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Feature

Feature

Features explore issues raised by news stories in more depth.

How do you read papers? 2010 will be different

In November 2008 I wrote a blog post called How do you read papers? The blog post was actually about different strategies to find interesting papers, e.g. browsing journal tables of content (TOC), different search strategies, filtering by papers others read, or filtering by experts (e.g. Faculty of

ORCID or how to build a unique identifier for scientists in 10 easy steps

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID and was announced in early December. This blog post tries to summarize some of the problems that have to be solved to develop a unique identifier for scientists. 1. Identify the problem The Researcher Identification Primer by the Gen2Phen Knowledge Center lists

Science and Sustainability

Sustainability in science is nothing new. The term sustainability science was probably first used in 2001 (see Wikipedia entry), and the title of this blog post was already used by a 2002 editorial in Science. There are both journals (Sustainability: Science, Practice & Policy, Sustainability Science) and conferences (e.g.

Increased cancer risk following computed tomography scans

Increased cancer risk following computed tomography scans

Two papers (this and this) and an editorial in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine examine the cancer risks associated with the use of computed tomography (CT) examinations.1 Ionizing radiation increases the risk for developing cancer. There is direct evidence from atomic bomb survivors in Japan in

On giving a talk about Open Access in my department

Earlier this month I gave this talk in my department. It is basically a summary of two blog posts that I wrote in October during Open Access Week (Open Access Week: a researcher's perspective part I and part II), and I had given a similar talk in November

Publication bias in clinical trials

Last week the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a paper on selective outcome reporting in clinical trials (Vedula et al. 2009). The primary and secondary outcome(s) of a clinical trial could for example be survival in cancer patients or rate of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events

Moving article-level metrics forward

In September PLoS started to show usage data (downloads, citations, but also use of social bookmarking services and blog posts) for all their published papers (article-level metrics at PLoS: addition of usage data). PLoS is not the first publisher to do that, but certainly the largest to date. Two Nature