Category Archives: Report

A day in the life of a Scientific Reports assistant production editor

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Charlotte Alldis helps shed some light on the publishing business for Scientific Reports and Naturejobs.

I’ve worked as an assistant production editor for Scientific Reports for almost a year now, and one thing I should mention is that Scientific Reports is an unusual journal. We’re completely open access (which means anyone can access and re-use the research we publish), and we publish loads of research in a rapid timeframe. Ensuring papers are published within the shortest possible time following acceptance is the key driver and focus of the work I complete on a daily basis in the production team.

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Charlotte Alldis

 

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Study system envy

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Graduate students must often weigh the pros and cons of straying from an advisor’s research program

Guest contributor Carolyn Beans

Early in graduate school, I had total study system envy. In many biological fields, including my own field of evolutionary ecology, a study system is a specific species that a scientist uses to run tests. Some of these species like mice, zebrafish, and the plant Arabidopsis are model organisms, and have been well-studied for decades or more. Whether scientists choose a model organism or a relatively unknown species as a study system can have drastic consequences for their research.

Zebrafish

Zebrafish{credit}Uri Manor, NICHD{/credit}

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Team science and the early career researcher

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The current trend towards increased research collaboration and larger groups is fuelled by the need to answer bigger questions, but this approach puts individual contributions at risk.

Guest contributor Lucia Possamai

Research ventures where several researchers, groups or institutions work together to answer a research question is becoming known as ‘team science.’ It can be seen at work today in large genetics studies, such as the 100,000 genomes project, in multi-centre clinical trials, or in rare disease consortia. Even on a smaller scale, it is becoming more common for publications to arise from collaborative projects.

As an early career researcher I can appreciate that team science is not just good for science: it gives those of us embarking on our scientific careers the opportunity to take part in research with high impact that would otherwise not be accessible to us. It can remove the pressure to obtain independent funding – in many cases, all funding will have been obtained as part of the larger project’s grant.

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The Naturejobs career expo, San Francisco

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Naturejobs’ visit to the home of technology was a huge success.

We’re thrilled with the way that the Naturejobs career expo – held for the very first time in sunny San Francisco – turned out. We learnt an awful lot about the career options available for researchers in California, both in industry and academia, and found some of the best ways to approach those options and how to maximise your chances of landing a job.

Peter Fiske

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Science communication: The predatory open access “journals”

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Having a web page with scientific articles isn’t all it takes to be a scientific journal, says Victor Morais.

Guest contributor Victor Morais

The number of open access journals available to scientists has grown enormously in recent years. They offer the possibility of fast and easy publishing to get research out in the world as soon as possible. Unfortunately, not all open access journals are as they appear.

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Victor Morais

Every day, email invitations to new open access journals drop into my inbox. Recently I decided to investigate further. On the publisher’s site I found more than 30 journals covering a variety of areas, but fewer than half of them had published articles and none of them had more than 10 articles. There were more places to publish than there were publications!

I wondered if these journals were real. They could be predatory journals – a web page where scientists publish papers in a form more like a personal page or a blog than a legitimate scientific journal. The real purpose of a scientific journal is to share and preserve knowledge and to protect the minimum quality requirements of a scientific publication. If scientists publish their work on personal web pages, there are no quality controls and it’s not possible to guarantee the visibility or protection of articles. Predatory journals do not do the job of a scientific journal in terms of quality, visibility or preservation, and most of the time lack the peer review process that makes science reliable. As a researcher, how do I guarantee that as soon as I’m charged for publication, my work won’t be lost in the ether?

In my ensuing research, I found some interesting resources like Think. Check. Submit that give guidelines to choose the right journal. Here, I want to share some of the clues that helped me to distinguish between established, emerging and predatory journals.

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Most read on Naturejobs: January 2016

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With another year behind us, and 91.67% of it yet to come, it’s time to look back on the content from Naturejobs that you all most enjoyed this month. We’ll get straight to it.

 

10. Making a simple and engaging grant application was one of the most important things for our readers this month, with Viviane Callier talking us through the process of building a message that conveys your science well, as part of our ongoing faculty series.

 

9. Monya Baker and Gautham Venugoplan sat down to have a chat last month, and they were good enough to share it with us. Here, Gautham describes switching careers from bioengineering to consulting, and explains how he still uses his scientific training daily.

 

8. The Jobs of the Future initiative (JOF) is a platform that will allow scientists to present what new jobs they think are coming to us in 2030. Michael Fischer and Mandë Holford talk about the genesis of the idea, and why they think it’s important.naturejobs-reads

 

7. Eli Lazarus talks us through how an iterative digidynamic cross-platform publishing process synergizes innovation across multiplatform research space. Whoops, sorry – how writing together bridges disciplines and cuts jargon.

 

6. From 2008 to 2011, Andrew Simons led a programme in Ethiopia for a US-based non-profit relief organization. After that he got a PhD in applied economics. Here he talks to Virginia Gewin about his career path and plans for the future.

 

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New report: medical students are missing out on a fulfilling career in psychiatry research

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Stigma against mental illness is putting medical students off academic psychiatry, but a new report seeks to address the issues.

It’s one of the most exciting times to work in psychiatric research, yet the field is losing out when it comes to recruiting medical students, and is suffering in the current economic climate where the needs of clinical services take priority over academic research. So says a new report by the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences, published today. The report proposes measures to change the way psychiatrists are trained in order to make sure that mental health research meets its potential.

Naturejobs asked Professor Nick Craddock, Treasurer of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who was involved in putting together the report, to talk us through the findings.

Thinking about psychiatric research?

{credit}Hemera/Thinkstock{/credit}

Why did the Academy commission this report now?

It’s a time of very exciting scientific development in the field, but it’s also a time when there has been some difficulty in recruiting sufficient people into psychiatry. So there’s a capacity issues. If we don’t produce sufficient high calibre academic psychiatrics, ultimately patients will suffer, because we won’t be driving the research forward. I am confident people are recognising the issues, but it’s up to the different stakeholders to come together and make that work.

Why is it such a good time to get into the field?

For anybody who is interested in the workings of the brain and interested in driving science forward then doing research training in psychiatry is really a very exciting opportunity, because things are going to change more during their career in psychiatry than in any other field. It’s a very special time in psychiatry because of the scientific tools available now, such as neuroimaging,  strong neuroscience developments, molecular genetics. It’s where a lot of the action will be in medicine over the next 20 or 30 years.

In that case, why is there a problem recruiting people? Continue reading →

Was your degree worth it?

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Would you do it all again?{credit}Futuretrack report{/credit}

A study tracking university students over 6 years from the moment they applied for university until well after they graduated has been published this week.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the findings reveal just how hard it has been for UK students graduating during the recession, with a significant increases in debt and lower earnings compared with the class of ’99. On a positive note, the vast majority thought it was worth it – see the infographic above.

The study found that :

  • 1 in 10 graduates experienced significant spells of unemployment

Human enhancement will change how we work, says report

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{credit}Comstock/Thinkstock{/credit}

If I told you that you could be more productive at work, make better decisions and even enjoy the worst parts of your job more, would you be tempted?

Such are the promises of cognitive enhancing pharmaceuticals and technologies, many of which are increasingly being used by students and professionals to improve their performance at work.

But a new report by scientists and ethicists, which says that these developments will undoubtedly change the way we work in the future, raises concerns about the ethical and safety questions surrounding their use.

“There are many exciting prospects for enhancing production in the workplace,” says Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, and one of the members of the report working group, adding that now is the time to consider the issues and “find a way forward.”

The report is timely as a number of cogntive enhancing drugs are already being used. Modafinil, which was originally developed to treat sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, has gained a reputation as a brain boosting-drug which can improve concentration and memory, and even make work feel more enjoyable.

Sahakian says it’s impossible to know exactly how many people are using the drug off-label but the fact is that many more prescriptions are given out than there are people with the conditions the drug is supposed to treat. Surveys suggest that such cognitive enhancers are well known to the student population, who reportedly see them as a better alternative to caffeine, helping them to stay awake longer to revise or write essays, or keep them going during exams.

The US army has also been testing out cognitive enhancing drugs to keep soldiers alert for longer. Then there’s the realm of physical and technological enhancements that may bring other benefits. Cognitive enhancement through ‘brain-training’ video games has also been effective in studies, and could help older workers to keep up to speed with their younger colleagues, for instance.  Other technological advances help improve hearing and vision, limb function, and more, which could all make people more productive.

The question is, how should these technologies be used? For a start, studies have shown that taking cognitive enhancing drugs reduces the number of accidents related to shift workers, and can also help surgeons do a better job, especially compared to caffeine which can cause their hands to shake. If it means saving lives, shouldn’t these advances be made compulsory by employers?

Many of the ethical concerns are not new, or reserved for developments in human enhancement, but where they are unique is that they will affect the workplace, said Jackie Leach Scully, an ethicist from Newcastle University, speaking at the report launch at the Science Media Centre in London. “What is special in the context of work is the competitive nature so it is likely that employees will be under big pressure to use enhancements to perform better,” she said, “but there might be lots of reasons why they don’t want to self enhance.” These include religious beliefs, safety concerns, or their own ethical reasons. Continue reading →

Challenging the integrity of research

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Stories of scientific misconduct, from plagiarism to falsification and fabrication of results are on the rise.

What leads scientists to make such poor judgements when it comes to their work? And how can you make sure you carry out your research with integrity? For instance, you might not make up your results – but what if you fail to record your data properly making your research hard to replicate? And how bad is it to plagiarise your own work, seeing as you wrote it in the first place?

{credit}iStockphoto/Thinkstock{/credit}

These are questions tackled by a new report on responsible research conduct, published today by the InterAcademy Council and the IAP – the global network of science academies. The  report examines how scientists can uphold values vital for  science in an increasingly pressurised research environment.

Although the report says it’s impossible to accurately estimate the number of cases of irresponsible research that happen each year, they are not unheard of, with the US Office of Research Integrity reporting 9 findings of research misconduct in 2010 and surveys indicating that incidence is higher than official statistics might suggest. The percentage of scientific papers that have been retracted also seems to be on the up.

According to the report, with the rise of interdisciplinary research (where each field has its own established rules and practices), the growing importance of research in policy and public decision making, and a number of high-profile cases of misconduct reported around the world, it is more important than ever to address the issue of research integrity. Continue reading →