Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "The Scientific Literature"

• The Scientific Literature

  Competing Interests

  7 February, 2018

  The Nature publishing group recently changed its rules on author disclosure for things that might affect objectivity in the authorship of papers. The criteria include the usual ones regarding financial interests, employment, funding, and so on. There’s a new section on non-financial stuff, though: Non-financial competing interests can take di… Read More

• Press Coverage

  Where Does the News Hype Come From?

  5 February, 2018

  From Chris Chambers on Twitter (of Cardiff Univ.) come some very important points about press coverage of scientific results. I often make references here to misleading and inaccurate headlines and stories in the popular press – as a scientist, it’s hard to take, seeing research results mangled in the only venues that most people will… Read More

• Natural Products

  Scooped, I Suppose the Word Is

  17 January, 2018

  Via Retraction Watch, here’s a situation that I don’t recall seeing before: a group at Foshan University in China published a paper in the journal Natural Product Research on the crystal structure of aspergicine. Here’s the original abstract in PubMed – their work prompted them to revise their previously published structure… Read More

• Chemical News

  Scaffold Popularity

  9 January, 2018

  Here’s a paper that’s analyzing the popularity of different structural scaffolds in medicinal chemistry over time. The authors are using the ChEMBL database and looking for the core structures with the most work done on them, tracking changes over time (1998-2014). That’s a set of nearly 283,000 unique compounds to work with, but… Read More

• The Scientific Literature

  An Odd Paper?

  17 November, 2017

  Nanoparticles came up around here the other day, and now a reader sends along a new paper in the field that’s. . .a bit odd. Maybe more than a bit. It’s been accepted at ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, and you have to wonder what the referee reports were like. It’s titled “Earthicle: The Design… Read More

• Pharmacokinetics

  Fewer Flashy Drug Delivery Papers, Please

  2 November, 2017

  Drug delivery – now that’s a tricky field. The variety of drug substances is large, and the ways that they’re taken up and distributed in living systems are many. And we’d like control over the process, which we don’t often have. A typical kid’s question is “How does the aspirin know where the headache is?… Read More

• Biological News

  Bad Cells. So Many Bad Cells.

  20 October, 2017

  Let’s file this one under “We’ve seen this before, and I’ll bet we’ll see it again”. Anyone who’s worked for some years in cell culture (or with people who have) should appreciate the dangers of cell line contamination. You can get mycoplasma, you can get other cell lines entirely (particularly others that… Read More

• Cancer

  There Are Probes, And There Are Probes

  9 October, 2017

  A friend in the business called my attention to this paper, which is about another piece of the ubiquitination system that I was writing about here just the other day – in this case, the deubiquitinating enzyme Rpn11. There are a couple of classes of deubiquitinators – some of them use a cysteine in their… Read More

• The Dark Side

  The Ugly State of the Literature These Days

  15 September, 2017

  So how’s it going out there in the land of the journals that will publish any flippin’ thing you send them? Apparently pretty well. I’m not sure if we’re still in the log phase of their growth or not, but there’s no shortage of quasi-open-access titles out there, the ones that (like reputable OA journals) Read More

• The Scientific Literature

  Publish and Prosper

  25 August, 2017

  What do you get if you publish a paper in a highly-ranked journal? Some prestige, certainly. If you’re in academia, it certainly helps your application for tenure, and it’s no bad thing come grant renewal time. Looks good on your CV if you’re applying for another job, no doubt. But how about a big pile… Read More