If you’re attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting this year (#SfN13), join us for our panel discussion: ‘Tackling the terabyte: how should research adapt to the era of big data?
When: Monday, November 11, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Where: Hilton San Diego Bayfront, 1 Park Blvd, San Diego, CA 92101
Room: Sapphire 400
We’re back! Apologies for the long radio silence – day job, what can I say.
Last week Nature published a leader reflecting upon our performance as editors and journalists in the gender balance of our referees, commissioned authors, and journalistic profiles. The verdict? Plenty of room for improvement – in 2011, only 14% of Nature’s 5,514 manuscript referees were women. Those numbers are for all areas, both physical and life sciences. I don’t have the exact number for just neuroscientists but a quick partial analysis suggests it is in the same ballpark. How good/bad is 14%? According to a 2007 survey of North American neuroscience programs, 36% of neuroscience assistant professors, 28% of associate, and 21% of full professors are women. I don’t know what those percentages would be if you included neuroscientists from the rest of the the world (I’m guessing they would be lower), but I am fairly confident in saying we haven’t been grossly overrepresenting women in our referee picks.
So how do we choose our referees? Continue reading
Our June editorial discusses the relationship between web traffic and citations. Specifically, can one predict how well any particular paper is cited years after publication, based solely on the number of downloads it receives immediately following its appearance online? Our preliminary analysis suggests that this relationship not only exists, but is surprisingly strong.
I’ll leave you to read the editorial for more of the background as to why we examined this relationship, but I will repeat a few keys things here. The main purpose of this post is to provide more of the details behind the data and analysis, and to initiate a good discussion.
I apologize for the long time between posts. Things have been busy and I hope to have more for you soon. In the meantime, I wanted to toss out something to tide you over.
A recent Nature editorial extends the previous discussion that began in the AP post “”https://blogs.nature.com/nn/actionpotential/2008/03/retraction_reaction.html">Retraction reaction", concerning the retraction of a paper from the lab of Nobel Prize winner Linda Buck. The editorial touches on the issue of a significant weakness in the scientific process. Namely that save for a select few in the “know”, the community-at-large rarely learns of what went wrong in a study, leading to its eventual retraction. This is indeed a concern and an on-going problem.
When the community is overburdened by peer review, it’s everybody’s problem. As of today, Nature Neuroscience has become part of the solution by joining the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, a flexible system that allows voluntary participation by authors, referees and editors. Here are more details, from our April editorial:
Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Linda Buck has retracted a 2001 Nature paper. In the retraction in this week’s Nature, the authors report difficulty replicating the data and ‘inconsistencies’ between the original data and figures and data printed in the paper. Buck told Nature reporter Heidi Ledford that the figures and data in question were contributed by the first author, Zhihua Zou, who was unavailable for comment.
This is the highest profile retraction that I can recall in neuroscience, but so far, there has been little fallout. Perhaps that’s because the original findings were notable only in the neuroscience community rather than in the general public. Regardless, it indicates that neuroscience and its well known labs are not immune from fraudulent data. Although I admire Buck’s swift and direct action, it concerns me that the first author has been assigned the lion’s share of the blame. This seems like a familiar refrain, and I find it troubling.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University voted Tuesday to adopt an open-access policy, providing a free repository for finished papers, according to a recent press release. This move will allow for greater dissemination of scholarly work conducted at Harvard, says Stuart Shieber, a professor at FAS. Shieber states that a combination of a restrictive publishing system and the “astronomical” cost of journals have led the Harvard professors to support such a venture. An official description of the proposal that was actually discussed by the FAS on Tuesday is here.
As my colleague from Nature Precedings, Hilary Spencer, points out in a recent Nature Network forum, this entire policy is very vague with regards to what is meant by the scholarly article or the “final version.” Is that the final, journal-produced PDF? The peer-reviewed, unpublished, non-copy-edited version? The non-peer-reviewed pre-print? According to an analysis written up on TheScientist.com, this mandate would require that published articles be submitted. However, go back and re-read the original proposal and tell me where it says that explicitly.
Answers in Genesis, a self-described Christianity-defending ministry dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively, recently launched a new publication, Answers Research Journal. Their mission:
Addressing the need to disseminate the vast fields of research conducted by creationist experts in theology, history, archaeology, anthropology, biology, geology, astronomy, and other disciplines of science, Answers Research Journal will provide scientists and students the results of cutting-edge research that demonstrates the validity of the young-earth model, the global Flood, the non-evolutionary origin of “created kinds,” and other evidences that are consistent with the biblical account of origins.
As their parental organization teaches, “facts” don’t speak for themselves, but must be interpreted. All I can say is……….Wow.
A new policy in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrates the current push towards open access publication. Researchers can pay to have their article freely available immediately upon publication, starting with all articles submitted as of January 1, 2008. It is interesting, because J Neurosci words the new policy a bit like an experiment, essentially telling the authors and funding agencies to put their money where their mouth is. If they want open access, as many are calling for, they can help support it. Hopefully we can return to this policy in 6 months or so to see how many authors took this option, and who funded those choosing to “pay for play.”
Since the recent fall-out of the recent NY Times OP-Ed piece discussing the use of fMRI to predict the inclinations and feelings of swing voters is still fresh in our minds, I wanted to simply provide the link to a recent PLoS ONE paper that touches on the general concept of the media reporting on science.