There is an excellent comment on research misconduct at the brand new Pubmed Commons site by Dorothy Bishop:
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Instead of valuing papers in top journals, we should be valuing research replicability. This would entail a massive change in our culture, but a start has already been made in my discipline of psychology (see http://www.nature.com). Continue reading Value replicability not journal impact
The JCI has a nice series of video interviews with Marc Feldmann, Thomas Südhof, John T Potts, Aaron Ciechanover, Bruce Beutler, Jon Oates, Christine Seidman, Stephen O’Rahilly, Bruce Spiegelman, Paul Greencard, Jeffrey Friedman, Eugene Braunwald, Thomas Starzl, Francis Collins, Paul Marks, Joan Wilson, Donald Seldin, Tadataka Tachi Yamada, Llloyd Hollingsworth Smith, Robert Lefkowitz, Joseph Goldstein, Michael Brown, Harold E. Varmus.
The next generation is at the WALS board.
Here is a recent interview transcript of Bruce Beutler
JCI: Would you advise any of your trainees to have the same drive and motivation you did to go after one singular problem with the same kind of tenacity that you had?
Beutler: I was often told by people, including by my father, that I was putting all of my eggs in one basket. But I must say in retrospect, if we hadn’t been focused and committed to one problem, we probably wouldn’t have got there. It was risky but I would counsel people to undertake high-risk projects and do them serially, rather than to work in parallel with a number of low-risk projects.
Maybe it is easier to answer that question if you are a noble winner. The Guardian is reporting two days ago
Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a “tyranny” that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications…
Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.
With the large distribution factor of the internet, I think there is nothing to loose by sending a paper to PLoS or some of the BMC journals. Quality will survive, yea, yea.
For a long time this has been a general rule. Just take the mean and substract two standard deviations and you get some useful reference values. Or whatever algorithm you like. This changed considerably where commercial or any other personal interests come into play. The cholesterin discussion settled only by studies showing that people with a history of cardiovascular disease may derive benefit from statins irrespective of their cholesterol levels.
I see some analogy in the vitamin D field. There is a German dermatologist who believes that 60% of all Germans are vitamin D deficient (the comments following the interview highlight this as an epiphany “totale Erleuchtung”). And a more recent paper showed that “89.9%” of all healthy newborns being insufficient. Really looks like a mix-up of some basic concepts in clinical medicine, yea, yea.
Just recently I cam across a long forgotten CIBA Foundation Symposium and they had some nice discussion printed there – conserved for eternity while I think that all these researchgate whatever forums are volatile, yea, yea.
Nature recently raised an extremely important point
Research metrics are ambiguous — a paper may be cited for positive or negative reasons. Funding agencies and universities focus on positive impact in evaluating research, which increasingly includes alternative metrics. We think that researchers can generate a more complete account of their impact by including seemingly negative indicators — such as confrontations with important people or legal action — as well as those that seem positive.
Yea, yea.
Wie oft habe ich den Satz in den letzten Wochen schon gehört… und er wird durch die häufige Wiederholung nicht richtiger. Denn natürlich habe ich etwas zu verbergen, wie die meisten Menschen, ich bin sogar vom Staat zum Arztgeheimnis verpflichtet worden.
Hier kommt jedenfalls ein sehr detailliertes Video für alle “die nichts zu verbergen haben”.
e! Science News reports a new study in EPJ Data Science by Marcel Salathé showing that anti-vaccination sentiments spread more easily than pro-vaccination sentiments.
We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious
Read the full paper for the tricky design – at least the results fully underpin daily life experience. It’s certainly much easier to do Twitter than Facebook studies on the other hand these rather short messages are certainly not the main channel of many great “opinionated” people.
The turn of the year may not only indicate many new chances but also allow a higher standpoint. IMHO the best paper in the vitamin field was published by Rousseau Gama in the BMJ 2012;345 :e5706.
We measured serum C reactive protein and 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations before and two days after elective knee or hip surgery in 30 patients. After surgery the mean serum concentration of C reactive protein increased (5.0 (SD 5.5) v 116.0 (81.2) mg/L; P <0.0001), whereas serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D decreased (56.2 (30.3) v 46.0 (27.6) nmol/L; P <0.0006).
The reasons are not fully clear but the results are consistent with two other studies reporting a fall in serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration during a systemic inflammatory response. So, it looks like 1 simple study will make 1000 other studies useless. That seems to be the beauty of science… although I do not understand how that related to a serum half-life of two weeks?
So far I argued that vitamin D is always a lifestyle proxy e.g. pubmed/22698792) but there maybe also biological reasons.
BTW I would also have a candidate for the worst vitamin D paper, just in case, ….
Genomes Unzipped just published guidelines for tweeting at conferences.
Check the conference social media guidelines first. Continue reading A new dress code, ahem write code, for conferences
We were recently dicussing that problem too what Nature writes about the Encode project:
The question is, where to stop? Kellis says that some experimental approaches could hit saturation points: if the rate of discoveries falls below a certain threshold, the return on each experiment could become too low to pursue
As always – the scientific method once invoked – creates beautiful results but when it comes to justification of programs or methods it’s all about personal preferences, irrational beliefs, common misunderstandings, conformance to general trends, and whatsoever non-scientific influences.
Retractions are increasing anytime I look around retraction watch. A new PNAS paper now has the most thorough analysis of retractions:
A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%) …fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975.
So, fraud is the most frequent cause – and it usually does not come isolated Continue reading The true reason for retractions?
Found an interesting comment in Nature Sept, 13, p177
All existing metrics capture only what a scientist has done, not what he or she would be able capable to.
I am not sure Continue reading A future predicting metrics for scientists?
Nature 486, 157 (14 June 2012) warns:
Scientists discussing their work through written media, including e-mail, should be aware that they could at any time be asked to reveal their conversations.”You are commanded to produce…any and all documents, data, and/or communications.” Towards the end of last year, those orders appeared in a subpoena that landed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
so please write me private things only in a closed letter. Maybe it’s not such a problem Continue reading Warning: Reply to all