Chronicle: Researchers and Scientific Groups Make New Push Against Impact Factors

Reported today in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

More than 150 researchers and 75 scientific groups issued a declaration on Thursday against the widespread use of journal “impact factors,” blaming the practice for dangerous distortions in financing and hiring in science.

The impact factor “has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment,” the scientists said in the letter, which had been in preparation since a conference led by publishers and grant-writing agencies last year in San Francisco.

Those deficiencies include the ability of publishers to manipulate the calculations, and the way the metrics encourage university hiring and promotion decisions, as well as grant agencies’ award distributions, that can lack an in-depth understanding of scientific work.

For some analysts, the impact factor has largely become an outsourced proxy for research quality, allowing decision makers (like tenure committees and deans) to forego actually reading faculty members’ work. Full article on line: http://chronicle.com/article/ResearchersScientific/139337/

Sloppiness on the Rise

Times Higher Education reports:

Speaking at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Montreal, Canada, from 5 to 8 May, Véronique Kiermer said a lot of errors that needed correction were “actually avoidable errors…and I think that is a very troubling trend”.

Although – unlike across academic publishing as a whole – the publishing group’s 18 journals had seen no increase in the number of retractions per year, the number of corrections issued had risen, said Dr Kiermer.

Directing her concerns mainly at the biomedical sciences, she listed problems with papers that included missing control tests, inappropriate and poor image manipulation, issues in experimental design and reporting, and problems with statistics.

The article is on line at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/research-paper-sloppiness-on-the-increase-warns-publisher/2003771.article

OMICS Threatens OA Critic Beall

If you’re like most academic nurses, you’ve probably been spammed by OMICS,  a group that publishes specious open-access journals and hosts conferences. This group landed on Jeffrey Beall’s carefully vetted list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” on the Scholarly Open Access Web site.

Now Beall, a U Colorado librarian, finds himself threatened with a billion-dollar lawsuit by OMICS, an Indian company where laws concerning what you can about a company may be different from those in the US.

Scrutinize very carefully an invitation from any open-access publication. Open-access publishing is a lawless frontier landscape with many unscrupulous publishers.

 

RAMESES: Meta-narrative reviews & realist syntheses

The Journal of Advanced Nursing has published two standards developed as part of the Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses Evolving Standards (RAMESES) project: “The RAMESES project is a NIHR funded international collaboration to produce such guidance and standards for these new forms of systematic review – Realist syntheses and Meta-narrative reviews.”

“RAMESES publication standards: meta-narrative reviews” can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jan.12092/full

“RAMESES publication standards: realist syntheses” can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jan.12095/full

 

Happy New Year: 2012 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 9,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 16 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Rejected, But Not Dejected

A report by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) of a recently published study by Vincent Calcagno et al. suggests that rejection by one journal with a subsequent resubmission and publication elsewhere may be a very good thing, appearing to be associated with the article’s being more frequently cited than articles accepted on the first submission attempt.

The SSP report observes:

While resubmission costs authors time and effort, it also comes with real benefits. Articles previously rejected by another journal received significantly more citations than articles published on their first submission attempt. Calcagno interprets this finding as evidence that the peer-review process is doing its job. Indeed, two large surveys on peer review (Sense about Science (2009), and Mark Ware/PRC (2007)) both indicate that scientists overwhelming agree that the peer-review process improves the quality of their work. Proponents of the publish-first-review-later model argue that it is better to produce more publications than improve the quality of one’s work.

James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist of science, suggests an additional explanation for the improved citation impact findings. As quoted in The Scientist:

“Papers that are more likely to contend against the status quo are more likely to find an opponent in the review system”—and thus be rejected—“but those papers are also more likely to have an impact on people across the system,” earning them more citations when finally published.

The SSP report is on its Web site: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/10/15/mapping-the-flow-of-rejected-manuscripts/

The original research study by Calcagno et al. : http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/10/10/science.1227833.abstract

Times Articles–Your Response?

Two articles in today’s New York Times cry out for a response from nurses.

“Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen with Health Law” mentions the word “nurse” once but fails to discuss the role of the APRN http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/health/policy/too-few-doctors-in-many-us-communities.html

“What Can Mississippi Learn from Iran” begins with an extended anecdote of a visiting nurse in Mississippi’s HealthConnect (modeled after the primary care system developed by Iran in the 1980s) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/magazine/what-can-mississippis-health-care-system-learn-from-iran.html

Keep in mind that, if you decide to respond, your response must be timely; the on-line comment board closes after a few days, and letters must be submitted within a week.

Comments can be submitted on each article’s page.

Submit a letter here: http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/letters/letters.html

Submit a longer op-ed here: http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op-ed.html

RU a PIG In MuD?

Paul Silvia, associate professor of psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for Pacific Standard reviews Dr. Roberta Ness’ Innovation Generation: How to Produce Creative and Useful Scientific Ideas (Oxford UP), which employs the acronym PIG In MuD:

1. Phrase a question based on interest, observation, and knowledge.
2. Identify the frames and find alternatives.
3. Generate all possible solutions.
4. Incubate.
5. Meld your single best idea back into the process of normal science.
6. Disseminate your innovative finding.

This brief video by Dr. Ness for TEDxHouston is engaging and informative.

 

Dr. Ness is dean of the School of Public Health, University of Texas at Houston.

“Nurse writer” on Wikipedia

A new article, “Nurse writer,” has been added to Wikipedia, a companion to the article “Physician writer” that was created in 2008.

As a wiki, this reference allows any registered reader to revise the entry.

Clinical Trials: Registered Late, Published Late, Smaller Than Planned

Kent Anderson, writing in the The Scholarly Kitchen, observes:

For any major medical study, the stakes are high — the results can affect how patients take care of themselves and how physicians treat disease, for years if not decades. Yet all is not well in the land of medical research, judging from a recent analysis of ClinicalTrials.gov, which finds that the majority of clinical studies are too small to matter in the near-term, are published late, and could be subtly manipulated by researchers, given when they are registered.

Problems like these are yielding undesirable downstream effects — for instance, only 15% of clinical guidelines are based on robust evidence, and there’s ongoing difficulty replicating published results.

The essay is on line, open access: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/05/10/clinicaltrials-gov-too-many-studies-are-registered-late-published-late-and-smaller-than-planned/