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…
preprint papers
9 posts
The identity of scientific papers
This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie's response to a suggestion in an editorial "first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter" – that scientists s…
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…
The costs of correction
I was slightly disappointed to read a report in the New York Times this morning. Entitled 'Two Huge COVID-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms', it discussed the implications…
Poor journalism is making it harder for preprints
There have been quite a few statements by various scientists on Twitter who, in pointing to some preprint paper's untenable claims, point to the manuscript's identity as a preprint paper as we…
Distracting from the peer-review problem
From an article entitled ‘The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research‘ published by Reuters: A Reuters analysis found that at least 153 studies – including epidemiological papers, genetic ana…
The scientist as inadvertent loser
Twice this week, I'd had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one o…