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