Scientific manuscripts
Deeper Impact
07/09/12 13:15 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Victor Henning and William Gunn in the Guardian's Higher Education Network blog questioned the usefulness of the impact factor as a measure of an academic publication's influence. They suggest newer tools for calculating the value of a publication including the "Total-Impact" aggregator, as well as Henning and Gunn's own company, Mendeley, which rely on growing openness and "interoperability" in scientific and academic publishing that reviews papers on rigour and technical merit, rather than perceived significance. S. Pelech points out that while the impact factor of a journal might reflect some general measure of quality and significance, this is does not necessarily equally apply to the degree of rigour of performance, peer-review and importance of individual scientific reports within the same journal. He proposes that the best indication of the impact of a scientific manuscript is how highly it becomes cited by others over time, and foresees an increase in self-publication of scientific work. Read More...
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Are You Sure?
31/07/12 12:55 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Daniel MacArthur at Massachusetts General Hospital suggests that false positives are a given in genomic research, especially due to the large size of genomes and errors from high-throughput sequencing. Ann Buchanan at Penn State University also notes for these and a variety of other reasons there many sequence errors in genomics manuscripts and online databases and a higher rate of retractions. S. Pelech argues that the increased rate of retraction of scientific research results in publications in general actually reflects a wide variety of confounding factors beside greater error rates from higher throughput technologies. These include amongst others premature submission for publication due to financial and continuing employment requirements, poorer peer-review, and a proliferation of new journals eager to acquire manuscripts, which can result in outright plagiarism and even fraudulent data. Read More...