Between now and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on 12 February 2009 science academies and societies should summarise evidence for evolution on their websites and take every opportunity to promote it, a Nature editorial says. Resources to help include the US National Academy of Sciences’ updated booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism (www.nap.edu/sec). And the palaeontologist Kevin Padian destroys the false assertions by creationists that there are critical gaps in the fossil record in a court testimony (www.sciohost.org/ncse/kvd/Padian/Padian_transcript.html). Darwin’s complete works are online at http://darwin-online.org.uk. Creationism is strong in the United States and rising in Europe (http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc07/EDOC11297.htm). (Nature 2008;451:108; doi: 10.1038/451108b)
Friday, May 16, 2008
N - Medline has 121 000 duplicate articles
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
B - Weighted impact factor proposal
Habibzadeh F, Yadollahie M. Journal weighted impact factor: A proposal. Journal of Informetrics 2008;2(2):164-72
The authors consider the sole impact factor not adequate enough to measure journal quality. Therefore they propose to improve the calculation of the journal impact factor by taking into account both the number of citations and a factor concerning the prestige of the citing journals relative to the cited journal.
This "weighted impact factor" could be a better scientometrics measure of journal quality.
http://scienceserver.cilea.it/cgi-bin/sciserv.pl?collection=journals&journal=17511577&issue=v02i0002&article=164_jwifap&form=fulltext
Monday, May 05, 2008
B - Mind the hack
Cartwright, Jon. 2008 Mind the hack. Physics World 21(5)14-15
Two of the worl's biggest science journals (Nature and Science) control their news coverage by giving sneak previews of research under embargo while limiting how scientists can interact with journalists. The author looks at whether the system benefits, or hinders, science communication. This article is also cited in the Editorial, in the same issue, entitled "Embargoed Science: Embargoes may have their faults but they mask wider problems in science communication".
Posted for John Glen
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/33959
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
N - WHO renames bird flu viruses
N - Editorial boards lack women
Women made up only a fifth (21%) of the editorial boards in 2005, although they were far worse represented in 1970, with just 1% of positions, a 35 year study of 16 prominent biomedical journals has shown (Arch Intern Med 2008;168:547-8). Seven per cent of the journals' chief editors have been women, but having a female editor made no significant difference to the sex distribution of the board. Women were better represented in specialty clinical journals, such as the Pediatrics, and general medical journals, such as the BMJ, than in biomedical science journals, such as Cell. In an accompanying editorial (p 446) Nanette Wenger calls for journals to “explore their ranks for gender diversity.”
N - Spanish portal opens access
A national portal for Spanish open access scientific publications, Recolecta (www.recolecta.net), has been launched. The project is a collaboration between the Spanish network of libraries REBIUN and the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) to provide a national search service for open access publishing in science. Recolecta seeks to stimulate open access publishing in Spain; to coordinate the creation of a national infrastructure of institutional repositories; and to serve as a central point of information on all topics related to open access. The search engine will find open access documents in journals, institutional repositories, and disciplinary repositories. (www.knowledgespeak.com/forward.asp?newsID=5918)
Thanks to Emma Campbell
N - Publishers confirm authors' rights
Advocating authors to add copyright postscripts to journal publishing agreements is a call for needless bureaucracy, said the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers in March. The publishers’ group has issued a statement, which, it says, clarifies authors’ rights: “Standard journal agreements typically allow authors to use their published paper . . . for educational purposes . . . and to post some version of the paper on a preprint server, their institutional repository, or a personal website.” Michael Mabe, head of the association, said, “Policy debate should be . . . based on evidence and consultation.” (www.stm-assoc.org/documents-statements-public-co/2008.3%20STM-PSP-ALPSP%20Statement%20Publishing%20Agreements%2020080310.pdf and www.stm-assoc.org/press-releases/STM%20Press%20Release%20Journal%20Publishing%20Agreements.pdf)
Thanks to Joan Marsh
N - Web ability declines with age
People’s ability to use websites declines between the ages of 35 and 60 by 0.8% a year, says the web usability specialist Jakob Nielsen. This is because they spend more time per page, and they visit more pages to find what they are looking for. This age group represents half of the population of the United States, has the best jobs, and spends the most money online. Nielsen advises to “test participants across the entire age range you’re targeting” and not to “believe everything your 25 year old web designers tell you about what’s easy.” (www.useit.com/alertbox/middle-aged-users.html)
N - Students plagiarise plagiarism code
Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio drafted a code to discourage plagiarism, but they took sections from Brigham Young University’s plagiarism code, which they found online, a Nature blog reports. They even copied the definition of plagiarism. Both codes say, “Inadvertent plagiarism involves the inappropriate, but non-deliberate, use of another’s words, ideas, or data without appropriate attribution.” The student in charge of the project said that the lack of credit was an oversight. The entire Nature blog entry was copied from other (referenced) sources. (http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/04/schools_plagiarism_code_plagia.html)
N - Blog till you drop
Two fatal heart attacks in the United States may have been a result of stress caused by excessive blogging, an article in the New York Times suggests. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, and mental health problems. Bloggers are “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock internet economy that demands a steady stream of news and comment,” the article says. In some sectors blogging is highly competitive. Financial rewards are often low and based on the number of posts written or the hits an entry gets. Some journalists have been fired for not meeting hits targets. (www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html and http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/04/is_writing_this_blog_killing_m.html)
Giustini D. Web 3.0 and medicine. BMJ 2007;335:1273-1274
doi: 10.1136/bmj.39428.494236.BE
Medical librarians believe that it is necessary to build better mechanisms for information retrieval, due to the current bulk of unorganised information "searchable" but not easely "findable" in web 2.0. That is why we need web 3.0, the new web, called the semanticweb. Information retrieval in web 3.0 should be based less on keywords than on intelligent ontological frameworks, such as Medline’s trusted MeSH vocabulary, or some other tool. Web 3.0 should help find information more effectively and cut through the information glut, creating also, through semantic technologies, new knowledge. It should hopefully bring order to the 21st century web in the same way that Dr John Shaw Billings’s Index Medicus brought order to medical research back in the 19th century.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1273
N - Email damages productivity
N - Le bloc replaces the blog
The English words “blog,” “email,” and “podcast” have been banned by French government, to be replaced by the more French sounding “bloc,” “courriel,” and “diffusion pour baladeur.” The French ministry of culture is worried about the anglicisation of the French language and has listed French replacements for 500 English words that are commonly used in France. Football commentators have been asked to use “entraineur” and “coup de pied de coin” instead of “coach” and “corner.” A spokesman said, “French is a living language rich enough to speak for itself without the need for hundreds of English expressions.” (www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2008/03/12/french-ban-the-words-email-blog-and-post-box-89520-20348325 and http://my.telegraph.co.uk/maggie_millington/march_2008/french_ban_on_english_words_.htm)
N - Peer reviews stay private
The New England Journal of Medicine has been told by a federal magistrate that it does not have to hand over peer reviews to the drug company Pfizer. The company recently issued subpoenas to try to force journals to disclose confidential peer reviews and other materials relating to studies of its painkillers Celebrex (celecoxib) and Bextra (valdecoxib), which are the subject of lawsuits. Three weeks ago an Illinois judge ruled against Pfizer after it issued almost identical subpoenas to JAMA and the Archives of Internal Medicine. (Nature 2008;452:677; doi: 10.1038/452677d)
N - Save the semicolon?
France is debating the future of the semicolon, according to a Guardian blog. The “point virgule,” the writer François Cavanna is reported as saying, is “a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought.” But defendants cite Hugo, Flaubert, and Voltaire as writers for whom the mark was essential. Writers such as George Orwell, Lynne Truss, and Will Self give their views. Meanwhile, in New York the sign “Please put it in a trash can, that’s good news for everyone” has been revised to include a semicolon, but the Financial Times reports that "Americans see the semicolon as punctuation’s axis of evil." (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/04/france.britishidentity and http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/03/the-semicolon-a.html and www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0ca549d2-25a9-11da-a4a7-00000e2511c8.html)
Thanks to Margaret Cooter
N - Vigilante copy edits America
An illustrated blog (www.jeffdeck.com/teal/blog) has been started to document errors in public signage and their correction by the Typo Eradication Advancement League, in a three month trip across the United States, reports Andrew Mueller in the Guardian. Armed with marker pens and correction fluid, Jeff Deck aims to correct as many typos in signs, posters, and restaurant menus as he can. Deck, a former editor for an academic publishing house in Washington, DC, said “I had internalised the Chicago Manual of Style . . . and thought it would be a good thing to go around raising awareness.” (Guardian 2008 Apr 14; http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_mueller/2008/04/linguistic_pedants_of_the_world_unite.htm)
N - Enough conflicts of interest?
In March the BMJ asked whether the hunt for authors’ conflicts of interests had gone too far. Thomas Stossel argued that restrictions on academics’ interaction with commercial companies damages research because they exclude qualified experts from writing in some journals. They also limit financial rewards that professionals can receive from private companies or even ban corporate consulting, he said. Kirby Lee, however, believes that competing interests “require management to prevent potential bias, or the perception of bias, in medical decision making or research.” Of 443 voters in an online poll 45% agreed that the hunt had gone too far. (BMJ 2008;336:476-7 doi: 10.1136/bmj.39493.489213.AD and doi: 10.1136/bmj.39491.391215.94)
Thursday, April 24, 2008
B - Developments of Informetrics (2000-2006)
Bar-Ilan J. Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review. Journal of Informetrics 2008;2(1):1-52
This is a very interesting review covering several issues concerning Informetrics, Bibliometrics, Scientometrics and Webometrics, at the beginning of the 21st century. The reader can find, here described, the most important novelties in these disciplines such as the developments of Open Access, the growth in webometrics, the comparison between two new citation databases (Scopus and Google Scholar), the use of new indicators (h-index) in science evaluation, ecc. Furthermore, traditional topics are also reported, i.e. history of bibliometrics, citation analysis, impact factor debate, University rankings and so on.
http://scienceserver.cilea.it/pdflinks/08032416200104511.pdf
Friday, April 18, 2008
B - Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting
Ross J S, Hill K P, Egilman D S, Krumholz H M. Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications Related to Rofecoxib: A Case Study of Industry Documents From Rofecoxib Litigation. JAMA 2008;299(15):1800-1812
The article starts from the recent litigation related to rofecoxib, to examine guest authorship and ghostwriting, both practices that have been suspected in biomedical publication but for which there is little documentation. The objective was to determine the different types and the extent of guest authorship and ghostwriting in a case study. Using court documents and articles related to the topic, the authors demonstrated that clinical trial manuscripts related to rofecoxib were authored by sponsor employees but often attributed first authorship to academically affiliated investigators who did not always disclose industry financial support, and that review manuscripts were prepared by unacknowledged authors and subsequently attributed authorship to academically affiliated investigators who often did not disclose industry financial support.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/299/15/1800
Thursday, April 17, 2008
B - Impugning the Integrity of Medical Science
DeAngelis CD, Fontanarosa PB. Impugning the integrity of medical science: the adverse effects of industry influence. JAMA 2008;299(15):1833-1835.
This Editorial illustrates studies documenting the manipulation of study results, authors, editors, and reviewers by pharmaceutical and medical device industries. It states also that if this manipulation has occurred it is because physicians have allowed it to happen, and it is time to stop it. Journal editors also bear some of the responsibility for enabling companies to manipulate publications. That is why drastic action is essential, and cooperation of everyone involved in medical research, medical editing, medical education, and clinical practice is required for meaningful change to occur.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/299/15/1833
B - Editors and Copy Editors in Fiction: Taking a Carpet-Sweeper to the Jungle
Bell H K. Editors and Copy Editors in Fiction: Taking a Carpet-Sweeper to the Jungle. Journal of Scholarly Publishing 2008;39(2):156-167
doi: 10.3138/jsp.39.2.156
In this article, the author examines the various types of editors and copy editors presented in fiction: the conscientious, the compulsive, the stereotypical, the Cinderellas, the ruthless, the arrogant, and the power-abusers.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_scholarly_publishing/toc/scp39.2.html
B - Different Kind of Profession
Luey B. Different Kind of Profession: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Keynote Address MLA Convention 2006. Journal of Scholarly Publishing 2008;39(2):94-108
doi: 10.3138/jsp.39.2.93
This article, which started as the keynote address at the 2006 meeting of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, discusses the ways professions are or are not appropriate to journal editing, and some possibilities for increasing professionalism. One of the starting questions is if journal editing is a profession, and the answer proposed is that it should not be. It should rather be a profession open to innovation and talent and transparent to those who interact with it as authors, subscribers, and readers.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_scholarly_publishing/toc/scp39.2.html
