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 Dark Side

  How Many Doctored Papers Are Out There?

  2 July, 2018

  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

• General Scientific News

  Science Reform in China

  11 June, 2018

  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

• The Scientific Literature

  Predation

  2 April, 2018

  “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

• The Scientific Literature

  Which Will Sprout and Which Will Bear Fruit?

  30 March, 2018

  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

• Press Coverage

  Gotta Be a Conclusion In Here Somewhere

  26 February, 2018

  A couple of years ago, I wrote about how far too much of human nutrition research was unfit to draw conclusions from. This new story does nothing to make a person more confident in the field: it’s a detailed look at the lab of Brian Wansink at Cornell, where he hold an endowed chair. He’s… Read More

• The Dark Side

  Down the Rabbit Hole With Alireza Heidari

  21 February, 2018

  Thanks to a comment on yesterday’s blog post, I was able to read this extraordinary tale, which comes to us courtesy of Prof. William Grover at UC Riverside’s Bioengineering department. Go check it out – you’ll learn of one Alireza Heidari, who is apparently quite the polymath. He is the author of 115 papers, which… Read More

• The Scientific Literature

  Not So Many Uncited Papers, Actually

  20 February, 2018

  How many scientific papers drop into the void, never to be cited by anyone, ever again? There are all sorts of estimates floating around, many of them rather worryingly high, but this look at the situation by Nature suggests that things aren’t so bad. The idea that the literature is awash with uncited research goes… Read More

• 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