Rescuing superconductivity
From a paper in Nature Reviews Physics, December 19, 2024: One of the forefront fields of modern superconductivity research is that on hydrides at high pressures. Over the past few years, this resear…
peer review
25 posts
A gentle push over the cliff
From ‘Rotavirus vaccine: tortured data analyses raise false safety alarm’, The Hindu, June 22, 2024: Slamming the recently published paper by Dr. Jacob Puliyel from the International Institute of Hea…
Poonam Pandey and peer-review
One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey's "death" and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish "anything". To be su…
The journal's part in a retraction
What explains a journal's peer-review producing two different results on two separate occasions?…
What's with superconductors and peer-review?
Throughout the time I've been a commissioning editor for science-related articles for news outlets, I've always sought and published articles about academic publishing. It's the part of th…
On that anti-mRNA vaccines video
The Times of India has published an irresponsible article today on a video by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claiming with dubious evidence that all mRNA vaccines are h…
Whose fault is a retraction?
A journal called Advances in Materials Science and Engineering retracted a paper it published and issued the following notice, excerpted from Retraction Watch, December 22, 2022: Advances in Material…
A Kuhnian gap between research publishing and academic success
There is a gap in research publishing and how it relates to academic success. On the one hand, there are scientists complaining of low funds, being short-staffed, low-quality or absent equipment, diso…
Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals
If they can.…
Are preprints reliable?
To quote from a paper published yesterday in PLOS Biology: Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version…
PeerJ's peer-review problem
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publi…
India's missing research papers
If you're looking for a quantification (although you shouldn't) of the extent to which science is being conducted by press releases in India at the moment, consider the following list of studi…