Excuse me while I indulge in some shameless company promotion here. Scientific research is a pretty fast-moving place to be. In some places I’ve worked in there were unofficial competitions to notice a hot paper and send it round to your colleagues. Not sure what the prize was, to be honest: a golden computer mouse…
You might have noticed that I’ve been tweeting random recent evaluations. I do this a couple of times a day (well, that’s the plan, at least), simply highlighting stuff that I find interesting, without having the time to write a proper post about the original articles. (This, by the way, is what I find to…
You’ve probably seen all the fuss over Wyeth and the ghost-writing of medical articles, along with the associated smugness of certain commentators. According to my contacts in the medical comms industry, the practice as such is nothing new, and there are very, very strong guidelines. The creative outrage we’re seeing is really rather misplaced: Well,…
Alejandro brings my attention to ScienceWatch’s list of most-cited institutions in science. This is the list of the ‘top’ twenty institutions out of just over four thousand. For some value of ‘top’, he says snarkily. Now, we know there are serious problems with citation metrics, but essentially it’s all we’ve got to go on, so…
Shirley Wu kicked off an interesting conversation on Friendfeed yesterday, reporting on a conversation that questioned the ‘quality’ of our old friend PLoS One. Now there’s a debate that’s going to go round and round, possibly generating rather more heat and noise than useful work. The conversation, thanks to Peter Binfield, then turned onto article…
Who are we? We’re the Faculty of 1000. We specialize in post-publication peer review. What this means is that we publish brief summaries of what our Faculty think are interesting, exciting, or otherwise noteworthy published articles in the biomedical literature. That’s the ‘post-publication’ and ‘review’ bits. The Faculty consists of about 5,000 senior scientists and…
Somewhere in the depths of PLoS One an article lurks… Liz Allen and her friends at the Wellcome performed an interesting study on papers that came out of labs that were at least partially funded by Wellcome grants. What they did was to figure where each of the nearly 700 papers ended up being published,…
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