This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
At a time of year when many publications are listing “top ten” scientific discoveries of the past 12 months, Hank Campbell has a different perspective in his “top 20 science stories of 2008” post: an alarming decrease in available clichés to describe what scientists think about new discoveries.
Eva Amsen writes a thoughtful essay entitled “Failure”, at her Nature Network blog Expression Patterns. She argues that the unit of publication is the basic measure of ‘success’ for a scientist, and hence that not publishing is perceived as a sign of failure. Publishing or perishing has driven some to extreme measures, not least of which (in the political science literature in any event) is a strange distribution of reported P values. If the production of exciting data is the only way by which a scientist can be judged as successful, what of all the things that get left out? Journals for negative results may be one part of the answer, but the question remains of what is the best way to assess the quality of science and scientists.