sennoma's Feed

Public Rambling: Name that lab ...

sennoma — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:35:00 -0500

Tagged by sennoma under lostart, scienceasabusiness, scienceisasnakepit, management,

Great Science, Great Scientists, and Icons

sennoma — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:12:00 -0500

NIH grants vs. investigator age Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit, science.numbers, science.funding,

Science & Sensibility » Can we improve research by crowd sourcing peer review?

sennoma — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:06:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under oa.laymanuse, oaos.examples, scienceisasnakepit,

PLoS ONE: Empirical Study of Data Sharing by Authors Publishing in PLoS Journals

sennoma — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:23:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under opendata, openscience, scienceisasnakepit, scholarlycommunication,

PLoS Biology: Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research

sennoma — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:59:00 -0400

After more than 40 years of full-time research in developmental biology and genetics, I wrote my first grant and showed it to those experienced in grantsmanship. They advised me my application would not succeed. I had explained that we didn't know what experiments might deliver, and had acknowledged the technical problems that beset research and the possibility that competitors might solve problems before we did. My advisors said these admissions made the project look precarious and would sink the application. I was counselled to produce a detailed, but straightforward, program that seemed realistic—no matter if it were science fiction. I had not mentioned any direct application of our work: we were told a plausible application should be found or created. I was also advised not to put our very best ideas into the application as it would be seen by competitors—it would be safer to keep those ideas secret. Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

PLoS Medicine: Ghostwriting: The Dirty Little Secret of Medical Publishing That Just Got Bigger

sennoma — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:35:00 -0400

If you are an editor, author, reviewer, or reader of medical journals, or if you depend on your doctor or health care provider getting unbiased information from medical journals, then the 1,500 documents now hosted on the PLoS Medicine Web site [1] should make you very concerned and angry. Because, quite simply, the story told in these documents amounts to one of the most compelling expositions ever seen of the systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners in their attempt to influence the health care decisions of physicians and the general public. Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit, ghostwriting,

Vital Signs - Awareness - Clinical Trial Rule Is Widely Ignored - NYTimes.com

sennoma — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:26:00 -0400

Many researchers are ignoring a 2005 requirement that they register proposed clinical trials in a government database as a condition for publishing their results in medical journals. And the journals are publishing the papers anyway, a new study reveals. The study, a review of 323 articles published last year in leading medical journals, found that only 147 of the clinical trials — 45.5 percent — were properly registered before the end of the trial in a way that clearly stated the main outcomes being assessed. Even among the articles that were registered, almost a third had discrepancies between the outcomes described in the registry and the ones ultimately reported. Of the trials that were not registered properly, 89 — more than half — were never entered in the National Institutes of Health’s clinical trials registry. The report appears in the Sept. 2 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. Tagged by sennoma under clinicaltrials, scienceisasnakepit,

Medical ghostwriting and the role of the 'author' who acts as the sheet. : Adventures in Ethics and Science

sennoma — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:37:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

Dèjà Vu all over again | RIN

sennoma — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:03:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers caught falsifying data in animal studies. : Adventures in Ethics and Science

sennoma — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:59:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

Salary Information — PhDs.org: Science, Math, and Engineering Career Resources

sennoma — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:02:00 -0400

Some of the salaries look very attractive, but what these surveys never indicate is the low, low probability of ever attaining any such position. Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

How to discourage scientific fraud. : Adventures in Ethics and Science

sennoma — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:27:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under lostart, scienceisasnakepit,

Fraud, rehabilitation, and the persistence of information on the internet. : Adventures in Ethics and Science

sennoma — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:26:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under lostart, scienceisasnakepit,

PLoS ONE: Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research

sennoma — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:57:00 -0400

Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field. Here we provide empirical support for this prediction. We evaluate published statements on protein interactions with data from high-throughput experiments. We find evidence for two distinctive effects. First, with increasing popularity of the interaction partners, individual statements in the literature become more erroneous. Second, the overall evidence on an interaction becomes increasingly distorted by multiple independent testing. Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit, misconduct,

Publishing Ethics | RIN

sennoma — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:25:00 -0400

I was on Friday at the Royal Society, speaking at the annual seminar for learned societies held by Wiley-Blackwell. There were a number of interesting presentations, not least that from Gavin Sharrock on publishing ethics. His theme was how ethics had risen to become a much more important issue for publishers than it had been only a few years ago, with increases in the number of cases of malpractice, and of retractions of journal articles. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is doing valuable work in this area, and most publishers now have established procedures for dealing with such problems. But I had not realised that retractions at Wiley-Blackwell are now running at more than one a week. Publication ethics are a matter not just for publishers, of course, and they are at least mentioned in many of the codes of practice for research that are now proliferating (see for example the draft code recently issued by the UK Research Integrity Office). One of the points made in discussion by journal editors was that when problems of this kind arise, they can find themselves involved in many different sets of procedures, run by research funders or institutions, or in some parts of the world in formal legal proceedings. The relationships between these different sets of procedures can be highly complex, and also, of course, time cosuming. This is an issue that is going to have to be addressed if the number of cases conntinues to rise Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

Why Academia Slows the Search for Cures | Newsweek Voices - Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com

sennoma — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 08:51:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under structureofscience, scienceisasnakepit, benchtobedside, researchROI,

Dr. David Goodstein -- Recent Articles

sennoma — Sat, 30 May 2009 06:10:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under postdocproblem, scienceisasnakepit, davidgoodstein,

PLoS ONE: How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data

sennoma — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:34:00 -0400

A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct. Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

Nautilus: Nature Immunology on authorship policy

sennoma — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:23:00 -0400

Music to my ears: "new responsibilities were announced for 'senior authors'. These responsibilities include ensuring that the original data described in the study are preserved and retrievable for reanalysis, confirming that the data presented in the manuscript are representative of the original data collected, and anticipating and minimizing any obstacles to the sharing of data, reagents, materials or algorithms described in the published work." Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit, scholarlycommunication,

Stimulus Funding Elicits a Tidal Wave of 'Challenge Grants' -- Kaiser 324 (5929): 867 -- Science

sennoma — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:35:00 -0400

A frantic grant-writing effort that has consumed biomedical research scientists this spring came to an end last week, resulting in a huge pile of new applications—more than 10 times larger than expected—to be reviewed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After this enthusiastic response, there will be many disappointed applicants: The rejection rate could run as high as 97%. Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,