Category Archives: Philosophy

Journal Hijacking

It’s not easy to monitor science output. This may be particular true when it comes to Journal Hijacking. In brief

The Spanish journal Afinidad has been hijacked. Someone has set up a fake website for the journal and is soliciting submissions and payments from the authors in accordance with the gold open-access model.

With the recent quality of some scholarly journals I feel they may have been highjacked too: typing errors, omission of references, major misunderstandings, logical errors, you name it.


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Academics – the most status-conscious people in the world?

Edge sends me an email today

The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they believe they’re completely immune to status considerations and consider themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space from an academic and see how long he stays. I always find this very strange when you occasionally get in the realm of happiness research, you get fairly considerable assaults on consumerism as if it’s just mindless status seeking. Now, the point of the matter is, is that academics are just as guilty of the original crime, they just pursue status in a different way.

True? True!


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Looks really good on paper?

Chinese science hasn’t the best reputation at all. A new piece at the Economist now shows that

by volume the output of Chinese science is impressive .. The number grew from a negligible share in 2001 to 9.5% in 2011, second in the world to America, according to a report published by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China. From 2002 to 2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others.

But wait

A hint of the relative weakness of these papers is found in the fact that China ranks just 14th in average citations per SCI paper, suggesting that many Chinese papers are rarely quoted by other scholars.

So, they are now overdoing it even more than Euopean scholars who are already crazy at getting as many papers published irrespective of any science behind.


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For research use only!

I am currently writing a piece on genetic testing, basically arguing that genetic testing is still a research method and whole genome sequencing nothing for prime time as basically now summarized also in JAMA:

In this exploratory study of 12 volunteer adults, the use of WGS was associated with incomplete coverage of inherited disease genes, low reproducibility of detection of genetic variation with the highest potential clinical effects, and uncertainty about clinically reportable findings. In certain cases, WGS will identify clinically actionable genetic variants warranting early medical intervention. These issues should be considered when determining the role of WGS in clinical medicine.

Maybe the judgment of any scientific method was largely limited to experts about 20 years ago. You had to know something about research, you had to go to a library, you had to find the relevant information and eventually put it into the right context. Only a few people and only a few journalists could do that. (and only the latter would even publish their opinion).
This has completely changed with so many research papers now being published online. There is no more gate, no more gatekeeper. It means, however, that research papers are frequently misinterpreted – from patient advocacy groups to companies to medical doctors. I would wish that research papers would carry a “For research use only!” label as printed on many bottles with enzymes, antibodies and alike (Medical information is otherwise still restricted in Germany to physicians, pharmacies and medical staff). Given that rather muddle-headed situation in genetic testing, I think the new JAMA paper is a welcome recommendation for everybody!

incomplete … low reproducibility .. uncertainty

yea, yea.


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The human disease network (no need to call it diseasome)

There was the 2077 Goh PNAS paper using that title. And it is a sound approach probably better than any division of chapters in Harrison’s Internal Medicine!

A network of disorders and disease genes linked by known disorder–gene associations offers a platform to explore in a single graph-theoretic framework all known phenotype and disease gene associations, indicating the common genetic origin of many diseases. Genes associated with similar disorders show both higher likelihood of physical interactions between their products and higher expression profiling similarity for their transcripts, supporting the existence of distinct disease-specific functional modules. We find that essential human genes are likely to encode hub proteins and are expressed widely in most tissues.

I found this on a slide at the recent vitamin D congress in London and was just interested to see, how often this paper has been cited. So far as I remember only the Barabasi update. And the result is impressing Continue reading The human disease network (no need to call it diseasome)


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Research research

I have no idea why this took ages – a meta-research institute that is run by experienced researchers . Yes, experienced researchers and not just by an EU, agency or a local government body that relies mainly on its common sense, its  self-constructed evaluation scale and influenced by a political agenda. Continue reading Research research


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One of my biggest problems

One of my biggest problems in science certainly is the motivation of finding truth. But as Oliver Burkeman puts it correctly

Even in the world of academia, most people aren’t motivated by the truth. What they want, above all, is not to be bored

And he continues to cite Murray Davis

What is it, Davis asks, that makes certain thinkers – Marx, Freud, Nietzsche – legendary? “It has long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true,” he writes, “but this is false. A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting.”

Yea, yea, that’s true.


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Forschung aus fairer Produktion

Davon habe ich heute das erste mal gelesen und zwar auf dem academics.de blog der auf einen ZEIT Artikel vom 15.3. zurückgeht

Hans-Jochen Schiewer hat eine lange Ausbildung genossen. Inklusive Schulzeit dauerte sie vier Jahrzehnte. An der Uni musste er sich auf einem halben Dutzend Stationen mit befristeten Verträgen bewähren. Als er endlich seine erste feste Stelle erhielt, eine Professur für Germanistik, war der Dauerazubi grau an den Schläfen und 46 Jahre alt.
Heute ist Hans-Jochen Schiewer fast weiß auf dem Kopf und selbst Chef einer dieser seltsamen Arbeitgeber namens Hochschule. Seine eigene Ochsentour hat der Rektor der Universität Freiburg nicht vergessen. Es könne nicht angehen, dass “die Universitäten ihren Nachwuchs bis Anfang vierzig in Unsicherheit und Unselbstständigkeit halten”, kritisiert Schiewer heute.

Der Marsch durch die Institutionen hat 1967 begonnen. Wenn ich rechne, dann hatten die Studenten 1967 schon die ersten 15 der 40 Jahre hinter sich. Dann hätten sie eigentlich kurz nach der Jahrtausendwende ankommen sollen. Es sind aber offensichtlich nun erst die Babyboomer, die den Millenials ein besseres Leben ermöglichen wollen, yea, yea.


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Veracity

It is a rather old topic here at Science Surf –searching for truth in science while here is a fresh new look.  How can we trust twitter messages and alike, is there any truth in big data?  What is just an internet meme?  Or a phenomenon — a meaning what is experienced as given? A pheme? A new EU project explains Continue reading Veracity


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Why we are addicted to science

This is a question that has neither a quick nor a simple answer. Spontaneously, I would not talk about the challenge but the reward system included. Maybe the addiction question ( and it is indeed an addiction for some people ) can be answered by analogy of a much simpler experiment using the “Candy Crush Saga” app that works extensively with audiovisual rewards. Even time.com is now writing about this app and identifies 9 key issues: Continue reading Why we are addicted to science


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Science delusion

It is a bit annoying. If you google for science delusion, you are only referred to Sheldrake. But this is not what I wanted, I was more interested in mad scientists.  Not Frankenstein,  not Moreau not Dr. Faustus not any literary character, some more real life figures. Also not Venter. But here comes something interesting

In 1951, entomologist Jay Traver published in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington [Traver, J. (1951). Unusual scalp dermatitis in humans caused by the mite, dermatophagoides (Acarina, epidermoptidae). Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 53(1), 1-25.] her personal experiences with a mite infestation of her scalp that resisted all treatment and was undetectable to anyone other than herself. Traver is recognized as having suffered from Delusory Parasitosis: her paper shows her to be a textbook case of the condition. The Traver paper is unique in the scientific literature in that its conclusions may be based on data that was unconsciously fabricated by the author’s mind.

The author ( Matan Shelomi, Mad Scientist: The Unique Case of a Published Delusion Matan Shelomi, Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:381-388) believes that a possible retraction of the 1951 paper raises the issue of discrimination against the mentally ill –  others may consider this as delusionary correctness.


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Payback for referees

There is a recent letter at Nature saying

I have discovered a negative correlation between the number of papers that a scientist publishes per year and the number of times that that scientist is willing to accept manuscripts for review  … I therefore suggest that journals should ask senior authors to provide evidence of their contribution to peer review as a condition for considering their manuscripts.

While I agree with the overall observation, Continue reading Payback for referees


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A Science career should not be like a Mastermind game

You do an experiment or a clinical study and you are the code braker not knowing the peg positions and colors ( set by a code maker ).

The codebreaker tries to guess the pattern, in both order and color, within twelve (or ten, or eight) turns. Each guess is made by placing a row of code pegs on the decoding board. Once placed, the codemaker provides feedback by placing from zero to four key pegs in the small holes of the row with the guess. Continue reading A Science career should not be like a Mastermind game


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