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anonymous

Abstract Science - 5 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...bstract-science_b_1923214.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Oct 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 Oct 12
     
    "Scientific abstracts are the hooks attempting to capture a discerning reader's attention, the shortcuts saving the busy reader some time and the keys unlocking scientific knowledge for those lacking a portfolio of academic journal subscriptions. But don't be dismayed if you're still confused after reading an abstract multiple times. When writing this leading, summarizing paragraph of a scientific manuscript, researchers often make mistakes. Some authors include too much information about the experimental methods while forgetting to announce what they actually discovered. Others forget to include any methodology at all. Sometimes the scientists fail to divulge why they even conducted the study in the first place, yet feel comfortable boldly speculating with a loose-fitting claim of general importance. Nevertheless, the abstract serves a critical importance and every science enthusiast needs to become comfortable with reading them."
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Erik Hanson on 05 Oct 12
     
    Took at class (well, more than one) with the UChicago professional writing program (http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/courses/index.htm). There was a lot of hammering this home to the writers of those abstracts, too. We've got all these forms, and it's not always clear to the reader or writer what's expected of those forms. This does not lead to effective communication.
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 12
     
    Too true. Sadly, it's a lesson that still lost on some pretty senior P.I.'s, who think that 'lay summary' means simply spelling out all their acronyms.
  • Erik Hanson on 05 Oct 12
     
    Honestly, this can be really hard and time-intensive work for some people. Some people understand what they need to do, but end up taking (usually very jargon-filled) shortcuts. I understand that, but I also know that it gets faster and easier with practice.
  • Erik Hanson on 05 Oct 12
     
    Or hire an editor.
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 12
     
    It would be interesting to see how much purchase a suggestion like that receives. I suspect more than a few PI's would find the notion insulting because they've been doing it for years, and some of these really technical publications have been tolerating it for so long. For my part as an Admin, I would review the lay summary and give my impressions, which would then get (mostly) completely ignored. :)
  • Erik Hanson on 05 Oct 12
     
    A _lot_ of people don't think they need professional writing and editing help. After all, they learned to write years ago.
anonymous

Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

shared by anonymous on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article).
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic.
  • Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime.
  • Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
  • In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.
  • And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise.
  • “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990.
  • The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
  • When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
  • What might be done to shore it up?
  • One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns.
  • Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.
  • Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.
  • (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
  • Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication.
  • Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting” work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it.
  • Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong.
  • anonymous on 19 Oct 13
     
    "A SIMPLE idea underpins science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better."
anonymous

Many say the peer review system is broken. Here's how some journals are trying to fix it. - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/...1

layscience publications manuscripts

shared by anonymous on 01 Sep 10 - Cached
  • But several journals, including Biology Direct, where Kaplan is an editor, have decided to eliminate anonymity from the peer review process altogether. “Under the Biology Direct model, everything is transparent, and everything is in the open,” says Eugene Koonin, one of the journal’s editors-in-chief.
  • anonymous on 01 Sep 10
     
    "It's become adversarial," agrees molecular biologist Keith Yamamoto of the University of California, San Francisco, who co-chaired the National Institutes of Health 2008 working group to revamp peer review at the agency. With the competition for shrinking funds and the ever-pervasive "publish or perish" mindset of science, "peer review has slipped into a situation in which reviewers seem to take the attitude that they are police, and if they find [a flaw in the paper], they can reject it from publication." By Jef Akst at I Hate Your Paper on August 1, 2010.
anonymous

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline - 0 views

flowingdata.com/...time-a-history-of-the-timeline

visualization timeline

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 10
     
    By Nathan at FlowingData on April 19, 2010.
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