Science Practice
clock | March 10, 2009Web usage data outline map of knowledge:
When users click from one page to another while looking through online scientific journals, they generate a chain of connections between things they think belong together. Now a billion such 'clickstream events' have been analysed by researchers to map these connections on a grand scale.
The work provides a fascinating snapshot of the web of interconnections between disciplines, which some data-mining experts believe reveals the degree to which work that is not often cited -- including work in the social sciences and humanities -- is widely consulted…
clock | March 2, 2009Douglas Kell: The Matthew effect in Science - citing the most cited:
The Matthew effect applies to journals and papers too - a highly cited journal or paper is likely to attract more citations (and mis-citations), probably for the simple psychological reasoning that 'if so many people cite it, it must be a reasonable paper to cite' (and such a paper is, by definition, more likely to appear in the reference list of another paper). Clearly that reasoning can be applied whether the paper has been read or otherwise. Simkin and Roychowdhury (2005 and 2007) note that a clear pointer to the citation…
clock | March 2, 2009Archy does an amazing detective job on who stole what from whom in the old literature on mammoths, going back all the way to Lyell!
Then, as much of that literature is very old, he provides us with a history and timeline of the ideas of copyright and plagiarism so we could have a better grasp on the sense of the time in which these old copy+paste jobs were done.
clock | February 26, 2009Another editorial about science blogging today, this time in Nature Methods: Lines of communication:
The public likes science stories it can easily relate to, and we have to admit that most science, including that published in Nature Methods, is unlikely to get more than a snore from nonscientists. In contrast, science stories that have a human interest or other emotionally charged angle require the concerted efforts of both journalists and scientists to ensure that the public understands the story well enough to make an informed personal decision. A failure in this regard can lead to a…
clock | February 24, 2009The very first, inaugural, and absolutely amazing edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival is now up on Urban Science Adventures. Wow! Just wow! Totally amazing stuff.
And what a reminder of my White privilege - a couple of names there are familiar to me, as I have read their papers before, never ever stopping to think who they were or how they looked like! What a wake-up call!
For instance, I have read several papers by Chana Akins, as she works on Japanese quail. And I am somewhat familiar (being a history buff and obsessive reader of literature in my and related fields) with the work…
clock | February 19, 2009Mrs.Coturnix and I arrived nicely in NYC last night and had a nice dinner at Heartland Brewery. This morning, we had breakfast at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where I ordered my pastry using a Serbian name for the cake, and the Albanian woman working in the Hungarian shop understood what I wanted! I forgot to bring my camera with me today, and Mrs.Coturnix did not bring her cable, so the pictures of the pastries will have to wait our return home.
Then, Mrs.Coturnix went for a long walk (it was nice in the morning, got cold in the afternoon), ending up in the Met. I joined my co-panelists Jean-…
clock | February 10, 2009Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I complained that Triangle is too narrow a term for a Hub at Nature Network, as there is really no humongous city where everything is centered but the science is distributed all around the state of North Carolina, with people collaborating with each other and traveling back and forth between various regions of the state.
Well, now, to reflect that situation, the Triangle group on Nature Network was renamed the North Carolina group. If it grows in size, it may one day become a proper Hub. So, if you are in any way interested in science and live anywhere in…
clock | February 9, 2009I will be on a panel, Open Science: Good For Research, Good For Researchers? next week, February 19th (3:00 to 5:00 pm EST at Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Shapiro CEPSR Building, Davis Auditorium). I am sure my hosts will organize something for us that day before and/or after the event, but Mrs.Coturnix and I will be there a couple of days longer. So, I think we should have a meetup - for Overlords, SciBlings, Nature Networkers, independent bloggers, readers and fans ;-)
Is Friday evening a good time for this? Or is Saturday better? Let me know.
You can follow the panel on…
clock | February 5, 2009That was last week, but I had no time to listen until now - check out the podcast (in the upper left corner of the page):
In 1989, Dr. Harold Varmus won a Nobel Prize for his cancer research. He was director of the National Institutes of Health during the Clinton administration, and now heads the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Recently, President Obama named him to co-chair his Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. And he's written a new book, "The Art and Politics of Science." In this segment, Ira talks with Harold Varmus about his work, biological research, and the…
clock | January 8, 2009Michael Nielsen posted today the first part of his look at peer-review: Three myths about scientific peer review:
What's the future of scientific peer review? The way science is communicated is currently changing rapidly, leading to speculation that the peer review system itself might change. For example, the wildly successful physics preprint arXiv is only very lightly moderated, which has led many people to wonder if the peer review process might perhaps die out, or otherwise change beyond recognition.
I'm currently finishing up a post on the future of peer review, which I'll post in the…
clock | December 21, 2008There was a good reason why the form and format, as well as the rhetoric of the scientific paper were instituted the way they were back in the early days of scientific journals. Science was trying to come on its own and to differentiate itself from philosophy, theology and lay literature about nature. It was essential to develop a style of writing that is impersonal, precise, sharply separating data from speculations, and that lends itself to replication of experiments.
The form and format of a scientific paper has evolved towards a very precise and very universal state that makes scientist-…
clock | December 18, 2008Publish in Wikipedia or perish:
Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.
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The RNA wiki is a subset of a broader project, the WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has marshalled hundreds of scientists to improve the content of biology articles in Wikipedia. It, in turn, is collaborating with the Novartis Research Foundation on GeneWiki 3, an effort to…
clock | December 18, 2008Kausik Datta asks:
There may be someone among us who has had this happen to him or her at some point or other: You embark on a new project in uncharted territories with gusto, your goal being gathering preliminary data that would aid generation of a hypothesis. You get data, analyze trends, feel excited, write it up and send it to YFJ (your favorite journal) - and the journal rejects it, saying, variously, "the scope of the study does not suit this journal", "the data presented are too preliminary", or the devastating "the research contains no novel finding".
On another side, you want to work…
clock | December 18, 2008Bob Grant, over on The Scientist's blog, describes a recent kerfuffle over a Cell paper and what it says about peer-review. The 40 comments on the post are already there with some interesting additional perspectives:
Improper citation, disregard for antecedent research, and shoddy experimentation - those are just a few of the allegations levied against a recent research paper written by a team of Stanford University scientists.
One of the paper's chief critics, University of Cambridge biologist Peter Lawrence, says that the problems with the publication exemplify a broader problem in…
clock | December 15, 2008Pawel tried, for a year, to be a freelance scientist. While the experiment did not work, in a sense that it had to end, he has learned a lot from the experience. And all of us following his experience also learned a lot about the current state of the world. And I do not think this has anything to do with Pawel living in Poland - I doubt this would have been any different if he was in the USA or elsewhere.
You all know that I am a big fan of telecommuting and coworking and one of the doomsayers about the future existence of the institution of 'The Office'. And you also know that I am a…
clock | December 13, 2008This one is good and thorough - by Colin Purrington, Department of Biology, Swarthmore College. Short excerpt from the beginning:
Why a poster is usually better than a talk
Although you could communicate all of the above via a 15-minute talk at the same meeting, presenting a poster allows you to more personally interact with the people who are interested in your research, and can reach people who might not be in your specific field of research. Posters are more efficient than a talk because they can be viewed even while you are off napping, and especially desirable if you are terrible at…
clock | December 12, 2008On arXiv, by M. E. J. Newman (Santa Fe Institute):
We investigate the structure of scientific collaboration networks. We consider two scientists to be connected if they have authored a paper together, and construct explicit networks of such connections using data drawn from a number of databases, including MEDLINE (biomedical research), the Los Alamos e-Print Archive (physics), and NCSTRL (computer science). We show that these collaboration networks form "small worlds" in which randomly chosen pairs of scientists are typically separated by only a short path of intermediate acquaintances. We…
clock | December 12, 2008From Reproducible Ideas:
Even when lab work and statistical analysis carried out perfectly, microarray experiment conclusions have a high probability of being incorrect for probabilistic reasons. Of course lab work and statistical analysis are not carried out perfectly. I went to a talk earlier this week that demonstrated reproducibility problems coming both from the wet lab and from the statistical analysis.
Continue the discussion here....
clock | December 10, 2008Yesterday's PhD comic strip:
We still have ways to go until we get it right....
clock | November 28, 2008The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally.
Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It is interesting how cultural…