Archive for the ‘scholarly communication’ Category

Today in The Hill: Science is littered with zombie studies. Here’s how to stop their spread.

November 26th, 2023

My newest piece is in The Hill today: Science is littered with zombie studies. Here’s how to stop their spread.

Many people think of science as complete and objective. But the truth is, science continues to evolve and is full of mistakes. Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds. 

Identifying these inaccuracies is how science is supposed to work. …Yet these zombie publications continue to be cited and used, unwittingly, to support new arguments. 

Why? Almost always it’s because nobody noticed they had been retracted. 

Science is littered with zombie studies. Here’s how to stop their spread. Jodi Schneider in The Hill

Thanks to The OpEd Project, the Illinois’ Public Voices Fellowship, and my coach Luis Carrasco. Editorial writing is part of my NSF CAREER: Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funds my retraction research in Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science including the NISO Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Working Group.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in information ecosystem, scholarly communication | Comments (0)

Last call for public comments: NISO RP-45-202X, Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern

November 26th, 2023

I’m pleased that the draft Recommended Practice, NISO RP-45-202X, Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) is open for public comment through December 2, 2023. I’m a member of the NISO Working Group which is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in collaboration with my Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science project.

The NISO CREC Recommended Practice will address the dissemination of retraction information (metadata & display) to support a consistent, timely transmission of that information to the reader (machine or human), directly or through citing publications, addressing requirements both of the retracted publication and of the retraction notice or expression of concern. It will not address the questions of what a retraction is or why an object is retracted.

NISO CREC

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem, Information Quality Lab news, library and information science, scholarly communication | Comments (0)

QOTD: What policymakers need…

November 17th, 2023

What policymakers need are things that we [researchers] don’t value so much. Meta-analyses. What do we know about a given topic. If we survey 1000 papers on a given topic, what does the preponderance of the evidence say about a thing? Obviously the incentive structures in academia are about smaller mechanisms, or about making those smaller distinctions in the body of knowledge and that’s how knowledge advances and research advances, but for the policymaking space, you need to be able to translate that, like hundreds of years, half a century, decades of what we know about education, about inequality, about the STEM fields, about the research ecosystem, into that.

Alondra Nelson, discussion after the 2023 Sage-CASBS Award Lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, November 16, 2023 [video]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in policymaking, scholarly communication | Comments (0)

What can two-way communication between scientists and citizens enable?

September 24th, 2023

The Washington Post quoted NIH researcher Paul Hwang: “Amazing findings in medicine are sometimes based on one patient”.

The findings here are a breakthrough discovery in a disease called ME/CFS – commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis – which led to a recent PNAS paper. This is an amazing moment: Without biomarkers, it’s been a contested disease “you have to fight to get”.

What really strikes me, though, is the individual interactions that created a space for knowledge production: an email from one citizen (Amanda Twinam) to one scientist (Paul Hwang); “serendipitous correspondence” from another scientist (Brian Walitt) with access to “an entire population” (9 of the 14 tested for the PNAS paper were similar to Amanda). Reading the literature, writing well-timed correspondence, and “hearing about” synergistic work going on in another lab all seem to have contributed.

Mady Hornig, a researcher not involved in the project, told the reporter: “It’s not very common that we do all of these … steps, having doctors who are really persistent about what is happening with one individual and applying a scientific lens.”

But what if we did?


Dumit, Joseph (2006). Illnesses you have to fight to get: Facts as forces in uncertain, emergent illnesses. Social Science & Medicine, 62(3), 577–590. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.06.018

Wang, Ping-yuan, Ma, Jin, Kim, Young-Chae, Son, Annie Y., Syed, Abu Mohammad, Liu, Chengyu, Mori, Mateus P., Huffstutler, Rebecca D., Stolinski, JoEllyn L., Talagala, S. Lalith, Kang, Ju-Gyeong, Walitt, Brian T., Nath, Avindra, & Hwang, Paul M. (2023). WASF3 disrupts mitochondrial respiration and may mediate exercise intolerance in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(34), e2302738120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2302738120

Vastag, Brian (2023, September 19). She wrote to a scientist about her fatigue. It inspired a breakthrough. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/09/17/fatigue-cfs-longcovid-mitochondria/ Temporarily open to read via this gift link.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in information ecosystem, random thoughts, scholarly communication | Comments (0)

QOTD: Working out scientific insights on paper, Lavoisier case study

July 12th, 2017

…language does do much of our thinking for us, even in the sciences, and rather than being an unfortunate contamination, its influence has been productive historically, helping individual thinkers generate concepts and theories that can then be put to the test. The case made here for the constitutive power of figures [of speech] per se supports the general point made by F.L. Holmes in a lecture addressed to the History of Science Society in 1987. A distinguished historian of medicine and chemistry, Holmes based his study of Antoine Lavoisier on the French chemist’s laboratory notebooks. He later examined drafts of Lavoisier’s published papers and discovered that Lavoisier wrote many versions of his papers and in the course of careful revisions gradually worked out the positions he eventually made public (Holmes, 221). Holmes, whose goal as a historian is to reconstruct the careful pathways and fine structure of scientific insights, concluded from his study of Lavoisier’s drafts

We cannot always tell whether a thought that led him to modify a passage, recast an argument, or develop an alternative interpretation occurred while he was still engaged in writing what he subsequently altered, or immediately afterward, or after some interval during which he occupied himself with something else; but the timing is, I believe, less significant than the fact that the new developments were consequences of the effort to express ideas and marshall supporting information on paper (225).

– page xi of Rhetorical Figures in Science by Jeanne Fahnestock, Oxford University Press, 1999.

She is quoting Frederich L. Holmes. 1987. Scientific writing and scientific discovery. Isis 78:220-235. DOI:10.1086/354391

As Moore summarizes,

Lavoisier wrote at least six drafts of the paper over a period of at least six months. However, his theory of respiration did not appear until the fifth draft. Clearly, Lavoisier’s writing helped him refine and understand his ideas.

Moore, Randy. Language—A Force that Shapes Science. Journal of College Science Teaching 28.6 (1999): 366. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42990615
(which I quoted in
a review I wrote recently)

Fahnestock adds:
“…Holmes’s general point [is that] there are subtle interactions ‘between writing, thought, and operations in creative scientific activity’ (226).”

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem, scholarly communication | Comments (0)

QOTD: Scholarly communication online, circa 1996

December 2nd, 2015

Here is a glimpse into scholarly communication 20 years ago, from a paper about Alzforum, the Alzheimer Research Forum website. “In July of 1996, the website made its debut at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders in Osaka, Japan.” ((page 458, Kinoshita, June, and Gabrielle Strobel. “Alzheimer Research Forum: a knowledge base and e-community for AD research.” in Alzheimer: 100 Years and Beyond, Mathias Jucker, Konrad Beyreuther, Christian Haass, Roger M. Nitsch, Yves Christen, eds. Berlin Heidelberg:Springer-Verlag, 2006: 457-463.))

Having established a foothold in cyberspace, the challenge for Alzforum was and continues to be to define new types of scientific publishing that take advantage of the speed and wide distribution of the Web and to curate and add value to information available from other public sources. This is a perennial challenge, thanks to the rapid advances in biomedical resources on the Web.

This uphill struggle, however, seems less strenuous when we compare the current situation with the “old days.” Recall that in 1996, PubMed did not exist! (PubMed was launched in June of 1997.) Medical institutions had access to Medline, but in order for Alzforum to produce its Papers of the Week listings, the editor had to ask the Countway Medical Library at Harvard Medical School to provide weekly text files listing newly indexed AD papers. The Alzforum hired a curator to paraphrase each abstract so that this information could be posted without violating journal copyrights. These documents were manually edited, sent out in a weekly email to the advisors for comments, and compiled into a static HTML page. Looking back, we can see that the entire process seems as antiquated as the hand-copying of manuscripts in the Middle Ages.

(emphasis mine)

From pages 459-460 of “Alzheimer Research Forum: a knowledge base and e-community for AD research” ((Kinoshita, June, and Gabrielle Strobel. “Alzheimer Research Forum: a knowledge base and e-community for AD research.” in Alzheimer: 100 Years and Beyond, Mathias Jucker, Konrad Beyreuther, Christian Haass, Roger M. Nitsch, Yves Christen, eds. Berlin Heidelberg:Springer-Verlag, 2006: 457-463.))

Tags: , , ,
Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem, scholarly communication | Comments (0)

Evidence Informatics

January 20th, 2015

I sent off my revised abstract to ECA Lisbon 2015, the European Conference on Argumentation. Evidence informatics, in 75 words:

Reasoning and decision-making are common throughout human activity. Increasingly, human reasoning is mediated by information technology, either to support collective action at a distance, or to support individual decision-making and sense-making.

We will describe the nascent field of “evidence informatics”, which considers how to structure reasoning and evidence. Comparing and contrasting evidence support tools in different disciplines will help determine reusable underlying principles, shared between fields such as legal informatics, evidence-based policy, and cognitive ergonomics.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in argumentative discussions, information ecosystem, random thoughts, scholarly communication | Comments (0)