bjoern.brembs.blog

The blog of neurobiologist Björn Brembs

Search

Main Menu

  • Home
  • About
  • Publications
  • Citations
  • Downloads
  • Resume
  • Interests
  • Contact
  • Archive

Tag Cloud

behavior brain career chance classical competition conditioning data decision-making Drosophila Elsevier evolution FoxP free will fun funders GlamMagz impact factor infrastructure journal rank journals libraries mandates neurogenetics neuroscience open access open data open science operant peer-review politics postdoc poster publishers publishing retractions SciELO science self-learning SfN spontaneity subscriptions Twitter variability video

Categories

  • blogarchives
  • I get email
  • news
  • own data
  • personal
  • random science video
  • researchblogging
  • science
  • science news
  • science politics
  • server
  • Tweetlog
  • Uncategorized

Recent Downloads

Icon
Rechnungshof und DEAL 85 downloads 0.00 KB
Download
Icon
Are Libraries Violating Procurement Rules? 383 downloads 0.00 KB
Download
Icon
Comments from DFG Neuroscience panel 658 downloads 0.00 KB
Download
Icon
How to improve motor learning in Drosophila 1556 downloads 0.00 KB
Download
Icon
Evidence for motor neuron plasticity as a major contributor to motor learning in Drosophila 1498 downloads 0.00 KB
Download
Jul05

…and now for some lock-picking cockatoos

In: random science video • Tags: cockatoos, exploration, operant, trial and error, video

Yesterday, Alex Kacelnik published yet another fascinating discovery – one of many over the years out of his lab. This time, they show how birds can pick even five consecutive locks to get to a food reward:

According to the authors, the birds solve this problem by trial and error, i.e., in the operant, goal-directed way, which is the learning mechanism we study in our lab.

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on July 5, 2013 at 13:23 Comments Off on …and now for some lock-picking cockatoos
Jul04

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

In: science politics • Tags: hyperlinks, literature, publishing, scholarly communication

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968:

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

Video von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden. Hinweise zum Datenschutz

On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, even before the scholarly literature was able to fully implement the technology he invented, 45 years and counting. You might wonder if I could provide you with evidence for the outrageous claim that such a standard technology that the internet (also invented by scientists) has been using for over 20 years cannot be used in the scholarly literature. Well, just go to any experimental paper and search for the methods section. Very often, you will find references there to previous work such as “experiments were performed as previously described (ref)”. If you read this in a PDF file, most likely all you will see then is a reference to the other paper. If you are lucky and read it in the HTML version online, you might get to see a link at the reference, sort of like this one (click for larger version):

hyperlinks

If you’re even more lucky, that link takes you to a paper that you can read and search for the actual passage where they describe the method. If you’re less lucky, you hit a paywall. But even if you get to read the paper, there may be just a reference to yet another paper and so on. In short, chances are, that you will have to spend considerable amount of time and effort (and perhaps money) if you want to find out what the authors actually did.

Why can’t we just link to the passage in the paper where the procedure is actually explained and then, when anybody clicks on that link, the pertinent section of the reference pops up? After all, this is what everybody else but scientists have been doing for over twenty years. When will scientists catch up to the rest of the world?

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on July 4, 2013 at 10:54 1 Comment
Jul03

Trying a new feature: Tweetlog

In: Tweetlog • Tags: Twitter

Following the example of Glyn Moody, I thought I’d start a log on the tweets I send around. One never knows what’ll happen to Twitter and besides, this provides a neat place to store and find everything. So here are the tweets for July first and second:

  • Where are we, what still needs to be done? Stevan Harnad on the State of Open Access https://poynder.blogspot.com/2013/07/where-are-we-what-still-needs-to-be.html
  • #Snowden could be offered witness protection in potential German federal anti-spy lawsuit (in German) https://spon.de/adYDF
  • Check out the slides from the talks at the @SPARC_EU session last week: https://sparceurope.org/presentations-sparc-europe-open-session-2013/
  • My latest upload : Sparc munich on @slideshare https://buff.ly/1cLdmUv
  • Mike Taylor’s brilliant analysis of #openaccess https://buff.ly/11WmBzH
  • Molecular and cellular mechanisms of dopamine-mediated behavioral plasticity in the striatum https://rss.sciencedirect.com/action/redirectFile?&zone=main&currentActivity=feed&usageType=outward&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%3F_ob%3DGatewayURL%26_origin%3DIRSSSEARCH%26_method%3DcitationSearch%26_piikey%3DS1074742713001056%26_version%3D1%26md5%3D328fc434bdba93f4374527256f8e9d5f
  • Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done? https://feedly.com/k/10v2kAg
  • Can GlamMag editors/authors count? Last sentence in abstract of https://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2676.html … via @Lab_Journal https://www.laborjournal.de/blog/?p=6531
  • Can’t wait to hear what they say when they find out about Drosophila and FoxP 🙂 From the Mouths of Babes and Birds https://buff.ly/128Vwoc
  • @Druidaeduardo The brain makes the mind real much like it makes colors real (analogy from Dennett): https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/06/free-w
  • Human behaviour: is it all in the brain – or the mind? https://gu.com/p/3gq5j/tw
  • Enough rhetoric. It’s evidence that should shape key public decisions https://gu.com/p/3hx3p/tw

That’s that for now. We’ll see how frequently I’ll be updating this category and for how long I manage to do it.

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on July 3, 2013 at 09:19 Comments Off on Trying a new feature: Tweetlog
Jun29

Amazing bead chain experiment

In: random science video • Tags: fun, physics, video
Amazing Slow Motion Bead Chain Experiment | Slow Mo | BBC Earth Explore
Amazing Slow Motion Bead Chain Experiment | Slow Mo | BBC Earth Explore

Video von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden. Hinweise zum Datenschutz

via io9

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 29, 2013 at 14:49 Comments Off on Amazing bead chain experiment
Jun27

#icanhazpdf more public than a publication?

In: science politics • Tags: Drosophila, open access, publishing, Twitter

This anecdote made my day today. On a Drosophila researcher mailinglist, someone asked if anybody on the list had access to the Landes Bioscience journal ‘Fly‘. I replied by wondering that if #icanhazpdf on Twitter didn’t work, the days of ‘Fly’ are probably counted, with nobody subscribing. A few minutes later, the author of the original email replied that he hadn’t dared using #icanhazpdf before emailing the list because the idea in the paper he was interested in was so easy to scoop, that he didn’t want people to know about the paper. He feared that the “broadcast approach” of #icanhazpdf would alert people to the paper!

In other words, at least in the perception of this one colleague, as long as nobody would draw attention to a peer-reviewed publication using Twitter, chances are low that anybody would pay attention to it. Obviously, the fact that a niche journal is behind a paywall contributes to this perception:

I'm amused that @FlyBaseDotOrg doesn't have free access to "Fly". I remember Michael Ashburner saying the lack of #oa would make it fail.

— Dr. Boris Adryan (@BorisAdryan) June 26, 2013

It is testament to our dysfunctional communication system that Twitter is perceived as a better medium to make a discovery public than a publication in a peer-reviewed, scientific journal. In a variation of an old saying, one could say: “if it isn’t on Twitter, it isn’t published”.

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 27, 2013 at 13:03 Comments Off on #icanhazpdf more public than a publication?
Jun21

Funder mandates: Are scientists like junkies?

In: science politics • Tags: funders, mandates, open access, publishing

Mike Taylor wrote about how frustrated he is that funders don’t issue stronger open access mandates with sharper teeth. He acknowledges that essentially, the buck stops with us, the scientists, but mentions that pressures on scientists effectively prevent them from driving publishing reform. Obviously, from the scientist’s perspective, this is a classic collective action problem: every scientist who would start boycotting corporate publishers would be risking their livelihood. On the other hand, if we all started to publish exclusively in a world-wide, federated scholarly communication system, based on a collective of SciELO or SHARE-like platforms, we would not only save billions in publishing costs every year and provide fully open access as an added benefit, but also no scientist would risk anything.

As I see it, there are two (clearly not mutually exclusive) approaches to this problem:

1. Ask for outside help. One can see scientists like junkies: they are addicted to publishing in the journals of parasitic publishers and can’t possibly wean themselves from their fix. This appears to be Mike’s position and Stevan Harnad‘s (although they probably might disagree on green vs. gold details). There is no doubt that this would work, if implemented as Mike and Stevan (and many others) argue. Thus, of course, it would be foolish to not embrace and welcome funder mandates.

2. Work on removing the pressures on scientists that prevents them from collective action. The fix is essentially mediated by the hierarchy of journals which bestows prestige on scientists and which decides who gets to keep their livelihoods and who don’t. To address this issue, we recently published a paper in which we outline that there is no empirical foundation for journal rank, in an attempt to effectively remove the fix.

While both approaches need to be pursued, personally, I strongly favor the second route. It annoys the hell out of me that we scientists creep and crawl on all fours to politicians, funders, publishers asking them to force us to do something we should bloody well be able to do ourselves: we broke the system, we fix it. Begging others to save us from the hell we created for ourselves is probably the one single most annoying aspect of the entire situation. We’re already living and researching off of people’s taxes and now we ask yet more for help – isn’t there anything we can do ourselves? Can’t we even get our own house in order without the help from someone who doesn’t have any direct responsibility for the quagmire?

I just can’t get over the humiliation that urging funders to do what we should be doing is essentially like saying: “we’re too weak to do it ourselves, please, in addition to all the money we’re already getting from you, could you please also do the mandates for us and, while you’re at it, shell out the dough to police and enforce the mandates?”

Funder mandates are great. They have been instrumental in getting us as far as we have gotten and while they are humiliating, they get the job done and work as advertised. Mike is correct in that they could have more teeth, but at least the funders have gotten the ball rolling with approach #1. When will we start to do our part and launch approach #2? Where’s the response from scientists saying: “thank you funders, here’s what we will do!” Instead, we keep pleading for yet more help.

Where’s the quid pro quo from us scientists? Does it always have to be a one-way highway of public service to the scientific community and none out of it? Is the scientific community really such a black-hole of public goods? Or is that just my myopic perspective?

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 21, 2013 at 15:27 2 Comments
Jun20

Free will: it’s not what you think it is

In: science • Tags: brain, free will, magic, nonlinearity

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the editors at the New York Times. The title of this op-ed piece says it all: “beyond the brain”. The author, David Brooks, claims: “The brain is not the mind.” Last I looked (which was a few seconds ago, I admit), beyond the brain was the Pia mater, the subarachnoid space, the Arachnoid, the dura mater and the skull. I wonder, just where precisely does the magic mind sit, if it’s not the brain? In the subarachnoid space, squeezed between layers of connective tissue and blood vessels? Or is it even beyond the skull, hovering above our heads? Now, Mr. Brooks doesn’t mention the Psychokinetic Energy Meter, but he makes it sound as if in his world this is the scientific instrument with which one would measure the capacity of the mind to move the body. Probably most disappointingly, Mr. Brooks bolsters his magic-mind hypothesis with the classic argument from incredulity: ‘I don’t understand it, so it must be magic’: “It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.” This is like saying “it’s probably impossible to build a heavier-than-air flying machine” before the Wright brothers’ first flight. More disturbingly, it’s like saying: “I don’t understand no evilution, therefore magic man dunnit”.

Mr. Brooks caps his magic-mind hypothesis off with a few short paragraphs essentially saying “we have free will because I think so, free will is magic, so there’s magic in the head – and science is too limited to get into magic, don’t you forget that!” Given that his main point is that the mind is magic, one can only assume that he means neuroscience is too limited to understand free will sort of like medicine is too limited to understand homeopathy and physics is too limited to understand astrology. This final point is probably the only accurate statement of the entire piece: magic in the head is about as thoroughly debunked as homeopathy or astrology.

What we call ‘mind’ exists in a similar way as colors exist: our brain creates it. Colors are real in the sense that our brain makes colors real, it constructs a reality with colors, but spectral properties of light are not colors. Just like colors, the mind, free will, are real, but not in the way Mr. Brooks apparently thinks: they’re not magic. Neural activity makes our minds just as real as colors, but neither are magic nor do they exist outside of our heads. The fact that we don’t understand, yet, how the brain does that, is not a valid reason to explain our ignorance away with magic, but a boon to neuroscientists (or we’d be unemployed). The correct answer to the question: “what is the mind?” is not “magic”, but “we don’t know how, but all the evidence says it’s our brain that somehow creates it”.

This very fundamental insight of the last 40 years or so of neuroscience, obviously entails that with every discovery we will be better able to predict future actions. If that seems disappointing, tough luck, live with it. Today, we clearly cannot “take pretty brain-scan images and […] use them to predict what product somebody will buy”, this is pop-neuroscience. However, much like we got better at predicting the weather by studying it, we will get better at predicting future actions by studying the brain – as we have already become much better over the last decades. Importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, we don’t need magic to understand that we will nevertheless, not even with unlimited time and resources, never be able to fully predict human behavior. Just like no neuroscientist postulates magic in our heads, no meteorologist would postulate that it’s magic that prevents us from making accurate weather forecasts and no astrophysicist would claim that magic messes with Pluto’s unpredictable orbit. Apparently, it will take a few more decades until it sinks in that the brain is a little more complex than the weather or our solar system. Anybody who thinks that the brain needs magic to bring about the mind with free will thoroughly underestimates it. Everybody and their grandma today has already realized that complex nonlinear dynamics (“butterfly effect”, “chaos” – coincidentally coined in the same decade that dualism essentially died) prevent accurate weather forecasts on a principle basis, not out of technical problems. These effects even make the orbit of Pluto unpredictable! The data from brain recordings and behavioral studies show mathematically analogous nonlinearities, which lead to the predictability of behavior to decay exponentially with the forecasting period even in flies. Clearly, one can assume that humans are less nonlinear and more predictable than flies as apparently Joshua Greene at Harvard seems to postulate, but even as a fly researcher, I find that somewhat hard to accept. But hey, what does a fly guy know? Be that as it may, as long as humans are equally or less predictable than fruit flies, the data from our own little lab alone already alleviate Mr. Brooks’ fears: brains will not become fully predictable with more neuroscience, only gradually more so.

It seems there is a deep-seated frustration that science explains away magic, even in otherwise science-o-phile individuals. More and more research (some of it reviewed here) is accumulating that demonstrates that not only our flies, but many, perhaps all animals have the capacity, given the right circumstances, to make different decisions under identical circumstances. In fact, as has often been argued (review here) before, such protean behavior is a prerequisite and an inevitable outcome of evolution. Why should animal brains possess this capacity and human brains not? If this kind of free will disappoints you, tough luck, live with it. Free will is the capacity of the brain to make decisions that are influenced by all the events leading up to the decision, but not determined by them. Free will is a brain capacity that is of course determined by neural activity, but the neural activity is no more deterministic than the weather is. In fact, I would postulate that our brains are even less deterministic than the weather. Call it wiggle-room, or elbow room, the nonlinearity of decision-making relegates the question of just how deterministic the brain really is to a (highly interesting!) academic debate: in practice, brains will always be less predictable than the weather, irrespective of any quantum effects playing a role or not. This modern, scientific concept of free will emphasizes that our freedom can of course not be absolute. Freedom is always a matter of degree, of shades of gray between the blacks and whites of determinism and stochasticity. In fact, this is precisely how such nonlinearities operate, by implementing deterministic and stochastic components to create phenomena that are neither fully deterministic nor completely stochastic. As we understand the deterministic components better, we get better at predicting nonlinear behavior, but the very nature of all of these systems fundamentally prevents fully accurate forecasts. In reality, we create robots with free will, we even start to understand the neurophysiological mechanisms by which neural processes become unpredictable, but Mr. Brooks writes in the NYT that because he doesn’t understand how the neurons are doing it, it must be magic.

For the life of me, I have no idea what is getting into people like Mr. Brooks who at least give off the very succinct impression that they fear that the human brain needs magic, or else we might one day understand it too well for our own good. Have they no respect for the lump of tissue between their ears? At least he gets a thorough bashing in the many of the comments and of course by the inimitable Neurocritic.

One of our graduate students might have just discovered the neural circuit that allows fly brains to decide which way to turn, even in a virtual environment without any cues. Now please excuse me while I go back to explaining away some magic by studying fly neurons.

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 20, 2013 at 19:30 8 Comments
Jun19

One more reason to publish negative results

In: science • Tags: cartoon, fun, negative results, open science

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope):

negative results

BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 19, 2013 at 20:15 Comments Off on One more reason to publish negative results
Jun10

SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?

In: science politics • Tags: data, libraries, open access, publishing, SciELO, SHARE

The recently released development draft for SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), authored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in response to the OSTP memo on public access to federally funded research in the US sounds a lot like the library-based publishing system I’ve been perpetually arguing for. It’s even in our paper on the pernicious consequences of journal rank. Could this be the initial step to break the stranglehold publishers have on scholarly communication? Here some key excerpts from the document:

universities have invested in the infrastructure, tools, and services necessary to provide effective and efficient access to their research and scholarship. The new White House directive provides a compelling reason to integrate higher education’s investments to date into a system of cross-institutional digital repositories that will be known as SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).

[…]

Universities already own and operate key pieces of the infrastructure, including digital institutional repositories, Internet2, Digital Preservation Network (DPN)2, and more.These current capacities and capabilities will naturally be extended over time. Universities have also invested in recent years in working with Principal Investigators and other campus partners on developing digital data management plans to comply with agency requirements.

[…]

University-based digital repositories will become a public access and long-term preservation system for the results of federally funded research. SHARE achieves the mission of higher education by providing access to and preserving the intellectual assets produced by the academy, in particular those that are made openly available.

[…]

Agencies that choose to develop their own digital repositories, or work with an existing repository such as PubMed Central, could simply adopt the same metadata fields and practices to become a linked node in this federated, consensus-based system. Discipline-based repositories, some of which are housed at universities, will be included.

[…]

The SHARE workflow is straightforward, and using existing protocols can be fully automated.

  1. PI or author submits manuscript to journal as currently occurs.
  2. Journal publisher coordinates peer review, accepts, and edits manuscripts as currently occurs.
  3. Journal submits XML version of the final peer reviewed manuscript (including the abstract) to the PI’s designated repository, or the author submits the final peer-reviewed and edited manuscript accepted for publication (including the abstract) to the PI’s designated digital repository.

In principle, this sounds almost verbatim like the system I advocate, with a few exceptions. Clearly, SHARE is still a ‘green’ OA route, meaning that regular journal publishing still occurs. I see no major issue with this, as some transition period will inevitably be required. The import part is that we wrestle at least some control over our literature back from the publishers.

I also find it important to point out the combined effort of these organizations to integrate the data mandates with the literature. Now we are only missing software requirements – I wonder why these are missing?

Another task not mentioned will be to integrate the back-archives of all the published literature into SHARE. Once we could get that incorporated, we’d potentially be able to offer a superior search, filter and discovery system than anything currently on the market – a system which I would guess to be crucial for weaning ourselves from publishers altogether, eventually.

In conclusion, this might be a very first, baby-step of our emancipation from corporate publishers. If we take the example of SciELO, and inspire  concerted action of a critical mass of institutions of higher education and research, we might just be able to achieve a fully functional scholarly communication system, perhaps even within this generation. Now is the time to provide our feedback to this draft. I think open access activists should get together and tell them what needs to happen.

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 10, 2013 at 09:16 Comments Off on SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?
Jun03

Everybody already knows journal rank is bunk

In: science politics • Tags: career, impact factor, journal rank, publishing

Today, finally, our manuscript on journal rank is accepted for publication at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. One may wonder how a paper that reviews the empirical findings around journal rank ends up in a journal about human neuroscience. After all, our main conclusions after the literature survey can be summarized like this:

  • Journal rank (as measured by impact factor, IF) is so weakly correlated with the available metrics for utility/quality/impact that it is practically useless as an evaluation signal (even if some of these measures become statistically significant).
  • Less practically, but statistically, journal rank (as measured by IF) is slightly better than chance when filtering for novelty/importance
  • Less practically, but statistically, journal rank (as measured by IF) is worse than chance when filtering for scientific quality (i.e., inverse journal rank is better than chance and throwing dice is better than IF-based journal rank)

Colloquially speaking: if you prefer the hip but shoddy science, read GlamMagz, but if you value substance over style, read the regular journals.

The two most notable exceptions to these general conclusions are retractions and subjective journal rank. As detailed before, among the few really strong correlations with IF-based journal rank are the rate at which papers are retracted: the higher up in the rank, the more likely your paper is to be retracted. Worse still, most of these retractions are due to suspected or demonstrated scientific misconduct or outright fraud. The data say that the reasons for this strong correlation are twofold:

  1. The methodological quality of publications in high-ranking journals is either not better or worse than that of publications in lower ranking journals
  2. The prestige correlates with IF and hence the incentives for submitting sloppy/fraudulent work increase as do the incentives for error-detection

The second strong correlation with impact factor is subjective journal rank, i.e., how well IF captures the perceived, subjective prestige/quality/impact of a particular journal. Given the human potential for confirmation bias paired with the circularity of self-selection by sending only the one’s ‘best’ work to the high-ranking journals, this result is not hard to explain. Moreover, given the history of gaming by abusing the flagrant violations of transparency and basic scientific methodology of the impact factor, it is not inconceivable that the numbers published by Thomson Reuters each year match public perception so well, because also Thomson Reuters know the subjective journal ranking in the heads of their customers and that violations of these expectations could potentially harm a very lucrative business.

Now, why is all this published in a journal on human neuroscience? Well, certainly not for the psychology of confirmation bias and self-selection. We did of course submit our manuscript to the journals with the general readership. Especially, since the data in the literature were new to us and virtually every one of our colleagues that we asked. So here is what the editors of these journals had to say about the conclusions mentioned above and in our article. This is what Nature‘s Joanne Baker had to say:

we will decline to pursue [your manuscript] further as we feel we have aired many of these issues already in our pages recently

and this is what Science’s Brooks Hanson replied:

we feel that the scope and focus of your paper make it more appropriate for a more specialized journal

While Nature felt they had already written enough about how the high-ranking journals publish unreliable research, Science had the impression the topic of journal rank and how it threatens the entire scientific enterprise was not general enough for their readership. Since there are not that many general science journals with sections fitting a review like ours, we next went to PLoS Biology. There, at least, the responsible editor, Catriona MacCallum (whom I respect very much and who is exceedingly likable) sent our manuscript out for review. To our surprise, the reviewers essentially agreed with Nature, that there wasn’t anything new in our conclusions: everybody already knows that high-ranking journals publish unreliable science, e.g.:

“While I am in agreement with the insidious and detrimental influences on scientific publishing identified and discussed in this manuscript, most of what is presented has been covered thoroughly elsewhere.”

[…]

“The authors make sound points, and for doing so can rely on years of solid research that has investigated the pernicious role of journal rank and the impact factor in scholarly publishing.

Overall, I deem this a worthy and valid “perspective” that merits publication, but do want to make the following reservations.

The particular arguments that the authors make with respect to the deficiencies of the journal impact factor (irreproducible, negotiated, and unsound) have already been made extensively in the literature, in online forums, in bibliometric meetings, etc to the point that very little value is gained by the authors restating them in this perspective.

Most of the points dedicated to the retractions and decline effect, and the relation between journal rank and scientific unreliability are also extensively made in the literature that the authors cite.

In other words, very few new or novel insights are made in this particular perspective, other than to restate that which has already been debated extensively in the relevant literature.”

For the full reviews and the letter of the editor, scroll down on our Google Doc.

Thus, essentially, Nature and PLoS Biology officially agree with our assessment that one should read high-ranking journals with more than the regular dose of caution. Therefore, I hope it is now clear that in order to convince readers that the conclusions we draw from the literature are reliable, we had to publish in a journal with an impact factor of 2.339 – and don’t you skimp on any of those decimals!

Like this:

Like Loading...
Posted on June 3, 2013 at 14:45 5 Comments
  • Page 20 of 21
  • « First
  • «
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • »

Linking back to brembs.net






My lab:
lab.png
  • Popular
  • Comments
  • Latest
  • Today Week Month All
  • Elsevier now officially a "predatory" publisher (23,715 views)
  • Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience (22,933 views)
  • Even without retractions, 'top' journals publish the least reliable science (15,437 views)
  • Booming university administrations (12,901 views)
  • What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like? (11,433 views)
  • We are hiring!
  • By their actions you shall know them
  • Research assessment: new panels, new luck?
  • Motor learning at #SfN24
  • What is a decision?
  • Today Week Month All
  • Booming university administrations
  • Even without retractions, 'top' journals publish the least reliable science
  • What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?
  • Science Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote
  • Recursive fury: Resigning from Frontiers
Ajax spinner

Networking

Brembs on MastodoORCID GScholar GitHub researchgate

View Bjoern Brembs

The Drosophila Flight Simulator 2.0
The Drosophila Flight Simulator 2.0

Video von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden. Hinweise zum Datenschutz

login

  • Register
  • Recover password

Creative Commons License bjoern.brembs.blog by Björn Brembs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. | theme modified from Easel | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑

[ Placeholder content for popup link ] WordPress Download Manager - Best Download Management Plugin

bjoern.brembs.blog
Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: brembs (modified from Easel).
%d