tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post7781948230324565422..comments2024-03-16T18:42:21.178-07:00Comments on DSHR's Blog: Signal or Noise?David.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-55375621408142232262016-09-12T18:57:02.937-07:002016-09-12T18:57:02.937-07:00Anahad O'Connor's How the Sugar Industry S...Anahad O'Connor's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html" rel="nofollow"><i>How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat</i></a> reports on <a href="http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2548255" rel="nofollow">JAMA's publication</a> of:<br /><br />"internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco ... suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.<br /><br />“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper."<br /><br />The sugar industry paid off scientists:<br /><br />"the Sugar Research Foundation ... paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5339699" rel="nofollow">the article</a>, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-28013223659063092932016-08-09T06:46:01.861-07:002016-08-09T06:46:01.861-07:00JOn Tennant's Why I will never publish with Wi...JOn Tennant's <a href="https://fossilsandshit.com/2016/08/05/why-i-will-never-publish-with-wiley-again/" rel="nofollow"><i>Why I will never publish with Wiley again</i></a> is an account of the "value" a commercial publisher adds to a paper in return for, in this case, $3.6K in author processing charge:<br /><br />"As Wiley make around a 40% profit margin, about $1440 of this fee went straight to their lucky shareholders, which must explain that nice, warm feeling you get when paying."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-61078682061416057532016-07-10T13:08:20.233-07:002016-07-10T13:08:20.233-07:00As I've mentioned here for a long time, among ...As I've <a href="http://blog.dshr.org/2013/03/journals-considered-harmful.html" rel="nofollow">mentioned here</a> for a <a href="http://blog.dshr.org/2011/09/whats-wrong-with-research-communication.html" rel="nofollow">long time</a>, among the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/why-bad-ideas-refuse-die" rel="nofollow">bad ideas that refuse to die</a> is journal impact factor.<br /><br />XXX <i>et al</i> have published <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/062109" rel="nofollow"><i>A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions</i></a>. John Bohannon at <i>Science</i> <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/hate-journal-impact-factors-new-study-gives-you-one-more-reason" rel="nofollow">writes</a>:<br /><br />"The 11 journals taking part in today's data release are Science, eLife, The EMBO Journal, the Journal of Informetrics, the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, three journals published by the Public Library of Science, and Nature along with two of its sister journals. In 2013 and 2014, those journals published more than 366,000 research articles and 13,000 review articles. The team then combed through the Thomson Reuters database to count all citations to those articles in 2015. Vincent Larivière, an expert on journal citations at the University of Montreal in Canada led the analysis of the data.<br /><br />The results give more ammunition to JIF critics. The citation distributions are so skewed that up to 75% of the articles in any given journal had lower citation counts than the journal's average number. So trying to use a journal’s JIF to forecast the impact of any particular paper is close to guesswork. The analysis also revealed a large number of flaws in the Thomson Reuters database, with citations unmatchable to known articles."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-17075125820262077612016-07-02T06:47:55.811-07:002016-07-02T06:47:55.811-07:00Steven Poole's Why bad ideas refuse to die is ...Steven Poole's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/why-bad-ideas-refuse-die" rel="nofollow"><i>Why bad ideas refuse to die</i></a> is more general, but includes:<br /><br />"Nearly every academic inquirer I talked to while researching this subject says that the interface of research with publishing is seriously flawed. Partly because the incentives are all wrong – a “publish or perish” culture rewards academics for quantity of published research over quality. And partly because of the issue of “publication bias”: the studies that get published are the ones that have yielded hoped-for results. Studies that fail to show what they hoped for end up languishing in desk drawers."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-13692486947082086422016-06-22T09:34:07.611-07:002016-06-22T09:34:07.611-07:00Another damming report on the corruption of the pe...Another damming report on the corruption of the peer-review and publishing process by pharma marketing is <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/corruption-of-fda-clinical-trials-reports-the-problem-and-a-proposed-remedy.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-63143994707089373052016-06-17T15:36:20.660-07:002016-06-17T15:36:20.660-07:00For the enforcement of conventional wisdom by seni...For the enforcement of conventional wisdom by senior researchers in the field of economics, see <a href="10.1257/jep.29.1.89" rel="nofollow"><i>The Superiority of Economists</i></a> by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-31715062098589903882016-06-17T12:30:15.614-07:002016-06-17T12:30:15.614-07:00The Economist reports on the GRIM test, an amazing...<i>The Economist</i> reports on the GRIM test, an <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21700620-surprisingly-simple-test-check-research-papers-errors-come-again" rel="nofollow">amazingly simple statistical test</a>:<br /><br />"When Mr Brown and Dr Heathers test-drove their method on 71 suitable papers published in three leading psychology journals over the past five years, what they found justified the pessimistic sounding label they gave it. Just over half the papers they looked at failed the test. Of those, 16 contained more than one error. The two researchers got in touch with the authors of these, and also of five others where the lone errors looked particularly egregious, and asked them for their data—the availability of which was a precondition of publication in two of the journals. Only nine groups complied, but in these nine cases examination of the data showed that there were, indeed, errors.<br /><br />The mistakes picked up looked accidental. Most were typos or the inclusion of the wrong spreadsheet cells in a calculation. Nevertheless, in three cases they were serious enough to change the main conclusion of the paper concerned.<br /><br />That, plus the failure of 12 groups to make their data available at all, is alarming. But if knowledge that the GRIM test might be applied to their work makes future researchers less careless and more open, then Mr Brown’s and Dr Heathers’s maths will have paid dividends."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-29048087826569666042016-06-14T12:40:12.201-07:002016-06-14T12:40:12.201-07:00The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is p...The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is publishing a <a href="https://avointiede.fi/web/openscience/publisher_costs" rel="nofollow">database of journal subscription payments</a>:<br /><br />"This dataset includes academic publisher costs paid by Finnish research organizations to publishers and suppliers during the years 2010–2015. The dataset includes total costs of license contracts made with individual publishers or suppliers. The dataset also includes information on the different material packages the contracts included. Also included is the information on how the materials were acquired."<br /><br />The dire economic situation in Finland, which led the <a href="http://yle.fi/uutiset/helsinki_university_to_shrink_payroll_by_nearly_1000/8628873" rel="nofollow">University of Helsinki to lay off nearly 1000 people</a>, is clearly a factor:<br /><br />"[Rector Jukka] Kola says that staff cuts are unavoidable because of the current government's drastic funding cuts to education. According to the university's calculations, the need for cost-cutting will amount to 106 million euros annually by the end of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government term in 2019-20."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-10346104340633111412016-06-09T14:07:16.625-07:002016-06-09T14:07:16.625-07:00Roheeni Saxena at Ars Technica discusses two repor...<a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/implicit-bias-still-hinders-minority-researchers/" rel="nofollow">Roheeni Saxena at <i>Ars Technica</i></a> discusses two reports. One from AAAS describes implicit bias in article reviewing:<br /><br />"journal editors presented evidence of a US-centric bias in scientific publication. Countries with fewer resources tend to be poorly represented among reviewers, and therefore may receive less attention from publishers."<br /><br />The other from the GAO show bias against women and minorities in grant reviewing:<br /><br />"for the National Science Foundation (NSF), ... only a quarter of all applications for funding come from women ... But that's great compared to minorities. Black scientists in the US submit only two percent of all NSF grants, and only eighteen percent of those applications are successful. The NIH, another major source of federal funding, reports that black researchers receive awards at half the rate of whites, so racial disparities persist across funding agencies."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-84574153640851475712016-05-25T13:38:01.332-07:002016-05-25T13:38:01.332-07:00Bjorn Brembs chimes in.<a href="http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/05/why-havent-we-already-canceled-all-subscriptions/" rel="nofollow">Bjorn Brembs</a> chimes in.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-52491115184731245162016-05-12T10:12:50.850-07:002016-05-12T10:12:50.850-07:00In a different media market, but revealing nonethe...In a different media market, but revealing nonetheless. Cory Doctorow at <i>BoingBoing</i> reports on a German court judgement that, in effect, <a href="https://boingboing.net/2016/05/12/german-publishers-owe-writers.html" rel="nofollow">publishers have been stealing from authors 30-50% of the fees</a> on blank media. They owe authors €100M, and:<br /><br />"are claiming that this is their death-knell, without acknowledging the hardship they imposed on authors by misappropriating their funds. ... if publishers can't survive without these funds, that means the industry was only viable in the first place because it was stealing from writers"David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-16659964135630786812016-05-11T22:49:44.034-07:002016-05-11T22:49:44.034-07:00The University of Montréal has canceled 2,116 jour...<a href="http://www.bib.umontreal.ca/communiques/20160506-DC-annulation-springer-va.htm" rel="nofollow">The University of Montréal has canceled 2,116 journal subscriptions:</a>Dragan Espenschiedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07217215855337282021noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-36683860223038446322016-05-10T09:27:43.561-07:002016-05-10T09:27:43.561-07:00John Oliver covers this problem far better than I ...<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw" rel="nofollow">John Oliver</a> covers this problem far better than I could. Its a must-watch.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.com