March’s SoNYC: On setting the research record straight – Sound familiar?

Posted on 15 Mar 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

Dorothy Clyde (Dot), is a Senior Editor at Nature Protocols and has been with the journal since its inception in January 2006. In her previous life as a research scientist, she spent close to a decade studying various aspects of fruit fly development and genetics. In her guest post she explains the role an editor plays in avoiding plagiarism, giving advice to all parties.

Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but I doubt if anyone feels particularly flattered when they come across their own work – copied verbatim and unattributed – in someone else’s publication. Unfortunately, instances of plagiarism are becoming more commonplace. As a result, tackling plagiarism has now become part of an editor’s job, and at Nature Protocols we work closely with our authors to avoid it. Once upon a time plagiarism was difficult to detect, but now that so much of the scientific literature is online there are a number of services that help us spot when parts of a submitted manuscript have already appeared elsewhere.

Thankfully, plagiarism of the classic kind is rare; when we do come across plagiarism, it usually takes the form of self-plagiarism (where an author reproduces uncited sections of text from one of their previous publications), or duplicate submissions (where the same manuscript is submitted to more than one journal, often simultaneously). Self-plagiarism, if detected early enough, is usually relatively straightforward to resolve. Duplicate submissions, on the other hand, are one of the more frustrating aspects of an editor’s job, as the problem often does not become apparent until the later stages of the editorial process – or worse, until both versions have been accepted and published in different journals!

Why is self-plagiarism a particular problem for Nature Protocols?

In order to ensure that our protocols are reproducible, Nature Protocols has a policy that all our protocols are based on a previous primary research paper from the author’s lab, in which the technique was used to generate data. If this supporting paper is very methodological, there may be some degree of overlap with the Nature Protocols manuscript. Alternatively, the authors may have published a protocol-type paper on a similar topic in another journal. In these circumstances, it is easy for sections of duplicated text to creep in, especially if the authors are unaware of the problems associated with self-plagiarism.

With respect to duplicate submission, we hope that all authors realise that it is unacceptable to submit identical manuscripts to more than one journal at the same time. However, duplicate submission (and self-plagiarism) problems can arise when manuscripts that were seemingly unrelated at initial submission, progressively become more similar as they pass through the editorial process, for example, when additional material is added in response to referee or editorial comments. In addition, some authors view protocols differently to other publication types and do not see a potential conflict in publishing the same protocol in more than one journal.

The role of editors in avoiding plagiarism

It is our job as editors to ensure our authors are fully informed about our plagiarism policies and to detect potential problems early in the editorial process. So how do we set out to achieve this at Nature Protocols?

When an author agrees to submit a full manuscript to Nature Protocols, they will be sent an e-mail that reminds them we take plagiarism seriously and it must be avoided, directing them to “NPG’s policy on plagiarism” for further information. This e-mail also requests that authors make the editor aware of any methods/protocol papers they have previously written or have agreed to write on a similar topic – and, if possible, to provide us with a copy of these papers. We also ask authors to provide us with a copy of their supporting primary research paper. Editors will have already carried out extensive literature checks by this stage and may ask authors to upload specific publications that these searches have identified as being potentially overlapping or a source of potential problems. In such cases, the editor will make it clear that we expect the Nature Protocol to add substantial value to the existing literature and request that the author outlines to the editor how the manuscript expands upon previous publications.
Authors are reminded of our policy again when their manuscript is returned to them for revision. It is also made clear in the editorial comments that duplication of text must be avoided and that all our manuscripts are cross-checked against the published literature before being accepted for publication. Thus, all authors are informed at least twice of our position on plagiarism.
Nature Protocols (along with all other NPG journals) participates in the “CrossCheck initiative.” Prior to accepting any manuscript for publication, it is compared to the CrossCheck database using “iThenticate”. iThenticate will generate an overall similarity score and provide a summary report that highlights instances of duplicated text in the submitted manuscript and links back to the original source(s). The editor then carefully checks each ‘hit’ in the report to determine its significance. Large sections, or multiple smaller sections, of highly similar text are an immediate red flag; if such sections are a clear indication of deliberate plagiarism or if the duplicated text cannot be removed by careful revision by the author (for example, by extensive rewriting or appropriate referencing) the manuscript will be rejected. We understand that paraphrasing sections of the Procedure can be difficult and not always helpful so in these cases it may make most sense to ensure the original source is prominently cited. However, the software will also turn up hits that are not plagiarism, such as isolated occurrences of partially similar sentences. Some standard phrases will be present in most of our manuscripts and can also be excluded, for example text reminding authors to follow institutional and national guidelines when performing experiments on animals. Another example where our editorial requirements make some duplication inevitable is the Materials section and so hits limited to this section can usually be overlooked.

Taking action

If self-plagiarism is detected before a manuscript is accepted for publication, the author is made aware of the offending sections and asked to either cite the original source or to rewrite the duplicated text. Duplicate submissions will be rejected outright as soon as they are detected. No manuscript will be accepted for publication until we are satisfied that all text is original and appropriately referenced.

Once a manuscript has been published, the course of action will depend on a number of factors, including: proof of intent; severity of plagiarism; policies of other journals involved. In cases where it is judged that the plagiarism is relatively minor and unintentional, authors will most likely be given the opportunity to correct the publication record by including additional citations or rewriting sections of text in the form of an official correction. In more serious cases, it is likely that we will retract the Protocol. That is about the limit of what we as editors can do ourselves although an author’s institution may well decide to investigate. In theUS, there is also the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) which will investigate complaints of plagiarism. We are of course happy to cooperate with Institutions, the ORI or equivalent authorities.

Limitations of our approach

Unfortunately, there will be cases of plagiarism that slip past the Nature Protocols editors unnoticed. Plagiarism detection software, such as iThenticate, is not foolproof; determined individuals will find a way to ensure their manuscripts evade detection. Services such as PubMed, Scopus or CrossCheck do not index content from every journal; neither do they index all content types from participating journals. And by definition, only published papers are included in these databases. Thus, concurrent submission of identical manuscripts to more than one journal is a serious problem with no immediate solution.

A closing plea to authors

Authors – remember, your editor is your friend when it comes to avoiding plagiarism. It is in everyone’s best interests to identify and resolve potential issues early in the publication process. To facilitate this, I would urge all authors to be honest and transparent with your editor. And if you are unsure about how the policies apply to your manuscript –just ask!

Science Online NYC (SoNYC) is a monthly discussion series held in New York City where invited panellists and the in-person and online audiences talk about a particular topic related to how science is carried out and communicated online. For this month’s SoNYC the topic for discussion is: Setting the research record straight. We’re looking at issues such as retractions and plagiarism and how they relate to real or perceived increases in research misconduct. More details about this month’s SoNYC can be found here.

To complement the event, we’re running a series of guest posts discussing what steps publications are taking to deal with fraudulent research practices and what is being done to investigate and deter such practices. We’ve already heard from Richard Van Noorden, Assistant News Editor at Nature. He gave us an overview of what retractions can tell us about setting the research record straight, highlighting some recent high profile cases of retraction, explaining why retraction rates appear to be increasing. We also compiled a Storify from a session at February’s AAAS meeting in Vancouver on Global Challenges to Peer Review which touched on some of the challenges faced by journal editors. More guest posts coming soon.

March’s SoNYC: On setting the research record straight – What retractions tell us.

Posted on 06 Mar 2012 by Laura Wheeler

Richard Van Noorden, Assistant News Editor at Nature, gives us an overview of what retractions can tell us about setting the research record straight. In his post he highlights some recent high profile cases of retraction, explaining why retraction rates appear to be increasing.

Up until the turn of this century, the research record shows that scientists hardly ever published work that was totally flawed: that is to say, so wrong that it needed to be retracted. Around the millennium, about 30 papers a year were being officially withdrawn; and so the total number of retractions in the scientific literature was admirably low. In retrospect, suspiciously low. Was the literature ever really that clean?

For suddenly, in the last ten years, retractions have shot up, rising ten- fold while the scientific literature expanded only 44%. A blog, Retraction Watch, has monitored them over the past 18 months. Recent examples include prominent psychologist Diederik Stapel’s fraud (particularly shocking because Stapel had such a stellar reputation); the dispute over whether or not chronic fatigue syndrome is linked to a virus ; and the scandal in which cancer geneticist Anil Potti’s flawed research led to patients being enrolled in clinical trials based on faulty data. Those are the ones that made headlines – but as Retraction Watch and Neil Saunders’ live feed of retraction notices on PubMed show, rarely a day goes by where a paper is not being withdrawn. The new norm nowadays is to expect hundreds of retractions, and perhaps that number will continue to rise.

The fraction of papers retracted is still utterly miniscule of course – just 0.02%; for retractions, after all, usually imply serious experimental or ethical errors. (According to Thomson Reuters, the number of retractions and corrections together has remained roughly stable at about 0.75% of the literature over the past two decades – but because there are so many, no-one has worked out whether ‘serious’ corrections are rising significantly; the signal is swamped by the myriads of corrections for trivial errors. For more data on who retracts papers, and why, see my blog post ‘The reasons for retraction’).

But as a result of the rise, the retractions system – and, more broadly, the trustworthiness of published research – has started to attract intense debate. Should we trust the science literature less, because more of it is being withdrawn? Or more, because editors and researchers are finding it easier to catch and signal mistakes?

Retractions and trust

The nagging question underlying such trust debates is whether scientific fraud and error are actually rising. From retractions data alone, this question cannot be answered – so people tend to go with their gut reactions. Many commentators opine that today’s ultra-competitive, publish or perish, photoshop-savvy, tenure-obsessed and blockbuster-drug-focused scientific culture is leading to a rise in both fraud and error. On the other hand, others think not; John Iannoidis, who certainly knows a thing or two about erroneous research findings, told me he didn’t think there was a sudden boom in the production of fraudulent or erroneous work, a view shared by the research ethicist Nick Steneck (see my feature, ‘The trouble with retractions’). Science journalist Jonah Lehrer made the same judgement in his blog.

There’s some logic behind this position. Surveys in which scientists report their misconduct all show that self-admissions of fabrication and falsification run into the low single % mark; claims to spot this in others typically reach above 10%; and admissions to a variety of other questionable research practices hit 30% or higher – see studies in the United States, the UK, Germany (PDF in German), and a much-quoted meta-analysis. Therefore errors and frauds are undoubtedly more widespread than the 0.02% retractions (and a few mega-corrections) suggest. It seems reasonable to assume that scientists have been publishing sloppy work – and in a tiny number of cases fraudulent work – for centuries; and that the number of retracted papers vastly undercounts this. Even though the rates of retraction have shot up recently, this tells us little about real rates of fraud and error. (Yet when the Wall Street Journal’s Gautam Naik covered the trend, his article was headlined ‘Mistakes in Scientific Studies Surge’).

Changing norms

The internet and electronic publishing has certainly helped to change retraction norms. It makes it easier to spot mistakes: image manipulation or plagiarism that once might have passed un-noticed now gets picked up by whistleblowers. Just as importantly, the internet allows the easier dissemination of papers among a wider community (including non-scientists). This community effect matters: in the 20^th century, a particular group of scientists might have been justified in feeling that since everyone knew a paper was faulty, there was no need to officially signal this with a retraction (unless the signal was to warn others of a scientist’s egregious fraud). That’s increasingly not true: even very old papers can easily be resurrected among communities unfamiliar with how the field has moved on. All of this means that editors need to change any pre-millennial attitudes to officially retracting or correcting outdated research, and how those changes are signalled on journal websites.

All in all, we should be pleased that journal editors and scientists are apparently more willing to retract. A clear retraction takes guts and hard work from both parties, and there are still many problems with the system that need fixing. As Retraction Watch has pointed out, retractions are often irritatingly opaque, leaving the reader mystified about what went wrong. Journals are inconsistent in their attitudes to retraction. And it isn’t clear that retractions always work as signals to wider readers – although a recent study suggests that annual citations of an article drop 65% after retraction, compared to control articles. The launch of the CrossMark system should further improve our awareness of changes to research papers.

Setting the record straight

More widely, the rise in retractions is welcome because it’s focusing discussion on how we straighten out our research record and promote best practice in the internet era: an age when it seems more important that scientists officially retract or correct erroneous records.

As Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus said recently, the research paper is not a sacred, never-to-be altered object. (I hope that no scientist ever thought it was). If scientists continue to record their results by publishing a series of research papers that form ‘the literature’, then revisions to this literature can probably only go so far; after all, scientists work by publishing new papers, not obsessively revising and re-linking what they’ve already published. But there’s no doubt that right now we can afford to encourage many more such revisions and to accept that mistakes do happen. There are many honest retractions; while embarrassing, such admissions should be treated differently to fraud.

Straightening out the research record goes far beyond best practice on retractions and corrections. To avoid errors of unconscious bias affecting what gets published, we should encourage the publication of negative results, so that we see the 19 out of 20 hypotheses that failed, not just the one success. In a similar vein, we should force clinical trials to be registered before they start – though a US effort to attempt just that appears to be off to a poor start. And we should focus on instilling an honest scientific culture; training researchers on what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to plagiarism (particularly those for whom English is a second or third language); and welcoming oversight institutions like the US Office of Research Integrity, although this is a kind of oversight which the UK science community apparently thinks it can do without.

Such prescriptions are easy to write down; much harder to put into practice. And the more retractions, corrections and negative result publications we encourage, the more perceptions may suggest that the research record is less trustworthy, prone to U-turns and failure. In fact – as we should not fail to point out – it will be more honest and trustworthy, and reflective of how science really works, than ever before.

Science Online NYC (SoNYC) is a monthly discussion series held in New York City where invited panellists and the in-person and online audiences talk about a particular topic related to how science is carried out and communicated online. For this month’s SoNYC the topic for discussion is: Setting the research record straight. We’re looking at the trends in retractions and how they relate to real or perceived increases in research misconduct. More details about this month’s SoNYC can be found here.

March’s SoNYC: On setting the research record straight – Introduction

Posted on 22 Feb 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

It’s time to share some details of the latest Science Online NYC (SoNYC). This month’s event will take place on Tuesday 20th March at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST. You can also watch online via our Livestream channel. The topic for discussion is: Setting the research record straight

The internet has enabled the faster and more thorough dissemination of published science, meaning that more eyes than ever are available to check the accuracy, veracity and integrity of the research record. With our enhanced ability to spot plagiarism and image manipulation electronically, it appears that the frequency with which we’ve flagged potentially fraudulent or plagiarized papers has gone up. This panel will look at the trends in retractions and how they relate to real or perceived increases in research misconduct. We hope to discuss what steps publications are taking to deal with the sloppy or fraudulent research practices that sometimes result in retractions, and also what research institutions are doing to investigate and deter such practices. Is the system broken, and what can researchers do to help fix it if it is?

Panelists:

– John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity.

– Ivan Oransky, Executive Editor, Reuters Health and one of the people behind the Retraction Watch blog.

– Liz Williams, Executive Editor, The Journal of Cell Biology.

The event is free to attend and includes the opportunity to meet the panelists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the online discussion, keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. There’s also a SoNYC Twitter account and Facebook page where you can find information and do check out our NYC Science Communication events calendar that lists this event and others.

Preparing for the discussion

To prepare for the upcoming discussion, we’re running a series of guest posts here on Of Schemes and Memes. In our series we will consider examples of research misconduct, look at what publications are doing to prevent fraudulent research and discuss the role of social media in exposing dishonesty.

If you would like to contribute to this series please do get in touch, or leave a comment in the thread.

What role can peer review play in keeping the research record straight?

Last week various representatives from Nature were in Vancouver, B.C for the The American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, an annual gathering and one of the most widely recognised global science events. The programme included a mix of plenary talks, smaller discussions and scientific exhibits.

One particular discussion, “Global challenges to peer review of scientific publications” touched on some of the issues relevant to March’s SoNYC and addressed a range of questions. Can peer review can help to detect fraud? How can technology and certain software programmes be used to help? What about fraudulent images? You can find a Storify summary below, collating this online conversation. Do let us know if we have missed anything and check out the official conference hashtag, #AAASmtg.

Communities Happenings – 20th February

Posted on 20 Feb 2012 by Laura Wheeler

Communities Happenings is a weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences which we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!

Social Media SoNYC

On Thursday, the eagerly awaited 9th SoNYC event took place, a super social media week special event at the American Museum of Natural History! The topic for discussion was, “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.“ The panel included:

– American Museum of Natural History educators who are developing a “tool kit” of mobile apps, websites and more to help middle school students collect, share and present data on urban biodiversity

– Ben Lillie, the co-organizer of The Story Collider, which tells science stories by combining verbal narratives with podcasts, Twitter and an online magazine

– Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

– Carl Zimmer, a science journalist whose latest book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, is based on feedback he received on his Discover Magazine blog when he asked the question: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science?

– Moderator: Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor, Science Department, The New York Times

You can catch up on the discussion via the recording of the livestream or read our summary post which includes a Storify of the online conversations.

The next SoNYC takes place on Tuesday 20th March when we’ll be discussing “Keeping the research record straight” with Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky as well as John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of the Journal of Cell Biology. If you’re in NYC and would like to attend, you can sign up here or watch our livestream if you can’t make it in person.

Guest posts and interviews

To complement this month’s SoNYC event we ran a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. You can find our introductory post here, including a presentation by Christie Wilcox on Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet.

To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gave us an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. His post considers how the effects of social media usage can be measured and what the future holds for such technology. Next we heard from Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider,who discussed the ways social media can also be used to tell a science story. Finally we interviewed Allie Wilkinson, creator of the “This is what a scientist looks like” initiative:

“This is what a scientist looks like.” Developed by science writer and multimedia specialist Allie Wilkinson, the concept is simple, a Tumblr blog which collates pictures of scientists from all walks of life. Allie explains, “there is no cookie-cutter mold of what a scientist looks like. A scientist can look like you, or can look like me.”

The project aims to challenge the stereotypical view of a scientist, “there is no rule that scientists can’t be multidimensional and can’t have fun.

Continue to the post to find out how the project aims to challenge the stereotypical view of a scientist.

Social media

To tie in with our social media extravaganza, our hub bloggers also joined the discussion. Tinker Ready, our Boston blogger, interviewed Joi Ito, Internet pioneer and head of the MIT Media Lab, on science, social networking and “the shape of ideas.”

In a conversation earlier this week, he offered a hypothetical example of how emerging tools are creating new ways to analyze information generated by online networks. Take data from the history of books, together with trends from search queries and Twitter and connect it all to scientific references, he said.

“Then we get these really rich data sets with which we can understand… the shape of ideas within the context of society.”

He also offered a very concrete example. This spring’s Research Update session – usually open only to the Media Lab’s corporate and philanthropic sponsors — will become a Tweet-up. For the first time, most of the previously private sessions will be live streamed and the lab will solicit input through Twitter.

“The more you get your ideas out there, the more likely you’ll find people to collaborate with,” Ito said.

Continue to Tinker’s post to hear more from Joi Ito.

Joanna Scott, our London blogger, interviewed Jack Ashby, Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, about QRator, the pioneering project the Grant Museum is working on to allow the public to engage with museum collections by contributing their own interpretations:

QRator is a project that allows our visitors to get involved in conversations about the way that museums like ours operate and the role of science in society today. In the Museum are ten iPads which each pose a broad question linked to a changing display of specimens. We are really interested in what our visitors think about some of the challenges that managing a natural history collection brings up, and other issues in the life sciences. They change periodically, but at the moment our current questions include “Is it ever acceptable for museums to lie?”, “Is domestication ethical?”, “Should human and animal remains be treated differently in museums like this?” and “What makes an animal British?”

Do you think social media is going to be very important to museums and outreach departments of universities in the future? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment thread.

Nature Education Launches Interactive Biology Textbook

Nature Education, the educational division of Nature Publishing Group, announced this week the worldwide release of Principles of Biology, a $49 interactive university-level biology textbook:

Principles of Biology is a “born digital” textbook, with all materials designed specifically for consumption by students via browsers on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Each of the 196 modules in the text is a self-contained learning experience, integrating text, images, interactives, and continual assessment, which feeds an automatic gradebook through which instructors can track student progress. Instructors can customize Principles of Biology to meet their curriculum by rearranging modules, turning sections within modules on and off, adding their own material, and integrating the textbook into their campus learning management system. In addition to accessing all materials online, students can download a Desktop Edition for use when not connected to the internet as well as printable versions of each module.

Principles of Biology follows the successful launch by Nature Education in 2009 of Scitable, a collaborative online learning space for individual life science students now used in more than 180 countries. You can find out more about this in the official press release.

Google +

This week the Nature Blogs Google+ page reached the 1,000 circles milestone. Thanks to everyone who is circling us!

Don’t forget that you can find other NPG journals and products on Google+. See our circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.

The AAAS meeting in Vancouver

The AAAS annual meeting has been taking place in Vancouver since last Wednesday, comprising of a mix of plenary talks, smaller discussions and exhibits. You can read Paige Brown’s Storify summary of Saturday night’s “Science is not enough” plenary featuring Hans Rosling and discussing the challenges of science communication.

Some upcoming events in Cambridge, UK.

Two dates for your calendars if you’re in or around Cambridge, UK. March 2nd is when the next #camscitweetup will take place in The Empress pub. A chance to meet others interested in science for an evening of relaxed chatting, everyone is welcome to join in.

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th. If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

Science Online NYC (SoNYC) 9 – Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media

Posted on 19 Feb 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

On Thursday evening, we hosted the ninth instalment of the monthly Science Online NYC (SoNYC) discussion series. For this month’s SoNYC we teamed up with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for a special event for Social Media Week.

The topic for debate this month was, “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.”

As a communications tool, social media is an undeniably effective way to enhance your message. But within the science realm, top communicators – both academic and professional – strive to use social media for something greater: to engage the public in a conversation about science. Never before has it been so easy for researchers, public information officers, educators, students, and journalists to talk directly to the public about the benefits, limits, and implications of scientific knowledge. Social media not only makes these meaningful conversations possible, but it often also makes them fun and compelling. During this session, hear from scientists, communicators, and educators who use social media tools and the philosophy behind them to find creative, collaborative, and engaging learning opportunities.

Preparing for the event

In anticipation of the discussion, we ran a series of guest posts here on Of Schemes and Memes, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of a science education project. To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gave us an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. Next we heard from Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider, revealing how social media can also be used to tell a science story. We then took a look at the, “This is what a scientist looks like” initiative, interviewing writer and multimedia specialist, Allie Wilkinson.

This month’s panel:

– Ben Lillie, the co-organizer of The Story Collider, which tells science stories by combining verbal narratives with podcasts, Twitter and an online magazine

– Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

– Moderator: Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor, Science Department, The New York Times

To read what people on Twitter were saying about the event, check out our Storify of tweets at the bottom of this post.

Blog posts about the 9th #sonyc

Do let us know if you blog about the event and we’ll include a round-up of links here.

Social Media as Science Facilitator: Write up in the Dana Foundation Blog

Live-streaming and video archiving

We live-stream each SoNYC event to give as many people as possible the chance to take part in the debate. Check out this month’s livestream, or take a look at our archives where you can view the previous meetings.

Finding out more

The next SoNYC will be held on March 20th and will be focused on deterring and detecting fraud in scientific publications. Details will be announced soon – keep an eye on the SoNYC twitter account for more details and/or watch the #sonyc hashtag.

If you have a suggestion for a future panel or would be interested in sponsoring one of the events, please get in touch.

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – This is what a scientist looks like

Posted on 16 Feb 2012 by Laura Wheeler

Science Online NYC (SoNYC) is a monthly discussion series held in New York City where invited panellists talk about a particular topic related to how science is carried out and communicated online. For this month’s SoNYC we’ve teamed up with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for a special event for Social Media Week. We’re looking at how social media can be used to communicate science, with the intention of concentrating on how the experiences can have educational value. More details about this month’s SoNYC can be found here.

To complement the event, we’re running a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gave us an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. Next we heard from Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider, revealing how social media can also be used to tell a science story. In our latest instalment we will be taking a look at the, “This is what a scientist looks like” initiative.

In the previous guest post here, Ben Lillie discussed the #IamScience hashtag which is being used on Twitter by scientists to describe their personal scientific career trajectories and counter the notion that there is only one career path in science.

Then, about three weeks ago, a science writer named Kevin Zelnio tweeted this: And with that, he completely transformed what I thought was possible, and indeed what the point was, of social media. The tweet came from a discussion of how people had started their science careers, and Kevin’s frustration that the path to a scientist was always depicted in one way: go to college, go directly to grad school. Hope it was a top-tier school, then, “Bam! You’re a scientist.”

But can social media really be used to change the way people think?

Putting this to the test is one initiative which has spread across the blogosphere, twittersphere and has been snapped up by the media: “This is what a scientist looks like.” Developed by science writer and multimedia specialist Allie Wilkinson, the concept is simple, a Tumblr blog which collates pictures of scientists from all walks of life. Allie explains, “there is no cookie-cutter mold of what a scientist looks like. A scientist can look like you, or can look like me.”

The project aims to challenge the stereotypical view of a scientist, “there is no rule that scientists can’t be multidimensional and can’t have fun.” The inspiration for this project was a blog post by Suzanne Franks, in which she very honestly shared her negative reaction to Science Online 2012 keynote speaker Mireya Mayor, a viewpoint which several other attendees also shared. Those who questioned Mireya as an appropriate choice, did so based upon her physical attractiveness, her past as a NFL cheerleader and the title of her keynote, “The Vain Girl’s Survival Guide to Science and the Media.” Suzanne recognized that her reaction was a sexist dismissal of someone she didn’t even know and made her realize, that despite decades of education and effort to counteract them, the stereotypes still exist. After some introspection, Suzanne said of Mireya:

“The child of Cuban immigrants, the former cheerleader, the person who did not look like a scientist, was also the expert speaking to us that morning. Above all, she was speaking passionately about her science.”

Mireya commented on the post herself, sharing her lifelong battle to be taken seriously as a scientist given her looks and past, and how with each new milestone in her scientific career she thought, ‘This is it, now they’ll take me seriously.’ Yet the reaction persists and even producers for her television show comment on her looks and how to best get her “to look more like a scientist.”

Allie was outraged by the negative reaction to Mireya. “I really find Mireya inspiring, especially after reading her book,” said Allie. “She started college late, made a last-minute decision to be a scientist and then got a PhD…and has done all of these awesome things.” Allie adds, “Sometimes I feel like I’m too old, or don’t have enough lab experience to get a graduate degree in science. But then I think about Mireya.”

Unfortunately, the fact that Mireya does not “look like a scientist” often shadows her scientific achievements. “I do think that because of Mireya’s looks, past and her role as a TV host, people do judge her,” Allie wrote to team member Katie Pratt. “Who says a scientist can’t also be attractive, or personable, or feminine, or funny?” Allie and Katie discussed how the point of Mireya’s keynote wasn’t to focus on her science, but rather to illustrate herself and her unusual path to a career in science.

And thus, the idea for “This is What A Scientist Looks Like” was born. Allie wanted to show the world that anyone can be a scientist. “In the movie Ratatouille, the motto repeated throughout is, ‘anyone can cook’. Although initially frustrated by this motto, the critic in the movie eventually realizes that not everyone can cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere,” explains Allie. “I want people to realize the same for scientists. Not everyone can be a scientist, just like not everyone can cook, but a great scientist can be anyone.” Allie hopes that this project will help change stereotypes and inspire kids to realize that they have the potential to be a scientist.

The impact of children encountering real-life scientists was illustrated in a study conducted by Fermilab where seventh graders (aged 12&13) were asked to draw pictures of what they believed a scientist looked like. The results were not surprising: prior to meeting scientists, the students’ drawings matched the cliché of a man in white coat and glasses, clutching a flask of coloured liquid. After meeting scientists, the students’ perceptions changed dramatically:

Image Source: Results from Who’s the Scientist? Picture by seventh grade student Amy

Allie hopes that her project will have a similar effect. For further reading you can also check our Soapbox Science guest post by Shreena Patel, Scientific Projects Manager for Exscitec which delves into similar themes.

Dear Science

Stemming from the #IamScience and “This is what a Scientists looks like” initiative and to tie in with Valentine’s Day, Allie and her team have encouraged scientists to send their very own “Valentine’s Day love letters to science.” You can check out their Pinterest board collecting the love letters received.

These “Dear Science” love letters intend to emphasise that scientists are ‘normal’ people, dealing with the same ups and downs of everyday life, just like everyone else. Here is a snippet from one of the love letters by Ed:

Dear Science,

When I was in elementary school I said I was going to grow up to be a scientist. Back then we didn’t have Tumblr, so I had to imagine what a scientist looked like. I believe in my imagination I wore a lab coat and one of those headbands with a shiny disc. It turns out I can dress like a normal person!

Only time will tell whether this initiative can really change the way people think. However, if you are a scientist you can certainly help the cause by submitting your picture to the project, joining in the online conversation on Twitter (@LooksLikeSci), or sharing your thoughts on their Facebook page.

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – The Museum and the iPad: how the Grant Museum is using social media to make us all curators

Posted on 16 Feb 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

As part of Social Media Week, Nature London talked to Jack Ashby, Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, about QRator, the pioneering project the Grant Museum is working on to allow the public to engage with museum collections by contributing their own interpretations.Read on for more from Jack before Thursday, when you can tune into the live stream of “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.” The panel, hosted by American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is the latest in the monthly series organized by Science Online NYC, aka SONYC.

Hello Jack, welcome to the Nature London blog. Can you tell us about the QRator project you’ve introduced to the Grant Museum?

Visitors can respond on the iPads themselves, on their own smart phones by scanning a QR code (hence the name QRator), via Twitter using #GrantQR, or at home on their computers at www.qrator.org. In these ways they can input into our decision making process. Their comments go live immediately on the iPads and online, without being moderated by museum staff.

Not only is QRator a way of empowering visitors but it’s also a research programme – it was developed with a team of academic partners here at the University – the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCL DH). Museums are only just beginning to use this kind of technology – it’s a truly ground-breaking project – and having developed the software specifically for us, our partners are researching the way that museum visitors behave around it.

What inspired you to try the iPads in the first place?

The Museum moved into our current venue last year from a small cramped lab down a back-alley in the UCL campus. It had an incredible atmosphere which, following our visitors’ wishes we didn’t want to lose as we moved into our beautiful larger space. At the same time we wanted to be a demonstrably 21^stcentury museum, engaging visitors in the ways described above and being innovative with our practices. Working with CASA and UCL DH we decided on iPads as they are discrete enough not to detract from the incredible atmosphere we have here in the way that some computer interactives can, and they are intuitive to use. More importantly, museums had never used them before. To our knowledge, we were only the second museum in the world to employ iPads permanently in displays, and the first to use them for visitor participation.

How are visitors engaging with them?

There’s been a great response from our visitors – they have left thousands of answers to the questions. One major thing that we didn’t anticipate is that people are also using them as a kind of digital visitors book. As well as getting involved in the conversations, people are letting us know their thoughts on the Museum in general and what they like or dislike about many of our specimens. The jar of moles gets a lot of mentions. This has become a great way for visitors to point things out to each other without us telling them what we think they should see.

Can people who can’t get to the Grant Museum at the moment participate at all?

Absolutely. Everything that is on the iPads is also on www.qrator.org– if you comment online it goes live on the iPad and vice versa.

Are you pleased with how it’s going?

Definitely. It was a big risk – we didn’t know if the hardware could stand up to this kind of use, and allowing visitors to comment without moderating beforehand is something museums very rarely do (though there is an expletives filter), but it’s been a real success. We’ve also had huge amount of interest from colleagues in other museums around the world wanting to know what we’ve learnt from it and whether they can create something similar for their visitors.

What are you hoping to do next with this project?

The big next step is to start putting our visitors’ responses into practice, and for the ones that are more broadly about the life sciences to disseminate what they’ve said more widely. We are constantly exploring what we can do next in this field – broadening the ways that people can respond.

Do you think social media is going to be very important to museums and outreach departments of universities in the future?

There’s no doubt it will be. It would be clichéd to say that more and more people are accessing information through these platforms, but it’s true. Museums are certainly upping their game, and the best examples are those that aren’t all about marketing. Building on the lessons we learnt with QRator at the Grant Museum, The Imperial War Museum is developing its new gallery with what they are calling “social interpretation” – it uses the social media model for visitors to participate digitally with the way their displays are interpreted. It’s a really interesting model and the time is now for museums to be experimenting with this kind of concept.

You can visit the Grant Museum and experience the QRator project for yourself at Rockefeller Building, 21 University Street, London WC1E 6DE. The Museum is open to the public free of charge Monday – Friday 1-5pm. Research and group visits are available by advance booking on weekdays 10am-1pm.

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito on science, social networking and “the shape of ideas”

Posted on 16 Feb 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

On Monday evening, Joi Ito, Internet pioneer and head of the MIT Media Lab, talked to Nature Boston as part of our coverage of Social Media Week. On Thursday, tune into the live stream of “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.” The panel, hosted by American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is the latest in the monthly series organized by Science Online NYC, aka SoNYC.

Science, by its nature, is built on a web of traditional social networks. Look at any citation map, C.V. or literature search for a sense of the interactions that drive scientific inquiry. Much of what we know stems from who studied with whom, who worked serendipitously in a particular lab and who moved their ideas from one company to another.

“With the so-called social networks we have today, we’ve exploded that,’ says Joi Ito, the Internet pioneer and, now, the director of MIT’s Media Lab.

The burst in electronic interaction is about much more than collaborating over the Internet. Scientists can learn a great deal from social networking about how to generate data, how to test ideas and how think beyond disciplines, Ito said.

“Then we get these really rich data sets with which we can understand… the shape of ideas within the context of society.”

“The more you get your ideas out there, the more likely you’ll find people to collaborate with,” Ito said.

Ito likes to talk about the Internet as a philosophy of decentralized innovation. In that sense, it is driving a shift in the way scientists collaborate.

“You can see peer review in science and peer review on the Internet converging,” he said.

Traditionally, a researcher will seek confirmation of findings from peers –top experts in a field. The basic ethos of the Internet, Ito said, is that, if you put something online and it survives, it must to be true. Instead of a handful of experts, “millions of people are going to read it and if you’re wrong,they point it out.”

For researchers accustomed to working with carefully collected data within a clearly defined discipline, that approach may seem chaotic. That’s the point.

“If you have the ability to collect a lot of data and inputs and do an analysis to filter out the noise, then you actually get a really interesting set of answers that has the benefit of having diversity mixed into it,” Ito said. He pointed to Wikipedia as an example.

You also end up with data that tends to be more robust – in the same way the human body is robust. Like the immune system, robust systems tend to be open and a bit messier but they are more adaptable, he said.

“When you have chaotic and fast changing environment, that we do, fitness and robustness are actually important…efficiency and cleanliness less so…But, I’m an Internet guy, so that’s the way I think.”

For more, see the Media Lab’s Social Computing project: The Social Computing group works on models for information processing that work from both angles. We build sociotechnical tools that aim to create substantive human connections as part of the process of data analysis. Our current focus is on developing programming languages for social computation.

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – #IAmScience and the unexpected tweets

Posted on 14 Feb 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

Science Online NYC (SoNYC) is a monthly discussion series held in New York City where invited panellists talk about a particular topic related to how science is carried out and communicated online. For this month’s SoNYC we’ve teamed up with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for a special event for Social Media Week. We’re looking at how social media can be used to communicate science, with the intention of concentrating on how the experiences can have educational value. More details about this month’s SoNYC can be found here.

To complement the event, we’re running a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gives us an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. In our next instalment, Ben Lille, co-founder of The Story Collider, reveals how social media can also be used to tell a science story.

I’ve always been what you might call a ‘light’ social media user. A few years ago I started a twitter account, and a year later I had produced seven entire tweets – I was that into it. Years of playing video games had made it clear that your number of followers was how you kept score, but I didn’t know how to play! (Oh yeah, Facebook exists, too.)

So it’s probably unsurprising that I started an organization that features a live experience and longform essays. I’ve always been obsessed with the story of science, the emotional impact on who we are as people: Can knowing about Hubble photos save one from depression? Can new technology change how and who we love? What happens when a neuroscientist’s own father has a stroke?

The Story Collider is an attempt to peer into those questions. Run by Erin Barker, Brian Wecht, and myself, we invite people to tell stories of their personal experience of science, either live on stage — which we recordand podcast— or in essays. Of course, we tweet and post to Facebook, when a new story is published, or an event announced. We’re pretty run-of-the-mill social media users that way. Given my history, I was quite proud of how much we’d done— taking advantage of all the new tools available. We had our content, we tweeted our content, people knew about our content. I figured we were doing it right.

Then, about three weeks ago, a science writer named Kevin Zelnio tweeted this:

And with that, he completely transformed what I thought was possible, and indeed what the point was, of social media.

The tweet came from a discussion of how people had started their science careers, and Kevin’s frustration that the path to a scientist was always depicted in one way: go to college, go directly to grad school. Hope it was a top-tier school, then, “Bam! You’re a scientist.”

But that wasn’t the path Kevin took, and it wasn’t the path most of the people he knew with careers in science took. So he tweeted, and encouraged others to tweet. It struck a chord, and within hours there were hundreds of people tweeting their stories with the hashtag #IAmScience. I was watching the stream from my office, fascinated, but not sure what to make of it. I tweeted my own and went home.

A couple days later, Erin Barker, the editor and producer of The Story Collider — whose background is in journalism and has no science training — sent me a video produced by Mindy Weisberger with this note:

“Have you seen this? I just watched it and cried and then emailed it to my baby brother. You’re in there!”

I was. The video is a text-animation of some of the tweets, including mine, set to Reckless Kelly’s “Wicked Twisted Road”. It’s simple in concept, easy to make for any video editor, and it brought me to tears a third of the way through.

So here was something that had appeared like magic. It had deeply affected me, a scientist, and Erin, a not-at-all-a-scientist, and it was exactly the kind of thing that we try to create ourselves. Within days, #IAmScience had collected as many stories as we had in a year and a half. Mind you, they’re a lot shorter, and lacking in a certain amount of detail, development, denouement, and other words of the craft, but there they are.

But more importantly than the quantity, is the type of story. These are tales of wrong turns, failed classes, delayed dreams, failed schools, rejection, disabilities, mistaken careers, and as you saw in Kevin’s tweet, much, much more. As science communicators we talk a lot about humanizing science. It doesn’t get much more human than this — but I’ve rarely seen a major science publication touch most of these subjects. And that, of course, is the power of Twitter. Things that would never be published anywhere find a way of bubbling to the surface.

Now, I realized that this is somewhat old-hat and small-peas. Certainly, #IAmScience is no #jan25. But it’s the smallness that’s fascinating: In our normal lives, we tend to be content with thinking of social media as a way to spread our message, to distribute our content, or whatever. It can do vastly more, at scales much smaller than major revolutions — from organizing amateur galaxy hunters to make a major discovery, to organizing small-scale revolutions within the Ivory Tower, to finding stories professional story-hunters missed.

If you want to read the #IAmScience tweets, and the blog posts and more they spawned, there’s a Storyify of the tweets. If you want to hear more about this, and other science and social media topics, come the American Museum of Natural History on Thursday, 6pm, or watch the livestream.

Ben Lillie has a B.A. in physics from Reed College, a Ph.D. in theoretical high-energy physics from Stanford and a certificate in improv comedy from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. He left the ivory tower for the wilds of New York’s theater district where he writes, produces, and otherwise brings to light stories about the human side of science. He is Co-founder and director of The Story Collider, where people are invited to share their stories of how science has affected their lives. He is also a Moth StorySLAM champion, and a writer for TED.com.

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – An Academic’s Viewpoint

Posted on 09 Feb 2012 by nature.com Communities Team

To complement the event, we’re running a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gives an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. His post considers how the effects of social media usage can be measured and what the future holds for such technology.

One of the best things about working at a medical school is that we have lots of students and lots of technology, so three years ago we ran a student through our most powerful NMR machine, and this is what we saw:

Image Source

Just in case you’ve had a sense of humour bypass, or my Ethics Committee is reading this, we didn’t really – this was one of those Photoshop experiments 😉

Nevertheless, institutional eLearning tools cannot effectively compete with the current generation of social networks for student attention. Yet there are good reasons for educators not to compete online with the attractions of alcohol and sex. In general terms, attention online is in short supply and although we know that Facebook can be a positive tool for education in some circumstances [1], I prefer to sidestep the complications of predominantly social spaces in order to provide some distinction. I try to foster the use of social tools for academic and professional development.

Dissatisfied with the lack of “social” in institutional tools such as virtual learning environments (VLEs), I started down a more outward looking path some years ago. Students log into the university VLE which acts an authentication hub, confirming their identities and providing us with a secure channel for information such as course marks, which, under the terms of the UK Data Protection Act, cannot be trusted to public sites. The university login provides us with an administrative layer but the interaction, and arguably the learning, takes place elsewhere. Although students may download PowerPoint presentations from the VLE, higher thought processes such as analysis and evaluation are associated with actions such as reading current content from RSS feeds on Google Reader and discussing the relevance of shared items to taught courses on Google+. Vital to this approach is the incorporation of student peer networks to amplify staff input [2].

Initially, I focussed on a range of social tools designed to foster student interactions. These included social bookmarking sites such as delicious, social citation tools such as CiteULike and wikis such as WetPaint and Wikispaces. Students were assessed on their use of these sites, but when assessment ceased, we found that very few students continued to use the tools. Some sort of social glue was required to maintain the enthusiasm. Our initial tool-based personal learning environment (PLE) concept rapidly turned into a people-based personal learning network (PLN) approach. As with all effective education, conceptual frameworks, in this case provided by a peer group rather than solely by teaching staff, win out over content alone.

A people-centred approach to peer learning, where academics assume the role of content curator, mentor, and technical support, places communication as a crucial requirement for success. This explains the failure of our initial tool-based approach to encourage students to curate their own information. In comparison with conventional tagging formats, the “just-in-time” attention management of activity stream architecture, where attention is continually refocused by active items returning to the top of the page, provides the reinforcement needed for continued use. Activity streams and the crowd wisdom of a peer network are at the centre of my approach to online learning. All this might seem like dry, academic posturing – but don’t say that to Facebook and Google, who have spent the last three years betting the farm on activity stream architecture. Starting with the highly influential but now moribund Friendfeed, we were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in terms of monitoring student engagement [3]. Students engaged in peer to peer discussions around shared resources and personal reflection on their own learning. The patterns of online activity were mapped using graphical tools and were used to inform staff how to guide individual students. Our statistical analysis showed that student contributions to the network could be used to discern student engagement with education in a way which give a far richer picture of online activity than traditional summary statistics such as course or exam marks.

Six months ago, concerned about the sustainability of FriendFeed, I switched our student network to the newly available Google+, and have not looked back. Google+ is conveniently linked to other tools that students use on our course (Google Documents for collaborative writing, Google Reader for RSS feeds), and has fine-grained privacy controls based on the idea of sharing content with user-defined Circles (see: here), which gives users confidence about sharing thoughts and content online. Google+ has proved to be an effective and engaging tool for student feedback [4]. We are currently analysing the structure of student networks on Google+ and looking in depth at usage patterns. If you’re interested in finding our more about this, follow me on Google+ where I post regular updates about my research.

What does the future hold? As connectivity continues to improve, undoubtedly massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the recent Stanford AI class will keep growing, but the notion that universities will be swept away by organizations such as Udacity and Kahn Academy and abandon qualifications from ancient institutions in favour of free badges and Klout scores is as fanciful now as it was on the barricades of 1968. Eventually our sleeping educational leviathans will rouse themselves and stumble towards the sunlight uplands of enlightenment. Unless Google gets there first of course.

Alan Cann is a senior lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Leicester. His interests are science education and exploiting emerging social technologies to enhance the student experience and maximise student and researcher development. He is the author of two highly successful textbooks, has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, is creator of MicrobiologyBytes.com, and is Internet Consulting Editor of the Annals of Botany. He has worked as a consultant for numerous educational and scientific institutions, and has published extensively in the area of educational research. More information

References

[1] (Junco, R. (2012) The relationship between frequency of Facebook use, participation in Facebook activities, and student engagement (Computers & Education 58(1): 162-171)

[2] (Cann, A.J. & Badge, J. (2011) Reflective Social Portfolios for Feedback and Peer Mentoring. Leicester Research Archive)

[3] (Badge, J.L., Saunders, N.F.W. & Cann, A.J.(2012) Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networks. Research in Learning Technology 20: 16283)

[4] (Cann, A.J. (2012) An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment. Leicester Research Archive)

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