DrDrA at Blue Lab Coats just had a paper officially "rejected", with the following initial reaction: Its ok, these things happen and its just a paper. I'm not really upset about it that much and will turn it over somewhere...
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Posted on May 15, 2008 9:35 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The NIH grant applications which will be reviewed Jun/Jul are going out to reviewers right about now. Poking through my pile of assignments I find that I have three R01 applications at the A2 stage (the second and "final" amendment...
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Posted on May 6, 2008 2:22 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bora linked to a recent article at the Scientific American Web site concerning "Web 2.0" and its relationship to the conduct of science. The basic concept is that "THE WEB TOTALLY CHANGES EVERYTHING!11!!!!!1!ELEVENTY!11!!!!!1!" and scientists are and/or should be going...
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Posted on April 23, 2008 10:20 AM • 47 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[The motivating context for this has been removed because subsequent developments made it obvious that it was such a unique event that my post would violate the confidentiality of all concerned. In both minor and major ways. -DM] I keep...
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Posted on April 18, 2008 6:08 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As we discussed in two prior posts, the Society for Neuroscience has driven forward an experiment in the peer review of neuroscience manuscripts. The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium seeks to streamline the peer review process by re-using the initial set...
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Posted on April 4, 2008 9:50 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship I noticed a commenter musing: I'd be interested to know how many readers of this blog have actual formal training in the task of review (here I make a strong distinction from training...
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Posted on March 27, 2008 3:12 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In a recent post Uncertain Chad opines that a "very good reason" for the "veil of confidentiality surrounding tenure decisions" is so that external referees will be free to derail someone's career with unsubstantiated accusations of scientific misconduct. This is...
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Posted on March 26, 2008 3:19 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A group of research institutes have apparently banded together to discuss the dismal prospects of younger and transitioning research scientists, producing a slick overview document hosted at brokenpipeline.org. Participating institutions include Harvard, Brown, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Duke Medicine, Partner's Healthcare and...
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Posted on March 11, 2008 2:11 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Apologies DearReader, we've been slacking in our duties around here (writedit is, of course, up to date). The NIH "Enhancing Peer Review" website has the Final Draft of the NIH 2007-2008 Peer Review Self-Study available as a PDF. The NIH...
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Posted on March 7, 2008 12:44 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The peer-review of scientific papers is in one sense democratic and in another sense highly authoritarian and dictatorial. What is most important is that the scientific peers with the most appropriate level of expertise review a given manuscript which is...
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Posted on March 4, 2008 3:20 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
