Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle gathered names of first and last authors from papers published from 2005-2017 in 15 major science and neuroscience journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Review. Nearly 10% of the names were excluded because they were relatively gender neutral, but the rest told a clear story: In these journals, authorship is a male-dominated enterprise. Read more
PhD students are the backbone of the research industry, often responsible for compiling precious datasets for their lab and learning the cutting-edge techniques required for analysis. But completing a PhD is hard, and getting harder as scientific standards creep steadily upwards. It takes over a year longer for current students to publish their first scientific paper than those 30 years ago because of the increasing data requirements of top journals. Across Europe and Australia, this is one reason why students are taking an average of four to six years (or longer) to complete their PhDs, despite candidature contracts usually being a maximum of four years, and government scholarships lasting at most three and a half years. Read more
Scientific irreproducibility — the inability to repeat others’ experiments and reach the same conclusion — is a growing concern. Read more
This piece was republished from Sophie Lewis’ blog. Read more
Every day in this job, I learn something new. As a publishing assistant, I guide manuscripts through the peer review process at Scientific Reports. As such I handle manuscripts at multiple stages of the process. I like to think of it as following a manuscript’s journey from the lab up out into the world. Each day brings new challenges. Organisational skills are a must. Read more
Gerjon Ikink is currently in his fifth and final year of a PhD at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, but is thinking about leaving research. He always wanted to be a scientist so that he could contribute to society by exploring the unknown in search of the truth, in this case research into the genetic pathways involved in breast cancer. Read more
Even though this was a few years ago, the advice given in Writing a paper: habits of successful authors still stands true today, and this was our starting point for this month. Bernd Pulverer, head of scientific publications at the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), shared some insights with attendees at the NaturejobsCareer Expo in Heidelberg, Germany in May 2011. Read more
During the Euroscience Open Forum 2012 (ESOF 2012) which opened in Dublin yesterday, Alaa Ibrahim, an astrophysicist from the American University in Cairo, Egypt, gave his advice to young researchers starting their research career on how to handle the peer reviewing process. Here is a summary of his tips: … Read more
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