‘Robot scientist’ Eve finds that less than one third of scientific results are reproducible

Science Daily  April 6, 2022 The reproducibility and robustness of only a small fraction of published biomedical results has been tested. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of Chicago) used a combination of automated text analysis and the ‘robot scientist’ Eve to semi-automate the process of finding papers reporting reproducible results. Out of the more than 12,000 research papers on breast cancer cell biology, after narrowing down to 74 papers of high scientific interest, only 22 papers were found to be reproducible. Two different human teams used Eve and two breast cancer cell lines and attempted to […]

Analysis suggests China has passed US on one research measure

Phys.org  March 8, 2022 The top-1% most-highly-cited articles are watched closely as the vanguards of the sciences. However, this finding contrasts with repeated reports of Western agencies that the quality of China’s output in science is lagging other advanced nations, even as it has caught up in numbers of articles. An international team of researchers (USA -Ohio State University, China, the Netherlands) used field normalizations, a new measurement method, which classify source journals by discipline. Classifications can be used for the decomposition, but not for the normalization. When the data is thus decomposed, the USA ranks ahead of China in […]

Editorial Bias and Nepotism in Biomedical Journals Revealed by Massive Study

SciTech Daily  December 4, 2021 An international team of researchers (France, Italy, Canada, UK) explored the usefulness of the Percentage of Papers by the Most Prolific author (PPMP) and the Gini index (level of inequality in the distribution of authorship among authors) as tools to identify journals that may show favoritism in accepting articles by specific authors. Among the journals with the highest PPMP or Gini index values, where a few authors were responsible for a disproportionate number of publications, a random sample was manually examined, revealing that the most prolific author was part of the editorial board in 60 […]

List of Highly Cited Researchers 2021 published

Max-Plank Society  November 16, 2021 Clarivate unveiled its 2021 list of Highly Cited Researchers. To determine the “who’s who” of influential researchers it draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information™ at Clarivate. The list identifies some 6,600 researchers from across the globe who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. The names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for the field. The United States is the institutional […]

The ‘Replication Crisis’ Could Be Worse Than We Thought, New Analysis Reveals

Science Alert  May 25, 2021 A team of researchers at UC San Diego used publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of post replication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure. Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is […]

Can We Automate Scientific Reviewing?

Arxiv.org  April 8, 2021 The number of scientific papers generated has skyrocketed. Providing high-quality reviews of this growing number of papers is a significant challenge. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University discuss the possibility of using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models to generate first-pass peer reviews for scientific papers. They collected a dataset of papers in the machine learning domain, annotated them with different aspects of content covered in each review, and trained targeted summarization models that take in papers to generate reviews. The results showed that system-generated reviews tend to touch upon more aspects of the paper than human-written […]

UC announces breakthrough open access deal with publishing giant Elsevier

UC Berkeley  March 16, 2021 Two years after cutting ties with publishing industry giant Elsevier, producer of more than 2,600 scholarly journals, the University of California system announced that it has reached with Elsevier the largest open access agreement of its kind in North America. As of April 1, all research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier’s hybrid and open access journals will be open access by default, so that everyone in the world can read it for free. This fulfills the UC faculty’s goals for its so-called transformative open access agreements with publishers — universal open access […]

21 per cent of all citations go to the elite

Science Daily  February 9, 2021 Researchers in Denmark used a linked dataset of more than 4 million authors and 26 million scientific papers spanning 15 years and 118 scientific disciplines to quantify trends in cumulative citation inequality and concentration at the author level. They found that a small stratum of elite scientists accrues increasing citation shares, and that citation inequality is on the rise across the natural sciences, medical sciences, and agricultural sciences. The rise in citation concentration has coincided with a general inclination toward more collaboration. While increasing collaboration and full-count publication rates go hand in hand for the […]

In pursuit of open science, open access is not enough

Science Magazine  May 7, 2020 Despite uncertainty about the long-term sustainability of OA models, many publishers who had been reluctant to abandon the subscription business model are showing openness to OA The healthy functioning of the academic community, including fair terms and conditions from commercial partners, requires that the global marketplace for data analytics and knowledge infrastructure be kept open to real competition. The dominance of a limited number of social networks, shopping services, and search engines shows us how internet platforms based on data and analytics can tend toward monopoly. In the research information space, contracts are being negotiated, […]

More Chinese scientists in America are going back home

Eurekalert  December 30, 2019 Researchers at the Ohio State University made use of Elsevier database to track researchers based on their publications in scientific journals and concluded that that more than 16,000 researchers have returned to China from other countries since that nation has opened to international engagement. More than 4,500 left the United States for China in 2017 – nearly double the number who left in 2010. Chinese scientists are more likely to return to their home from Europe than from the United States. The most elite Chinese scientists are more likely to stay in the United States than […]