Tag Archives: impact factor
Getting rid of the GRE
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test whose purpose I could never … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged academic diversity, Cornell University, Educational Testing Service, graduate studies, GRE examination, H-index, higher education, impact factor, PhD, scientometrics
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Defending philosophy of science
From Carl Bergstrom’s Twitter thread about a new book called How Irrationality Created Modern Science, by Michael Strevens: The Iron Rule from the book is, in Bergstrom’s retelling, “no use of philosophical reasoning in the mode of Aristotle; no leveraging … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged Against Method, impact factor, Iron Rule of Explanation, Michael Strevens, objectivity, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Dawkins, scientific method, self-correcting
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The scientist as inadvertent loser
Twice this week, I’d had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one of the chief USPs of preprint repositories … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics journal, citation, citation racket, H-index, impact factor, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Kuo-Chen Chou, Lorenz attractor, peer review, post-publication peer-review, preprint papers, preprint repositories, reviewer coercion, scientific research, transparency, trustlessness
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To see faces where there are none
This week in “neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they’re doing”: a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and whose institution’s media office crafted a press release without thinking … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged arXiv, Björn Brembs, conspiracy theories, Elisabeth Bik, image manipulation, impact factor, Ingelfinger rule, journal rank, Nature Medicine, Ohio State University, open knowledge, pareidolia, peer review, preprints, research fraud, William Romoser
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The cycle
Is it just me or does everyone see a self-fulfilling prophecy here? For a long time, and assisted ably by the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, researchers sought to have their papers published in high-impact-factor journals – a.k.a. prestige journals – … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged for-profit publishing, impact factor, Nature journal, peer review, prestige bias, prestige journals, publish or perish, scientific publishing
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Why are the Nobel Prizes still relevant?
Note: A condensed version of this post has been published in The Wire. Around this time last week, the world had nine new Nobel Prize winners in the sciences (physics, chemistry and medicine), all but one of whom were white … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Op-eds, Science
Tagged Abhijit Banerjee, Albert Einstein, Appa Rao Podile, Booker Prize, Brian Keating, Caltech, Chien-Shiung Wu, CV Raman, Esther Duflo, Fermilab, gender-based discrimination, Göran Hansson, Hindutva, Hugo Award, impact factor, Isaac Asimov, John B Goodenough, late capitalism, Lise Meitner, Margaret Atwood, nationalism, Nature journal, Nobel laureates, Nobel Prize, prestige bias, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sexism, The Big Bang Theory, Vera Rubin
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The case for preprints
Daniel Mansur, the principal investigator of a lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina that studies how cells respond to viruses, had this to say about why preprints are useful in an interview to eLife: Let’s say the paper that … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged impact factor, paywall, preprints, research, scientific publishing
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Priggish NEJM editorial on data-sharing misses the point it almost made
The editorial expresses fear that people who publish in the journal’s pages could be wrong – cleanly forgetting that replication and revalidation are a big part of science. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged data sharing, funnel plot, impact factor, John Ioannidis, New England Journal of Medicine, reproducibility, retraction index, Simone Schnall, Social Psychology
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