Publication
Journal Impact Versus Paper Impact
26/01/11 02:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Prodigal Academic suggested that when you are choosing where to submit a manuscript, it is important to consider the target audience of who is most likely to actually read it rather than just the overall impact factor of the scientific journal. S. Pelech comments that the speciality focus of a journal now has relatively little impact on whether members of the scientific community will notice a publication. Rather, most researchers find scientific papers through PubMed, Google and other search engines and those publications with open-access are likely to receive the widest dissemination. Read More...
Of the People, By the People
27/06/11 16:52 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
The Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Max Planck Society announced that they'll be jointly launching a new, open-access scientific journal that will ensure fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. S. Pelech comments that it is commendable that these agencies that are funding biomedical research are taking a greater initiative to ensure that the fruit of their investments are going to reach a larger number of scientists with open-access publication. Read More...
An App for Papers?
14/07/11 14:31 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Joe Pickrell at Genomes Unzipped questioned why researchers publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, which among other things, is costly, time-consuming, and random. Pickrell proposes a system of immediate publication, connected to a social media network, in which readers could recommend papers and researchers could search for them based on the community's opinions or rankings. S. Pelech agrees with Joe Pickrell that the current journal system is fast becoming obsolete on many fronts, including mounting costs, publication speed, labour, environmental problems and the fact that few scientists actually search online for articles based on the reputations of scientific journals. In the end, it is the number of times that a particular scientific paper is quoted that counts and not the impact factor of the journal that it appears in. Read More...
Take That Back
12/08/11 16:16 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Derek Lowe at the Pipeline described what appears to be seems to be a dramatic increase in the frequency of retracted papers based on data from Thomson Reuters, which reported that the number of papers published has risen 44 percent since 2001, while the retraction rate has risen 15-fold. A chart of PubMed retractions shows many of them are from top journals. S. Pelech comments that with over a million new scientific manuscripts published annually, the actual increase in retracted publications over the last decade is actually pretty inconsequential. Read More...
Oh, the Pressure
08/05/12 22:49 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
David Colquhoun from University College London wrote in the Guardian that the pressure to publish scientific papers has led to the ability to publish just about anything, whether the paper merits publication or not and this can reduce the quality of science. S. Pelech comments that in the scientific research endeavor, discovery is of limited value if it is not disseminated, but most research findings are of interest to a rather select group of aficionados. The best measure of impact is how highly cited the work becomes and this is evident only after a period of years. Read More...
Positive Results Can Be Negative
13/09/11 14:22 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Daniele Fanelli at the University of Edinburgh examined more than 4,600 scientific papers published between 1990 and 2007, and found "a steady decline in studies in which the findings contradicted scientific hypotheses." During those 17 years, positive results increased from around 70 percent in 1990 to about 86 percent in 2007, and she speculates that the growing pressure to report only positive results may lead to a "decline" in scientific research around the world. S. Pelech observes that with the rapid progress made in the biological sciences with improved tools and techniques over the last few decades, it is not surprising that our knowledge about the world is becoming increasingly extensive. Nevertheless, it is striking that with around 23,000 proteins encoded by the human genome, it appears that over 95% of the biochemistry/molecular biology publications arise from less than 5% of these proteins. It would seem likely then that there is in fact a high degree of redundancy in scientific publications, which contributes to a very high rate of positive results. Read More...
Is This the End?
14/10/11 15:33 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Alan Marnett at Benchfly stated that it's time to start thinking about the "impending death of scientific journals" and just what kind of "fast-paced, technologically savvy" system might suitably replace them. He suggested not to obliterate the scientific journal itself, but to change the way it is constructed and presented, using modern technologies and solicitation of feedback could come from a large online community. In a Benchfly poll, 31 percent of respondents indicated that they think journals will no longer be the primary mode for scientific publication in the next 10 years. S. Pelech reveals that Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation plans to to launch Kinetica Online, as an open-access, meta-website dedicated to supporting cell signaling research. He also suggests that for laboratories in academic settings, it should become feasible for the universities to host open-access websites that allows for the dissemination of results from their faculties. Read More...
Oh, the Vanity
03/05/10 12:39 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Apparently authors with connections to industry are more than twice as likely to pay open access fees to make their work free — a bias that some think could lead to preferential publishing and reading of pro-industry results. S. Pelech argues that even with the traditional journal subscription model, there has alway been an "author-pays' element to scientific publishing in most cases and academic authors are just as inclined to publish "favorable work" as industrial authors, because they are subjected to even more pressure to publish or perish that those in industry. Ultimately, a scientific manuscript stil has to pass independent, scrutiny from peer-review before it is published. Read More...