access platforms: opportunities and threats presented by funder open access platforms in the ongoing transition to open access.
When it’s also big science, the careers of those involved can suffer.
As young scientists, we are fooled into working harder and longer to live up to sky-high expectations and encouraged to feel inadequate.
Now that many European library consortia are cancelling deals with publishers, how will libraries respond to a world of open access?
Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks.
As a commendable European law on personal data comes into force, the research community must not let excessive caution about data sharing, however understandable, become the default position.
Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it.
A graduate student is analyzing how Stormfront and other racist websites misunderstand, and misuse, new scientific papers.
In June 2017, PSI was made aware of allegations that members of its staff had submitted an article containing aspects of scientific misconduct to a scientific journal. A preliminary review by experts showed that the allegations raised were solid.
If the publishers of scientific journals everywhere enforced a universal code of ethics - if you violate the code, you cannot publish your scientific work - systematic bullies and harassers would be eliminated from their fields.
Most papers fail to report many aspects of the experiment and analysis that we may not with advantage omit - things that are crucial to understanding the result and its limitations and to repeating the work. Instead of arguing about whether results hold up, we should strive to provide enough information for others to repeat the experiments.
By tying rewards to metrics, organisations risk incentivising gaming and encouraging behaviours that may be at odds with their larger purpose. The culture of short-termism engendered by metrics also impedes innovation and stifles the entrepreneurial element of human nature.
Preprint showing that ethnic diversity consistently leads to higher scientific impact.
Scientists are more efficient at producing high-quality research when they have more academic freedom, according to a recent study of 18 economically advanced countries. Researchers in the Netherlands are the most efficient of all. The existence of a national evaluation system that is not tied to funding was also associated with efficiency.
Men were more likely to secure health research grants than women in Canadian study.
Case report looking at two approaches taken by the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich in 2017.
In a controlled experiment with two disjoint program committees, the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'17) found that reviewers with author information were 1.76x more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from famous authors, and 1.67x more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from top institutions.
The National Cancer Institute has invested millions of dollars into determining the genetic sequences of patients’ tumors, and researchers have found thousands of genes that seem to drive tumor growth. But until patients’ medical records are linked to the genetic data, life-or-death questions cannot be answered.
When citation-based indicators are applied at the institutional or departmental level, rather than at the level of individual papers, surprisingly large correlations with peer review judgments can be observed.
The role of faculty hiring networks in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the importance of where in the network an idea originates: research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions.
