Archive by date | May 2014

US and UK scientists dominate the ‘Hong Kong Nobels’

US and UK scientists dominate the 'Hong Kong Nobels'

The Hong Kong-based Shaw Prize Foundation announced the winners of the annual Shaw Prize today. Three prizes, in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences, each carry US$1 million. It’s the 11th year the prizes were awarded.  Read more

The decline and fall of Microsoft Academic Search

The decline and fall of Microsoft Academic Search

Five years after it launched, Microsoft’s free scholarly search engine has fallen into shabby disrepair, failing to track even a fraction of papers published since 2011. But the team behind the product says they are shifting their focus to a yet-to-be-released, next-generation version of the service.  Read more

NIH alternative-medicine centre proposes name change

The US National Institutes of Health’s Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a perennial punching bag, no longer wants to be “alternative”. Director Josephine Briggs announced today that NCCAM is accepting public comments on a proposal to rename itself the “National Center for Research on Complementary and Integrative Health”.  Read more

Climate row pits academic publisher against The Times

Climate row pits academic publisher against The Times

The Institute of Physics, a respected academic publisher, has hit back at claims in a newspaper that one of its journals declined to publish a paper because the results in it contradicted the scientific consensus on climate change.  Read more

‘Misreading’ of data led to errors in statin papers

The BMJ is modifying, and is considering whether to retract, articles that questioned whether many patients should be given cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. The articles made a critical statement about the rate of side effects that were based on a “misreading” of another study, according to the journal’s editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee.  Read more