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Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
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Hadas Shema
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- September 30, 2010
- 12:19 PM
- 6,423 views
Hyping Astronomy
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Astronomers from the Carnegie Institution and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered and earth-sized planet called Gilese 581. It's 20 light-years away, which makes it an unlikely traveling destination, but this is exciting news nonetheless. The abstract is enthusiastic yet cautions, saying that:"The estimated equilibrium temperature of GJ 581g is 228 K, placing it squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of the star and offering a very compelling case for a potentially ha........ Read more »
Vogt, S. S., Butler, P. R., Rivera, E. J., Haghighipour, N., Henry, G. W., & Williamson, M. H. (2010) The Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey: A 3.1 M_Earth Planet in the Habitable Zone of the Nearby M3V Star Gliese 581. Arxiv. info:/1009.5733v1
- September 18, 2010
- 04:21 PM
- 4,579 views
Don't say you found aliens (unless you actually have)
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Unlike with health and medicine press releases (Woloshin and Schwartz have a few good papers about the matter) I haven't seen much research about other scientific press release. That's why I was glad to find the paper "Credibility of science communication: An exploratory study of astronomy press releases" by Nielsen et al. (2007).They conducted 11 in-depth interviews with journalists, scientists and public information officers, and came up with several conclusions regarding the accuracy and cred........ Read more »
Nielsen, L. H., Torpe Jørgensen, N., Jantzen, K., & Christensen, L. L. (2007) Credibility of science communication: An exploratory study of astronomy press releases. Proceedings from the IAU/National Observatory of Athens/ESA/ESO Conference, Athens, Greece. info:/
- December 14, 2011
- 09:08 PM
- 3,260 views
Reinventing Discovery, Part II
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
This is the second part of my review of Michael Nielsen's book "Reinventing Discovery - The New Era of Networked Science" (first part is here). Last time we talked about Galaxy Zoo, the Polymath Project, and why scientists don't (usually) do Wikis. This time I'd like to focus on the book parts which talk about ArXiv. First of all, I have to say I've been using ArXiv extensively lately as part of the ACUMEN project, trying to figure out who and what can be found there. The place is a bit of a m........ Read more »
Nielsen, Michael. (2011) Reinventing Discovery. Princeton University Press. info:other/9780691148908
- April 4, 2011
- 11:44 AM
- 1,514 views
Pig's blood, tobacco control and mass media
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Pigs play an important role in the western culture, mostly as guests of honor in many meals. A less known role of pigs, or, to be precise, of pigs' blood (‘porcine haemoglobin’) is as part of what is called ‘biofilter’ in certain cigarette brands. Developed by Greek researchers, said 'biofilter' is supposed to make cigarette smoking healthier (it doesn't).According to Valavanidis, Vlachogianni & Fiotakis (2009)"Filters (so called “bio-filters”) with antioxidant compounds impregnated ........ Read more »
Mackenzie R, & Chapman S. (2011) Pig's blood in cigarette filters: how a single news release highlighted tobacco industry concealment of cigarette ingredients. Tobacco control, 20(2), 169-72. PMID: 21172854
Valavanidis, A., Vlachogianni, T., & Fiotakis, K. (2009) Tobacco Smoke: Involvement of Reactive Oxygen Species and Stable Free Radicals in Mechanisms of Oxidative Damage, Carcinogenesis and Synergistic Effects with Other Respirable Particles. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 6(2), 445-462. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph6020445
- October 30, 2010
- 09:16 PM
- 1,461 views
How the NEJM became an advertising platform for the pharmaceutical industry
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
These days it's common practice for authors, peer-reviewers and even editors of medical journals to declare conflicts of interest, if those exist. However, the medical journal normally don't issue them same declarations. Journals publish regularly industry-supported papers reporting large clinical trials. Reprints of those trials are regularly bought by pharmaceutics companies and distributed to clinicians. The result is an increase of the journals' income as well as an increase in their presti........ Read more »
Lexchin, J. (2003) Pharmaceutical industry sponsorship and research outcome and quality: systematic review. BMJ, 326(7400), 1167-1170. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.326.7400.1167
Moriarty CM, Jensen JD, & Stryker JE. (2010) Frequently cited sources in cancer news coverage: a content analysis examining the relationship between cancer news content and source citation. Cancer causes , 21(1), 41-9. PMID: 19784789
Lundh, A., Barbateskovic, M., Hróbjartsson, A., & Gøtzsche, P. (2010) Conflicts of Interest at Medical Journals: The Influence of Industry-Supported Randomised Trials on Journal Impact Factors and Revenue – Cohort Study. PLoS Medicine, 7(10). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000354
- February 6, 2011
- 09:00 PM
- 1,377 views
Misrepresentation of ADHD in scientific journals and in the mass media
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
The scientific community often discusses the misrepresentation of health news by the media. A less discussed subject is misrepresentation of data in the scientific literature. Gonon, Bezard and Boraud used their knowledge about ADHD to find misrepresentations of data in scientific literature and mass media, and found that the misrepresentation problem often begins in the scientific literature. 1. Internal inconsistenciesThe good news is that only 2 out of about 360 papers (Barbaresi et al and V........ Read more »
Gonon, F., Bezard, E., & Boraud, T. (2011) Misrepresentation of Neuroscience Data Might Give Rise to Misleading Conclusions in the Media: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. PLoS ONE, 6(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014618
- May 7, 2011
- 06:11 PM
- 1,352 views
Students and pseudo-scientific beliefs
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
"The Dean insists that we add creationism and crystal theory and spiritualism to the curriculum.""They already have those--""Not as equal time in the physics and chemistry departments"Fallen Angels (Niven, Pournell and Flynn, 1992)Luckily, chemistry and physics departments aren't forced (yet) to add these kind of courses to their curriculum, but that doesn't stop the students from believing in all sorts of pseudoscience, from astrology to faith healing. Since 1988, students (mostly freshmen and ........ Read more »
Sugarman et. al. (2011) Astrology Beliefs among Undergraduate Students. Astronomy Education Review. info:/
- March 5, 2011
- 01:12 PM
- 1,343 views
State of the library and information science blogosphere
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Back around 2006, blogs were the height of fashion, like the Tamagotchi in 1996. Blogs, like Tamagotchi, need to be cared for regularly to survive. Torres-Salinas et al. (unfortunately behind a paywall) set out to check what happened to library and information science blogs in the years 2006-2009. For the study, the authors selected to analyze the blogs indexed in the search engine Libworm (n=1108). Most of the blogs were from 2006 (n=1030), because Libworm stopped indexing new blogs since ........ Read more »
Torres-Salinas et al. (2011) State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach. Library . info:/10.1016/j.lisr.2010.08.001
- August 19, 2011
- 10:00 PM
- 1,336 views
Generic drug trials: more transparency needed
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
The New York Times reported a couple of days ago that "Federal regulators and the generic drug industry are putting the final touches on an agreement that would help speed the approval of generic drugs in this country and increase inspections at foreign plants that export generic drugs and drug ingredients to the United States." The generic drug manufactures will pay an annual fee of 299$ million dollars, so that the FDA will be able to hire more reviewers and speed up approval of applications ........ Read more »
van der Meersch, A., Dechartres, A., & Ravaud, P. (2011) Quality of Reporting of Bioequivalence Trials Comparing Generic to Brand Name Drugs: A Methodological Systematic Review. PLoS One. info:/10.1371/journal.pone.0023611
- August 7, 2011
- 11:25 PM
- 1,274 views
The Wikipedia Gender Gap, Part I
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Wikipedia editing is a men's club. We already talked here about the lack of Wikipedia female editors (barely 13% of the editors are women). However, that survey was self-selecting and most of the participants (75%) used Wikipedia in non-English languages. Now, Lam et al. (2011) present their analysis of the gender imbalance in English Wikipedia. They took most of their data out of the January 2011 data dump, as well as from the Wikipedia API and the January 2008 and 2010 data dumps.In Wikipedia,........ Read more »
Lam, S., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., Terveen, L., & Terveen, J. (2011) WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance. WikiSym’11, October 3–5, Mountain View, California. info:/
- May 20, 2011
- 11:12 PM
- 1,267 views
You're just a number: introduction to the h-index
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Measuring a single scientist's output has always been problematic. Why? First, in order for the statistics to be reliable, the scientist has to produce a considerable publication output and get cited. That takes time. Second, measures like research productivity, number of publications and citations don't always correlates. Measuring the output of journals and universities has been far more reliable than measuring that of one person. Suggested by physicist Jorge Hirsch, h-index (2005) offers an ........ Read more »
Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H. (2008) The state of h index research. Is the h index the ideal way to measure research performance?. EMBO reports, 10(1), 2-6. DOI: 10.1038/embor.2008.233
Hirsch, J. (2005) An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(46), 16569-16572. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0507655102
- March 8, 2011
- 11:28 AM
- 1,177 views
International Women's Day and the science blogging gender gap.
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Warning: This post contains *gasp* feminist and non-politically correct opinions. Read at your own risk. As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I've been working on characterizing Science Blogs which have over twenty posts at the Researchblogging.org aggregator, and posted there after January 1st, 2010. While my original sample had almost 200 blogs, I've decided to focus on private independent blogs and private blogs belonging to a blogging network (meaning of "private" here is "one or t........ Read more »
Glott, R, & Ghosh, R. (2010) Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results. UNU-Merit. info:/
- October 20, 2010
- 06:33 AM
- 1,175 views
The Matthew Effect Strikes Again
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
The new Bornmann, de Moya Anegón and Leydesdorff paper, published in PLOS ONE, shows that highly cited papers tend to reference other highly cited papers more often. That is true especially for the life science and health science disciplines. Ms. Corbyn from Nature News saved me the need to summarize the paper by writing an excellent article about it. Based on their findings, Bornmann et al. suggested to concentrate funding on already highly-cited researchers and research groups ("A concentrati........ Read more »
Bornmann, L., de Moya Anegón, F., & Leydesdorff, L. (2010) Do Scientific Advancements Lean on the Shoulders of Giants? A Bibliometric Investigation of the Ortega Hypothesis. PLOS ONE, 5(10). info:/10.1371/journal.pone.0013327
- June 27, 2011
- 06:40 PM
- 1,109 views
More about t-citings
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Several months ago I blogged about Priem & Costello's t-citings paper "How and why scholars cite on Twitter". Now Weller, Dröge & Puschmann have done further research about the subject, by analyzing tweets from two major scientific conferences.They collected tweets from the World Wide Web conference 2010 (WWW2010, #www2010) and the Modern Language Association Conference 2009 (MLA09, #mla09), starting two weeks before each conference and ending two weeks after.WWW2010 Vs. MLA09The author........ Read more »
Weller, K., Dröge, E., & Puschmann, C. (2011) citation analysis on twitter. MSM2011 - 1st Workshop on making sense of Microposts, 1-12. info:/
- June 9, 2011
- 07:41 PM
- 1,022 views
Coverage of common causes of death in the UK media
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Is there a correlation between the diseases you read about in the news and what is actually likely to kill you?Williamson, Skinner and Hocken (2011) studied the 10 most daily read newspapers in the UK s (The Sun, Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Telegraph, The Times, Daily Express, Daily Star, The Guardian, The Independent and the Financial Times) for a year, in order to see whether there's a correlation between the media reporting of illness and death and actual statistics.Most common causes of dea........ Read more »
Williamson, J.M., Skinner, C. I., & Hocken, D.B. (2011) Death and illness as depicted in the media. International journal of clinical practice, 65(5). info:/21489079
- December 7, 2011
- 06:25 PM
- 954 views
Reinventing Discovery: Book Review, Part I
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
In Arthur C. Clarke's story "Into the Comet" he describes a spaceship with a computer malfunction that dooms all abroad to eventual death by starvation/oxygen deprivation, whichever comes first. The solution is a device older than the computer: the abacus. The entire crew run calculations on acabi, and they make their way out of the comet's nucleus successfully. That is an extreme example of citizen science (or oh-my-God-we're-all-going-to-die science) but it shows the principle, that collaborat........ Read more »
Nielsen, Michael. (2011) Reinventing Discovery. Princeton University Press. info:other/9780691148908
- August 10, 2011
- 03:17 AM
- 938 views
The Wikipedia Gender Gap, Part II
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
In part I we talked about the small percentage of female editors in Wikipedia and their shorter editing life span. In this part we'll talk about content areas female and male editor focus on, coverage of female and male-related topics and involvement in editing controversial entries.
Content areas The authors divided the data from the January 2008 data dump into 8 main areas: Arts, Geography, Health, History, Science, People, Philosophy and Religion. Then, they checked the focus areas of each ed........ Read more »
Lam, S., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., Terveen, L., & Terveen, J. (2011) WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance. WikiSym’11, October 3–5, Mountain View, California. info:/
- August 14, 2011
- 05:50 PM
- 927 views
The Wikipedia Gender Gap, Part III
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
In part I and part II, we discussed several of the gender gaps in Wikipedia. In this part, we'll talk about reverted edits, blocking, and their association with female and male editors. .
Blocking The hypothesis here was that "Female editors are less likely to be blocked." However, there wasn't a statistically significant difference in the percentage of females blocked (4.39%) and males blocked (4.52%). Surprisingly, females were significantly more likely to be blocked indefinitely (3.85% and 3........ Read more »
Lam, S., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., Terveen, L., & Terveen, J. (2011) WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance. WikiSym’11, October 3–5, Mountain View, California. info:/
- December 31, 2011
- 02:54 AM
- 883 views
Correlation between reference managers and the WoS
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Even though web citations have been a part of our lives for several years now, the correlation between "traditional" citations and web resources like Mendeley, CiteULike, blog networks, etc. hasn't been thoroughly studied yet, and any new research in the field is very interesting (to me, anyway). The new paper was published at Scientometrics by Li, Thelwall (still one of my dissertation advisors) and Giustini. They focused on the correlation between user count - the number of users who save a pa........ Read more »
Li, X., Thelwall, M., & Giustini, D. (2011) Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement. Scientometrics. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-011-0580-x
- November 25, 2010
- 07:01 PM
- 763 views
Who writes health news?
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
In times of financial difficulties, health reporters are usually the first to be let go. This is especially true if they actually know something about health (it makes them more expensive). Financial cutbacks mean that media outlets have to rely on news agencies or have non-specialist journalists report health. The authors of "Does it matter who writes medical news stories" are familiar with such problems (and their consequences), since they are reviewers of health news stories for the Australia........ Read more »
Wilson, A., Robertson, J., McElduff, P., Jones, A., & Henry, D. (2010) Does It Matter Who Writes Medical News Stories?. PLoS Medicine, 7(9). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000323
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