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.
Time is short for blogging today, but I wanted to take a moment to point out people for whom time for writing things up is (apparently) never, ever short. This is a study on prolific authorship, and the high end of that cohort is pretty terrifying. At least 9,000 authors have been on 72 papers… Read More
Here’s something to keep an eye on: eleven of the largest national research funding agencies in Europe have announced a plan to require open-access publication of papers arising from their grants. The plan is that by 2020, all such work must be published in compliant open-access journals or on compliant open-access platforms. There are quite… Read More
There’s more activity on the predatory journal front. A large investigation reported recently that the number of papers put out by the five largest publishers in this category has tripled since 2015, so there’s clearly an expanding market for such “services”. Among the elite (by which I mean the top layer of this pond scum) Read More
Superconductivity is one of those places where chemistry and physics cross paths. That’s especially true as people search for higher-temperature materials, because that seems to involve more and more complex synthesis and characterization of the results. Very tiny changes in conditions or starting materials can make for huge differences in th… Read More
The whole machine learning field has a huge amount to offer chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biomedical science in general. I don’t think that anyone seriously disputes that part – the arguing starts when you ask when this promise might be realized. In the abstract, the idea of tireless, relentless analysis of the huge piles of… Read More
Some readers may recall this post from 2015, which details problems with a natural product isolation paper in PLOS ONE. The compound, named Xinghaiamine A by the authors, was. . .well, let’s say extremely unlikely, and I think anyone who looks at the structure in that earlier post will agree. And that spans several levels… Read More
Just how much crap is out there in the scientific literature? “Quite a bit” comes the answer from anyone with real experience of it, but that’s not too quantitative. Here, though is an analysis of one (perfectly respectable) journal of its own output, and the results are. . .well, they range from “pretty bad” to… Read More
There have been all sorts of scientific scandals involving faked journal articles, faked peer reviews, duplicated papers and figures, etc. over the last few years. It’s been a running battle: our current technologies allow for these things to be done more easily, but caught more easily as well. And a pretty significant share of these… Read More
“Beall’s List”, as a way to keep track of predatory publishers, has been officially offline for some time now. Jeffrey Beall himself has said that it was taken down under “intense pressure” from his employer (the University of Colorado at Denver), although his employer says no, not at all, this was his personal decisio… Read More
Back in 2013, I mentioned the “JACS Challenge”, an interesting attempt to see if papers that eventually got cited a lot were obvious prima facie. Given a selection of older papers from the journal that readers were unfamiliar with, could they pick out the ones that ended up getting cited more? Now this work, revised… Read More
