Monthly Archives: January 2013
Do major funding agencies support better research?
Written on January 23, 2013 at 12:54 pm, by David
Too many US authors of the most innovative and influential papers in the life sciences do not receive NIH funding, conclude Joshua M. Nicholson and John P. A. Ioannidis in a recent issue of Nature. The authors concluded that three out of five of a carefully selected sample of highly cited principal investigators eligible for Read more...
Impact of Open Access in different biomedical areas
Written on January 18, 2013 at 11:19 am, by David
Following my last post, I have looked more closely at two of the biomedical areas used in the last analysis. I have used the search terms “epilepsy” and “genomics” to pull off all of the records in PubMed published in these separate areas since 2000. Then I consolidated these data so that I could compare Read more...
Open access – have we reached the tipping point?
Written on January 15, 2013 at 10:38 am, by David
“Open access” only really gets interesting when users and product developers have access to a critical mass of content. I’ll leave the definition of “Critical mass” vague at this point, but it probably means something like 80-90% of the most cited content in a field such as biomedical research. But for this to happen the Read more...
Global competition and the demise of the Ivory Tower
Written on January 10, 2013 at 10:43 am, by David
According to Wikipedia the term Ivory Tower, which originates in the Biblical Song of Solomon, has been widely used to describe an academic environment where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. Those days are over. Battelle’s annual R&D report and the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Read more...
Scientific publishing goes “Boink”
Written on January 9, 2013 at 11:49 am, by David
A simplified picture of the scientific research process would include a cycle of events beginning with the identification of a new idea or hypothesis (A “known unknown” after Donald Rumsfeld’s definition) derived from a gap analysis of the literature, followed by competitive peer review of the corresponding research proposal and the release of funding and Read more...