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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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May 7, 2012
11:31 AM
91 views

Understanding the Journal Impact Factor – Part One

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

The journals in which scientists publish can make or break their career. A scientist must publish in “leading” journals, with high Journal Impact Factor (JIF), (you can see it presented proudly on high-impact journals’ websites). The JIF has gone popular partly because it gives an “objective” measure of a journal’s quality and partly because it’s [...]

... Read more »

Bar-Ilan, J. (2012) Journal report card. Scientometrics. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0671-3

April 24, 2012
07:42 PM
128 views

The post-journal era

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

Most of the scholarly publication today goes more or less like this: a scientist writes a manuscript about research funded by her university and/or the grant fairy (usually a government agency) then submits it to a commercial peer-review journal. An editor (either working for free or for "honorarium") reads her manuscript and sends it to appropriate peer reviewers (payment? what payment?). Then, if her manuscript is accepted, her institute's library gets the privilege of buying access to the published manuscript. This state of things is very profitable for the commercial publishers' stock owners, but less so for scientists, libraries and the general public, who rarely get to read research they paid for. While many people agree this system is, shall we say, less than optimal, attempts to remedy the situation have been less than successful, and the commercial publishers might be targeting our research budgets next.The latest attempt to renovate the system is by Priem & Hemminger (2012). At the beginning of their paper, they suggest that previous attempts in reinventing scholarly publishing have failed due to two reasons:1.Change to peer review are just patches on a fundamentally broken scholarly journal system2.Proposals offer no smooth transition from the present system.Today, the journal fills four main functions: It archives scholarly material and time-stamp the researchers' contributions, if disseminates scholarly products and it certifies contributions (if it's published in a high-impact journal it must be of value). Priem and Hemminger want to make each of these functions independent from the others.Their first suggestion is to "refactor" the system. This means locating "parts which are confusing, inefficient or redundant" and improving them without hurting the rest of the system. Their second suggestion is the "decoupled journal" (DcJ) (more about this later).Overlay journalsThese journals were suggested by Ginsparg (1997) and only provide the "stamp of approval" to an already published-archived-registered material. Despite the promise the overlay model represents, it hasn't been successful so far, and almost every journal which tried it went back to the traditional coupled model.The PLoS One modelPLoS One is an open access journal which publishes work not according to what the editors and reviewers consider significant, but consider only the paper's methodological quality. They decoupled the significant approval from the methodological approval. PLoS One also decoupled copy-editing: they warn in advance that they don't copy-edit in details, and instead provide a list of services which do just that. This model has proven to be profitable: PLoS One published more than 5,000 papers in 2010 at 1350$ each (and the other PLoS journals charge even more). The flaws here, beyond the price, are the exclusivity: authors publish only in one journal, and the danger of a future with only a few mega-journals.Post-publication review servicesThere are a few existing post-publication peer review services, the best-known of them are Faculty of 1000 (F1000) and Mathematical Reviews. F1000 "...identifies and evaluates the most important articles in biology and medical research publication." F1000 is supposed to function as additional help for researchers in managing their reading. It has actually been shown to identify quality papers which were overlooked by leading journals (Allen et al., 2009).Mathematical Reviews is and abstracting service, but as Priem & Hemminger say, it is "occasionally called into service as a post-publication peer review venue when the traditional journal fail in their role as certifiers. In this case, abstracters may abandon objectivity and attack papers and their reviewers directly."These services have one major problem: they aren't brand names, and can't replace the certification of well-established journals, no matter how much their peer review is sound.The Deconstructed JournalSmith (1999) had three insights about the Deconstructed Journal (DJ):1. The means (journal) and the functions are not the same.2. Any system that will be implanted instead of the journal has to be at least as good.3. Several cooperating agencies could successfully replace the central publisher.Priem and Hemminger cite van de Sompei et al. (2004) and Smith (2003) as those who pointed out the advantages of a deconstructed system:"...encourages innovation, adapts well to changing scholarly practices, and democratizes the largely monopolized scholarly communication market" However, van de Sompeis' and Smith' proposals are a bit outdated, because they hadn't taken into account the social media.The functions of the decoupled journalThe Decoupled journal (DcJ, rather than DJ) is the updated version of the DJ. This is a universal, or meta, journal, where everything scholars produce and share is stored long-term, added to other projects, linked to, commented about...etc. etc.With the DcJ, publication is the first step in the process of revisions, reviewes, etc. Scholarly items will need persistent IDs, storage, and mirror backup in order to survive long-term. This can be done with persistent identifiers such as the DOI and institutional or subject-area repositories (ArXiv, Pubmed).After the publication of a draft, it's time for preparation. Preparation is defined by the authors as "Changing the format of a work to make it more suitable for a given (human or electronic) audience". Today, many companies sell authors services (like copy-editing), but preparation is still mostly left to the journal. The DcJ will allow authors the freedom to choose the preparation they prefer (say, PDF or HTML format). PLoS One, as mentioned before, already leaves copy-editing to authors, perhaps showing the beginning of a trend.After the preparation comes the assessment. Defined as "Attaching an assessment of quality to a scholarly object". Today's method of assessment, peer review, is usually anonymous, unpublished to the general public, and done by invited reviewers. The reviewers give their opinion in free text first, then a final assessment whether the material should be published.In the Priem & Hemminger model, reviewers don't decide whether the material is publishable or not (it's already published!) but certificate it. In the future, Nature could become "Nature stamping agency" and give papers its "seal of approval". It will even be able to do so by giving grades, rather than just accept or reject the paper. There will be agencies that will only review the soundness of the work (like PLoS One does today), agencies who will certify only certain parts, open peer reviews and blind peer reviews. Other forms of assessments - blog posts, number of downloads, and even tweets - will be stored as well. The authors see the DcJ as a way to allow peer-review to evolve freely, without its tight coupling with the other functions of the journal.With libraries' budgets tighter than ever (even Harvard decided that commercial journals are just too expensive ) I expect more and more authors will choose the DcJ route. However, it could be that a certification bottle-neck will be created, with the prestigious journals of today becoming the prestigious stamping agencies of tomorrow. The number of expert peer-reviewers in each field could become a limitation as well. Will our grandchildren complain about the amount of money they have to pay for a Science certification? Only time will tell.Allen L, Jones C, Dolby K, Lynn D, & Walport M (2009). Looking for landmarks: the role of expert review and bibliometric analysis in evaluating scientific publication outputs. PloS one, 4 (6) PMID: 19536339Ginsparg, P. (1997). Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village The Serials Librarian, 30 (3-4), 83-95 DOI: 10.1300/J123v30n03_13... Read more »

Priem, J., & Hemminger, B. (2012) Decoupling the scholarly journal. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00019

Smith, J. (1999) The deconstructed journal – a new model for academic publishing. Learned Publishing, 12(2), 79-91. DOI: 10.1087/09531519950145896

Smith, J. W. T. (2003) The deconstructed journal revisited: a review of developments. ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing-ElPub03: From information to knowledge. (Minho, Portugal). info:/

March 30, 2012
10:46 PM
171 views

When prince charming kissed Mendel: delayed recognition in science.

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

Monk Gregor Mendel hadn't lived to see his peas become famous; his paper has been asleep, waiting for prince charming to cite it awake. Of course, not all "delay recognition" papers sleep as long as Mendel's, but "sleeping beauty" or "Mendel's syndrome" papers do exist in science. A "sleeping beauty" paper can go uncited for years, until suddenly it's awakened. Costas, van Leeuwen and van Raan (2010) classify published scientific papers according to three general types: Normal-type: these have the normal distribution of published papers, usually reaching the peak of their citation 3-4 years after publication and then decay. Flash in the pans-type: these get cited very often when they first come out, but are forgotten in the long run, kind of like a teenager pop star. Delayed-type: those who start drawing interest later than the normal-type papers. Costas et al. prefer not to call them all "sleeping beauties" because real sleeping beauties (never cited and then suddenly rise to fame) are very rare. Source: Costas, van Leeuwen and van Raan (2010) Looking at all the documents from Web of Science between the years 1980 and 2008 (over 30 million), Costas et al. found that the "flash in the pans" type of papers tend more to be editorial, notes, reviews and so forth, rather than research articles. Delayed documents tended to be more prominent in the "articles" category. When they checked Nature and Science, two 'letter' journals, Costas et al. found that they cover 10.9% and 10.5% of "flash in the pans" documents respectively, which is higher than average (9.8%) in the database. The castle of the sleeping beauty is the availability of information. The information has to be accessible, and it has to be visible. The Web, of course, has improved the accessibility of papers a great deal, especially when said papers are open-sourced. When a paper is digitalized or becomes open-accessed, its visibility and availability increase. But being available is not enough: researchers must have use for the information despite the passage of time. The prince kisses the sleeping beauty awake Source: Wang, Ma, Chen & Rao, 2012In 1995, Polchinski's paper on supergravity in string theory “Dirichlet branes and Ramond-Ramond charges” came out and cited an early work by Romans (1986) about the same subject. Romans' paper has not been cited from 1986 to 1995(!), but according to Google Scholar (which admittedly could be inflated) count, it has been cited 424 times since then. Why? One reason is that Romans' paper was simply ahead of its time, published in a "sleeping beauty" field. In the nine years until Polchinski's paper, interest in supergravity has considerably increased. Another reason is that Polchinski is a high-classed prince, with great academic authority. An unknown scholar probably wouldn't have been as successful in waking up Romans' paper.Source: Wang, Ma, Chen & Rao, 2012 An extension of the "Mendel Syndrome" is "Mendelism", when researchers "develop lines of research and have a profile of publications (‘oeuvres’) 'ahead of their time'’’ (recent Nobel Laureate Dan Shechtman comes to... Read more »

Costas, van Leeuwen, & van Raan. (2011) The ‘‘Mendel syndrome’’ in science: durability of scientific literature and its effects on bibliometric analysis of individual scientists. Scientometrics, 177-205. info:/

van Raan, A. (2004) Sleeping Beauties in science. Scientometrics, 59(3), 467-472. DOI: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000018543.82441.f1

Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. van Leeuwen, & Anthony F. J. van Raan. (2009) Is scientific literature subject to a sell-by-date? A general methodology to analyze the durability of scientific documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. arXiv: 0907.1455v1

Wang, Chen, & Rao. (2012) Why and how can "sleeping beauties" be awakened?. The Electronic Library, 30(1), 5-18. info:/http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204033

Research / Scholarship

December 31, 2011
02:54 AM
427 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 particular paper - and WoS and Google Scholar citations. The researchers extracted from WoS all the Nature and Science research articles that were published in 2007 and their references. They ended up with 793 Nature and 820 Science articles, or 1,613 articles overall (not including references, of course). Then, they searched CiteULike for those articles' titles and number of citations, as well as for their user count in Mendeley. They also collected the same data from Google Scholar. It's important to note that Mendeley had 32.9 million articles indexed while CiteULike had only 3.5 at the time of the study.Google Scholar's mean and median number of citations were higher than in WoS (not surprising; If you want better citation numbers, always use GS). They found that despite Mendeley being "younger" than CiteULike (launched in 2004 and 2008 respectively), CiteULike had only about two-thirds of the sample articles saved, while Mendeley had about 92%.Spearman correlations between citations in GS and WoS were high in this research (0.957 for Nature and 0.931 for Science). The correlations between Mendeley's user count and the citations in GS and WoS were also rather good (0.559 and o.592 for WoS and GS respectively for Nature, 0.540 and 0.603 for Science). CiteULike had far weaker correlations: 0.366 with WoS and 0.396 with GS for Nature, 0.304 with WoS and 0.381 with GS for Science.LimitationsThe authors remind us that correlation isn't causation, saying they can't conclude a casual relationship based on correlations between two data sources. Therefore, it can't be determined for sure whether there is a connection between a high user count and a high number of citations. Only Nature and Science were studied, so it can very well be that the results aren't true for other journals. Also, group-saved and single-user saved references were given the same weight. The number of saved references in Mendeley and CiteULike is much smaller than in the WoS counts and therefore the results might be less reliable.The authors speculate that user count may represent a more accurate scientific impact of articles, and take note that one can measure the impact of all sorts of resources in online reference managers, unlike in the limited bibliographic indexes. I think it could be reference managers don't always reflect readership: one could save a reference and forget about it all together later (so many articles, so little time...). On the other hand, citation counts might suffer from the same problem, as many scientists use a "rolling citation" from other articles citing an earlier article, without actually having read the article themselves.Priem et al. also presented lately a study about web citations and WoS citations, based on data from the seven PLoS journals, but I think I'll wait for the journal article to cover it in the blog.Li, X., Thelwall, M., & Giustini, D. (2011). Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement Scientometrics DOI: 10.1007/s11192-011-0580-x... 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

Research / Scholarship

December 14, 2011
09:08 PM
1,318 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 mess - it's not Pubmed - but it still left me in awe, because not only that most of the astronomers I've searched had papers there, most of them contributed at least one of the papers themselves (you can see who submitted the paper). ArXiv comes with a service called SPIRES (now inSPIRE) which can tell you how many times a paper was cited, who's citing who, and so forth. This way, it's possible to measure at least some of the impact of preprints (if you're a high-energy physicist). So, not only ArXiv makes the scientific communication faster, it also helps evaluate the impact of this kind of communication more accurately. Unfortunately, not everybody gives ArXiv the honor it deserves. Nielsen tells how when he was writing the book, a physicist told him that Paul Ginsparg, ArXiv's creator, was wasting his talent on "collecting garbage", reflecting a disregard certain scientists have for "mere" tool builders. I don't know if this attitude is common in the scientific community, but it's discouraging nonetheless. Open Access can be problematic Citizen science isn't always all that - in the Polymath Project, there were people with good intentions but not much knowledge, their contributions didn't have much value to the project and had to essentially filtered out. Misinformation - premature publications , especially in fields the mainstream media takes interest in, can spread far and wide, confuse the general public and discredit research projects in the eyes of the public. How we can be more open (if you're reading this, you probably don't need these suggestions). In the last few pages of the book, Nielsen suggests practical steps toward open science. A scientist can upload old data, code, etc. online for reuse (be sure to tell people how to cite it!); He/she can open a blog, contribute to other people's open science projects, or try to create a new one. Nielsen advises to "be generous in giving other scientists credit when they share their scientific knowledge in new ways" which I think is an excellent advice, even though the formatting and style guides are a bit behind the times when it comes to social media. All in all, Reinventing discovery is a great book, however, I was a little disappointed to find only a small section dedicated to science blogs. The author explains that he had enough of the hype around blogging and that he doesn't want "to cover that well-trodden ground again", but I think the book could have benefited from a few more pages about the subject (yes, I know I'm not very objective here...). Also, though the book deals with - and recommends - open access, it isn't under Creative Commons licence (you can read why here). Nielsen, Michael (2011). Reinventing Discovery Princeton University Press Other: 9780691148908... Read more »

Nielsen, Michael. (2011) Reinventing Discovery. Princeton University Press. info:other/9780691148908

December 7, 2011
06:25 PM
475 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 collaboration by a large number of people can solve very complicated problems. Michael Nielsen's excellent book, 'Reinventing Discovery' tells us about many such examples, though in most of them participants have to do a lot more than just calculate without thinking.Source Take 'Galaxy Zoo': volunteers can help classify galaxies (it turns out people do it faster and more accurately than a computer). It all began when one overworked grad student, Kevin Schawinski, wanted to prove that elliptical galaxies aren't always old, but had simply too many galaxies to go through in order to prove his theory. He and a post-doc, Chris Lintott, joined forces and opened a website which allowed anyone to come and classify galaxy photos. The project is an enormous success, with 22 scientific papers so far and the spin-offs Galaxy Zoo 2 and Galaxy Zoo:Hubble.Another story Nielsen recounts is the story of the Polymath Project: Fields Medal recipient Tim Gowers posted a mathematical problem in his blog and asked for a collaborative efforts. Twenty-seven people wrote 800 comments and solved the problem within 37 days. Now there is a Polymath blog which keeps up the good work.These projects were a success, but Nielsen also studies failed projects and the reasons for their failure. He argues (which I wholly agree!) that scientists are rewarded by writing as many good scientific papers as possible. Contributing to, say, Wikipedia, essentially takes away time from research and gives nothing in terms of academic reputation. Galaxy Zoo is a success because it gives astronomers something to write about, and it's possible the Polymath project succeeds because it A. involves people with tenure and B. involves people who want to be noticed by people with tenure. Personally, I think the solution to scientists' reluctance to cooperate in collaborative projects is simple: put them in a spaceship and tell them they won't be able to make it home until they collaborate. However, it is possible the oxygen run out while they'd argue about whose name gets to be first in the authors' list. Also, spaceships are very costly. Next part: what Nielsen has to say about Arxiv and the future of open science. Bora's ReviewJoerg Heber's ReviewMichael Nielsen talks Open Science in a TED event:Nielsen, Michael (2011). Reinventing Discovery Princeton University Press Other: 9780691148908... Read more »

Nielsen, Michael. (2011) Reinventing Discovery. Princeton University Press. info:other/9780691148908

August 19, 2011
10:00 PM
734 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 for marketing of generic drugs. The question is: what do we know about the generic drugs marketed today?
Van der Meesch et al. (2011) published in PLoS One a methodological systematic review about Bioequivalence trials which compared generic to brand-name drugs published between 2005 and 2008. They searched Medline for appropriate papers, as well as journals which regularly publish bioequivalence trials. Out of 134 papers that reported bioequivalence trials between brand-name drug and generic drug, 55 didn't include the reference drug name and were excluded. The final sample consisted of 79 papers which dealt with assessment of the bioequivalence of generic and brand-name drugs.

What do the FDA and the EuropeanMedicine Agency (EMA) demand from a generic drug?The FDA wants to know three things:
Cmax - maximum plasma drug concentrationTmax - time required to achieve a maximal concentrationAUC - total area under the plasma drug concentration-time curve
The 90% confidence intervals for the ratios (test:reference) have to be between 80% and 125%. The EMA wants to know only the Cmax and the AUC.

Source: Generics – equal or not? (Birkett, 2003)
Experiments of bioequivalence are usually randomized crossover trials. They are conducted on healthy volunteers by administrating one dose of the drug. Seventy-three (92%) of the trials were indeed single-dose trials (6 (8%) were multiple-dose) and 89% of the single-dose trials reported bioequivalence. About a third didn't report CIs for all the FDA criteria, and 20% didn't report the required EMA criteria. Only 41% of the papers reported funding, 25% had private funding.
As always, the study has limitations: it included only papers from the years 2005-2008 and relied on FDA guidelines from 2003 and EMA guidelines from 2001 (updated 2008). It's also possible that they researchers' search in Pubmed didn't retrieved all the relevant papers.
In conclusion, there is a serious lack of available data about generic drugs. The authors point out that while 1,661 generic drugs were approved by the FDA during the study period, there weren't any data available about trials assessing generic drugs on the FDA and/or EMA sites. The authors also hypothesize that such a small percent (10%) of failed bioequivalence trials seem unlikely and suggested a possibility of publication bias.

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 : 10.1371/journal.pone.0023611

... 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 14, 2011
05:50 PM
654 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 3.32% respectively). Females were also significantly more likely to be reverted for vandalizing Wikipedia’s articles (3.26% and 2.11% respectively). This should be taken with a grain of salt, because the proportion of users who self-reported their gender and were blocked or reverted for vandalism was even smaller than the baseline.
Reverted EditsAre female editors more likely to have their early edits reverted? To find out, the editors first "cleaned" the data from the reverted edits that were vandalism damage repair and took into account only reverts that were made within one week of an edit (more than 95% of the edits in the data set). For the seven first edits, the average reverting percent for women was significantly higher than that of men. Beyond those first edits, men and women's chances of having their edits reverted are similar.
Are women more likely to leave Wikipedia after their early edits were reverted? The authors answered this question by building a Cox regression model, to find out which factors are associated with changes in activity life span. The model included gender, the number of edits made in the first 24 hours of editing Wikipedia, the proportion of edits made in the first 24 hoursthat were reverted for vandalism-related reasons, the proportion of edits made in the first 24hours that were reverted, but not for vandalism-related reasons, and %RvNV×Gen, an interaction term between %RvNonVandal (the non-vandalism reverted edits) and gender, which was used to study the interaction between gender and reverts for non-vandalism reasons.
All the variables except for %RvNV×Gen were significantly associated with activity lifespan. The more edits an editor made during her/his first 24 hours, the longer her/his lifespan was likely to be. Shorter life span was associated with having early edits reverted. Even after taking said factors into account, being female still had a strong association with shorter lifespan.
While early reverts tend to make a lifespan shorter for both men and women, the likelihood of their departure wasn't gender-related. Female editor was just as likely to leave after being reverted as a male editor. In short, it's not that women "give up" more often than men when being reverted, it's that they were more likely to be reverted.

In ConclusionWhy doesn't Wikipedia have more women editors? This isn't the first time this question has been widely discussed. Last year, after a survey that found that only 13% of the Wikipedia's editors were women, the NYT published an article about the subject, which lead to some serious discussions and blog posts. Sue Gardner, Executive Editor of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote a blog post including several of the reasons women supplied when asked why they hadn't edit Wikipedia. Answers varied and included reasons like the less-than-friendly interface, lack of time, lack of self-confidence, and an overall atmosphere of misogyny.
Now, since we know women *do* edit Wikis and *do* deal with less than friendly interfaces (have you ever, for example, tried to convince a Live Journal post to behave?) one must wonder if the main problem is, indeed, a culture that isn't women-friendly enough for most women to make the effort to fit in.
Lam, S., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., Terveen, L., & Terveen, J. (2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s GenderImbalance WikiSym’11, October 3–5, Mountain View, California

... 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 10, 2011
03:17 AM
624 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 editor's activity. The authors found that men focused more on Geography and Science, while women focused more on People and Arts.
January 2008 Gender distribution of editors in eight interest areas. Editors can be categorized into more than one area
The reason these data look different than those presented earlier is that they are taken from a different data pool (2008 as opposed to the more recent data used earlier).
Topics CoverageAre female-related topics covered in Wikipedia as well as male-related topics? The authors used their gender data to determine whether an article is of more interest to women or to men. Since there are so few female editors, the metrics were "subject to high relative variance and noise" so they had to use only high-activity articles where gender was known for at least 30 editors. Articles shorter than 100 bytes were exclude because they usually redirected to other articles. The authors ended up with a sample of 59,579 articles.
Articles were declared "male" if they were in the bottom quintile (lowest 20%) of female editing activity, "neutral" if they were in the third (center) quintile, and "female" if they were in the top quintile.
Male articles are significantly longer than female articles (33,301 and 28,434 bytes respectively, t-Test, p < 0.001). Neutral articles are the longest at 36,511 bytes. Since the authors used the articles' length as a crude measurement of quality, they concluded that coverage of female topics is indeed lacking. They hypothesized that neutral articles are longer because they appeal to editors of both genders and therefore receive more overall attention.
For an additional analysis, the authors used the movie recommender web site MovieLens, which has self-reported gender information from over 80% of users who started using MovieLens before May 2003 (when they stopped asking about gender). 32% of the site's users were females. The authors mapped each movie to its Wikipedia article and excluded movies with less than 10 known-gender raters or movies which had no article. The remaining data set included 5,850 movies. The Article Length was the dependent variable, "Movie Gender" the independent variable and Movie Popularity, Movie Quality and Movie Age were the control variables. Articles about "male" movies were longer than those about "female" movies.
However, when articles about Nobel Prize winners and recipients of the Academy Award for Best Actor/Actress were analysed, it was found that they are about of equal length. So, the length gender gap isn't noticeable for very popular and/or important articles.
Controversial TopicsThe authors hypothesized that "Females tend to avoid controversial or contentious articles." They determined controversial articles according to whether the articles were protected or not, reasoning that Wikipedia tend to lock articles which are often vandalized or subject to content disputes. 5.20% of the “female” articles were protected, compared with 2.39% of the “male” articles. Female editors are actually more likely to be involved in controversial articles.
Next time: are women less likely to be blocked? Are edits by women more likely to be reverted?

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

... 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 7, 2011
11:25 PM
829 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, editors can specify their gender in their accounts' settings, place a gender user box in their User page, or mention their gender in their User page description and discussion. The authors collected data from the accounts' settings and from the gender user boxes through the Wikipedia's API. They didn't check whether the editors refer to their gender somewhere else as that would have been too progressed for the techniques they used. The final sample included 113,848 users. Only 2.8% of the Wikipedia editors report their gender, but the authors found that dedicated editors tend to state their gender more often: while only 6.5% of the editors who had at least ten edits stated their gender, 14.1% of those who had over a hundred edits and 34.7% of those with at least 1,000 edits did so.The overall gender gap is still in placeOut of the 38,497 editors who started edited in 2009 and specified their gender, only 16.1% were women. To add to this, 16.1% of those accounts may have belonged to women, but they only did 9.0% of the edits. Male editors make almost double the edits female editors do. Women are only 6% of the editors with over 500 edits. Life and death of editorsAn editors begins her or his life in the first edit date and "dies" after more than six months of inactivity. Women "die" sooner, while men tend to live on. The gender gap is consistentThe gender identification methods described earlier were introduced to Wikipedia in different times (gender user boxes in December 2005 and gender preference settings in January 2009). Since men usually "live" longer in Wikipedia, the authors could only compare the users who have joined Wikipedia after a gender identification method was introduced (otherwise they would have just carried the survival rate bias on and on in the analysis). The gap has remained more-or-less the same since December 2005.That's it for this part. Next time: Is there a difference in content areas between women and men? Do women editors tend to avoid confrontations, and they less likely to be blocked?Lam, S., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., Terveen, L., & Terveen, J. (2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s GenderImbalance WikiSym’11, October 3–5, Mountain View, California... 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:/

June 27, 2011
06:40 PM
757 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 authors considered tweets with links to websites as external citations. URLs were classified into the following categories:Blog: Blog posts/commentaries in personal websitesConference: Official conference websitedError: Bad URLMedia: Photos, videos, graphics, etc.Press: non-scientific publications from newspapers, journals, etc.Project: Official websites of research groups, scientific projects or project resultsPublication: Scholarly publicationsSlides: Presentation slidesTwitter: In-Twitter links or Twitter-related sitesOther: Everything that didn't fit into the categories above.Almost 40% (39.85%) of the WWW2010 tweets included URLs, and more than a quarter (27.22%) of the MLA09 tweets had URLs. Tweets classified into categories: Participants of MLA09 preferred linking to blogs and press articles, while the WWW2010 participants preferred various media items and blogs. The WWW2010 number of links to presentations and publications was much higher than the number of those in MLA09, which had zero slides linked and only 3 unique publication URLs.Retweets: Bora Z wins the WWW!Counting retweets can be problematic, since they don't always start with RT @user. The authors had to manually classify tweets to locate the retweets. In both conferences the top retwitteres weren't retweeted often themselves. Top retweets usually include URLs:While this work is interesting, it's definitely preliminary. The authors promise to analyze citation patterns over time, study differences between disciplines and more in the future. I hope we'll see more research about those subjects soon.Weller, K., Dröge, E., & Puschmann, C. (2011). citation analysis on twitter MSM2011... 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
637 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 death in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics (table from the paper)They searched each paper's site and recognized 18,482 articles covering the most common causes of death in the UK. They used 'media friendly' terms when it was necessary (for example: 'heart attack' instead of ‘ischaemic heart disease’). The most common conditions reported were the Flu/pneumonia (6525 articles, 35.2%), ischaemic heart disease (3849 articles, 20.8%) and dementia (2577 articles, 13.9%). The least reported conditions were obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (95 articles, 0.5% of total) and heart failure (547 articles, 3%). Pneumonia: third most common cause of death in the UKIn comparison with the number of deaths they cause every year, the Flu ⁄ pneumonia, prostate cancer, dementia and breast cancer have been mentioned extensively in the media. On the other hand, Cerebrovascular accidents (CVAs) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are very underrepresented in the media.The study suffers from several flaws: for one, the researchers don't know in which context their search terms appeared in the media; why were these diseases reported? They hypothesize, for example, that "prostate cancer" could have been reported because of the coverage of the Libyan Lockerbie bomber, Al-Meghari, or that the search term 'flu' could actually been 'swine flu' but they can't be sure. There is, in my opinion, a large difference between a story mentioning prostate cancer as the reason for Al-Meghari's release from prison and a story about prostate cancer from the medical point of view. The Swine Flu has been indeed covered intensively lately, but that doesn't mean that the 'regular' flu has been covered, even though it's a common cause of death. The Swine Flu falls under 'health scare' while the regular flu doesn't, and treating both as 'flu' kind of misses the point. This study is more about "how many times diseases' names appear in the press" than about "the media and representations of common diseases". Swine Flu: sexier than the regular fluWilliamson, J.M., Skinner, C. I., & Hocken, D.B. (2011). Death and illness as depicted in the media International journal of clinical practice, 65 (5) : 21489079... 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

May 20, 2011
11:12 PM
786 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 attractive way of quantifying one's scientific output as a single number. The index is defined as:“A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np − h) papers have ≤ h citations each” (Hirsch, 2005).So, if a scientist published at least ten papers, which each were cited at least ten times, her h-index is ten. A zero h-index, on the other hand, says that the scientist perhaps published papers, but is yet to have an actual impact.The h-index is attractive because it takes into account both the number of publications and the number of citations. It isn't phased by "one hit wonders", but favors a body of work that each of its components has at least a certain impact (citations).Problems and disadvantagesWhich database to use? Different databases cover different journals, conferences, etc. Web of Science, for example, has better coverage of STEM than of the humanities, which tend to publish books rather than papers. Using Google Scholar will likely inflate the h-index.You aren't a number! (Or at least, not just *one* number). Reducing scientists to a single number ignores other factors, such as their teaching skills and ability to collaborate. Can an entire career really be described as a single number?Source: PhD ComicsThe age factor: The older the scientist gets, the longer she had to publish and get cited. Younger scientists are at disadvantage with the h-index.Relevance: Since the h-index doesn't decrease, it can't tell whether a scientist is still active and/or where her work is still relevant for others in her field.Since the h-index is a single number, scientists with the same h-index can have very different numbers of papers and citations. In the following table, scientist A and scientists B have the same h-index, but scientist A has far more citations in the overall raw calculation. ... 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

May 7, 2011
06:11 PM
932 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 sophomores) at the University of Arizona were given a questionnaire in order to determine their attitudes toward science and pseudoscience, as well as examine their basic scientific knowledge. Normally, the students take the survey during the first week in General Education astronomy courses, before any discussions in class about astrology and/or pseudoscience.Do students consider astrology a science?Less than a third of the students "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the statement "The position of the planets have an influence on the events of every day life." Female students tend significantly more to believe that astrology is "sort of" or "very" scientific.Students majoring in science did better than students studying non-scientific majors:Strangely, the findings of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the U.S. regarding astrology are considerably better: in 2006, 65% of the Americans said that astrology was "Not at all scientific", in comparison with 5% who thought it was "Very scientific", 26% who thought it was "Sort of scientific" and 4% who didn't know. Female respondents tend to think more than male respondents that astrology is "Sort of scientific" (29% and 23% respectively). Five percents of both genders believe that astrology is "Very scientific".The authors aren't sure why the NSF results and their differ so much. They mention that the NSF survey takes place over the phone, as opposed to their paper-based survey. Also, the survey is given as a part of an astronomy course and the similarities between "astrology" and "astronomy" might have confused the students. While the NSF survey population comes from all over the U.S., this survey's population is mostly for the Southwest, so the sample might be location-biased. Science literacy and astrologyThere is a negative correlation between belief in astrology and science classes. The more science classes student take, the less they tend to believe in astrology.On the other hand, there was only a small (though significant) difference in the number of correct answers to the scientific knowledge questions between those who thought astrology wasn't scientific and those who did. Out of 15 questions, the former answered, on average, 12.5 questions correctly (83%), while the latter answered 11.6 correctly (77%).Pseudoscience and scientific knowledgeNearly 39% of the students think that "Some people possess psychic powers". About 32% have no opinion about the matter, and only about 29% "Disagree" or "Strongly disagree". Things are a bit better with "Some ancient civilizations were visited by extraterrestrials": only 15% or so said they "Agree" or "Strongly agree". More than half of the students (51.66%) didn't have an opinion about the subject. Less than 40% "Strongly disagree" or "Disagree" that "Faith healing is a valid alternative to conventional medicine".In conclusion, it seems that scientific knowledge doesn't necessarily make people (at least Arizona students) disregard pseudoscience beliefs. However, studying science correlates positively with rejection of pseudoscience such as astrology. Sugarman et. al (2011). Astrology Beliefs among Undergraduate Students Astronomy Education Review... Read more »

Sugarman et. al. (2011) Astrology Beliefs among Undergraduate Students. Astronomy Education Review. info:/

April 4, 2011
11:44 AM
1,044 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 in active carbon canaffect only marginally the composition and toxicity of solid and gaseous phases of cigarette smoke."Marketed as healthier, the BF helped the cigarette company SEKAP to become the second largest Greek cigarette manufacturer, with the BF cigarettes capturing 6% of the Greek market the month after they were launched. The company also export their cigarettes to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. By the time healthier smoking claims were outlawed by the Greek government, in 2002, the product already acquired a 'healthy' image.An Australian organization decided, as part of a tobacco control project (funded by the cancer institute of New South Wales) to alert the media, through press releases, to several tobacco-related issues. They issued a press release in March 2010 ("New book on pig products reveals problems for Islamic, Jewish and vegetarian smokers"). It is important to note that at least in Australia, tobacco companies aren't obligated to reveal their cigarettes' ingredients.As part of the research, the authors studied the coverage of the press release online. The story was covered all over the globe, including by the Daily Mail, the Calcutta News and even by The Colbert Report. The less thrilling part was that no media, except for an Israeli TV channel and a group of journalists one of the authors encountered during a visit to Indonesia, contacted the authors. They all based their coverage on a newswire (AAP) media release.The pig blood's news created confusing, and author Simon Chapman received emails, mainly from Muslims, who wanted to know which cigarette brands were 'safe'. The the South African National Halaal Association issued an anti-smoking leaflet (fig. 1). The Iranians blamed 'the Zionists' for the 'tainted cigarettes'. Cigarette companies such as Japan Tobacco International, Philip Morris were quick to publish denials.Overall, the authors consider 'unorthodox' framing was considered a success in alerting the public to the secretive nature of the tobacco companies and the lack of regulation on tobacco products. I think that for Orthodox Jews and Muslims it is another reason to stop smoking: I mean, dying of lung cancer and going to hell?!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: 2117285Valavanidis, 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... 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

March 8, 2011
11:28 AM
829 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 two writers and not a commercial blog). I ended up with 126 blogs*. If you think you've seen these results before, it's because you probably have. Jennifer Rohn from "Mind the Gap" showed last year that women were considerably outnumbered in four major science blogging networks. This gap isn't limited to selective blogging networks, but exists in the Researchblogging.org aggregator as well, as Dave Munger showed. To quote Munger: "The gender ratio there closely mirrors the other networks." Wikipedia has the same problem: only 13% of the contributors are women. I must say that the first time I saw the data, I thought "Wow, it looks like the percentage of women in Science Fiction at the 40s". Back then women were walking wombs (Heinlein), miserable, lonely scientists (Asimov) or silly housewives (Asimov again). The problem is that, well, Science Fiction moved forward since then, while the spreading of scientific memes to the public is still being done mostly by men. So, where are all the women? I don't have a definite answer, but I can offer a few ideas:Fandom - Fandom is a feminine sphere. Both genders watch television and read books, but in all my years in fandom, I've rarely seen men author fanfics, to the point that the default assumption is that a fanfic author is a "She". A "Science" blog - What is a science blog? Or a research blog? RB is supposed to be open to all posts dealing with peer-review science, but I'm currently working on a list of peer-review journals cited in RB posts, and Literary, History or LIS journals are rarely cited. It is possible that once we take into account blogs dealing with peer-review research that aren't "officially" science blogs, the percentage of women will go up. The second shift - Today, not to breast-feed until the kid can talk whole sentences is considered child abuse. And that's before we talked about picking up the kid from day care, helping older kids with homework and driving them to after-school activities. In many homes, somehow the mothers end up doing most of the work. However, the "Publish or Perish" rule is looming over everyone's head, mothers included. The third shift - In "The Beauty Myth" Naomi Wolf pointed out that many women today feel the pressure not only to be excellent workers and excellent mothers, but to look great while doing everything as well. How is a woman to balance between being a scientist, mother and an aspiring model? This post might seem kind of gloomy, but it's important to remember how much we progressed. Whenever I hear a female parliament member, a business woman, or a female professor claiming she's not a feminist, all I can do is wonder how would said woman lived her daily life without a bank account or a right to vote. Never take those for granted. *Disclaimer: These are primary results and the final results might change a bit (if I decide to include other groups in the sample, for example. Please don't quote anywhere official without consulting me first). Glott, R, & Ghosh, R (2010). Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results UNU-Merit... Read more »

Glott, R, & Ghosh, R. (2010) Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results. UNU-Merit. info:/

March 5, 2011
01:12 PM
1,017 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 the beginning of 2007. The study's time frame was between November 2006 and June 2009. Results: Blogs are difficult to maintain. Even with the generous definition of an active blog as a blog which published at least one post a year, by 2009 only 622 blogs remained active, a drop of 43% from 2006. Out of the 1108 blogs active 2006-2009, only 572 blogs remained that way during the entire study (almost 52% became inactive). When applying a more strict definition of "active" (at least one post per month between Nov. 06 and June 09) the numbers go down even more: from 804 blogs at the beginning to 454 at the end (fig. 1.). Blogs went extinct at a rate of 11 per month. Fig. 1. Going down: LIS blogs publishing at least one post per month between November 2006 and June 2009 (Source: Torres-Salinas et al, 2011)Top LIS blogsThe web-visiblity of each one of the 1108 blogs was calculated by PageRank, number of links from Google and Technorati authority. In table 4 of the paper, the authors show the top 30 blogs according to these indicators and in comparison to past papers (the ranking part is presented in fig. 2. here) . fig. 2. Ranking of the 30 top blogs.Most of the blogs were written in English, and the most frequently linked blogs were Blog of a Bookslut, John Battelle's Searchblog and Official Google Blog. The average number of posts per month for a blog in the top list was 63, and the highest PageRank was 8, for Official Google Blog and Stephen (no. 26 on the list). Personal Vs. corporate blogsFifty-eight percent of the blogs in the sample were personal blogs, and they produced 79% of the posts, on average 301 per year. Corporate blogs have lesser visiblity, according to the rankings, and less impact. Limitations:Libworm's coverage of LIS blogs is limited, to say the least, and it mostly index British and American blogs (91.4%) of the sample. Also, the "active" blog definition of one post per year for yearly trend and one post a month for a monthly trend is very wide.Conclusions Blogs are alive and kicking. However, it seems the rise of Twitter* and social networks is correlated with a decrease in active blogs. If several years ago one had to post a new entry each time he or she found an interesting link, today we have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for that. Perhaps blogs these days are more of a tool for interpretation of information rather than merely spreading it. Torres-Salinas et al. (2011). State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach Library & Information Science Research :doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2010.08.001*I don't consider Twitter exactly a social network.... 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

Research / Scholarship

February 6, 2011
09:00 PM
977 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 Volkow et al) had "obvious discrepancies" between results and their authors' stated conclusions.The bad news is that both papers had been covered by the media, who mostly accepted their conclusions as gospel. Gonon et al say that in the 40 mass media articles they'd read about the Volkow et al. paper, "We have never read a mitigating statement saying that their results are open to the opposite interpretation although the authors explicitly raised thispossibility in their result section." Out of 21 the articles written about Barbaresi et al's paper, only The Guardian's article questioned the conclusions. More than that: out of the 30 times the Volkow et al paper was cited in scientific papers, in 20 the authors quoted its conclusion without pointing out the discrepancies.2. Fact omissionIt goes like this:Summary: A totally controls B!Result section: A controls B if C is present and D isn't.In this part, the authors focused on papers dealing with "the association between alleles of the gene coding for the D4 dopamine receptor (DRD4) and ADHD." According to the authors, previous research has shown that while there is an association between higher frequency of a certain DRD4 allele and ADHD, it only occures in 23% of ADHD patients, as opposed to 17% of the control population. Out of 117 papers about ADHD research done in humans that mentioned the DRD4-ADHD connection, 74 mentioned the association in their summaries, but only 19 of those also mentioned the conferred small risk. All 25 papers which mentioned the association but didn't present data on it had the misrepresentation in their summaries. In review papers, out of 43 summaries, only 6 mentioned that the allele confer only a small risk. The DRD4 gene, ADHD and the mass media - Media outlets have been known for their tendency toward genetic determinism (the "gay gene" for example) and so were quick to adopt the view that ADHD is "genetic". Out of 170 articles between 1996-2009, 168 mentioned that the DRD4 gene is significally associated with ADHD and out of those, 117 didn't mention the small risk and/or presented the raw data. 26 articles mentioned the 1.2 to 1.34 odd ratio but also stated there's a strong connection between the gene and ADHD. The authors' conclusion is that 82% of the articles misrepresented the association, a rate similar to that observed in the scientific literature.3. Extrapolating basic and pre-clinical findings to new therapeutic prospects ("Hi, it worked on mice!")The authors surveyed 101 papers dealing with the mouse brain for 3 common overstatements, and found that 56 overstated their conclusions. 23 even fantasized extrapolated about new therapeutic prospects. Naturally, those 23 papers were published in higher-impact journals and the overstatements made their way to the mass media. Out of 63 mass media articles, only 11 contained migtated comments. Limitations The authors consider their work to be qualitative rather than quantitative, since the selection of papers in the first case was not systematic. In the second and third cases the papers were selected after a systematic search, but the authors only highlighted one aspect of misrepresentation in each case. While the results correlate with misrepresentation in the mass media, there's no way to determine causation. In conclusionWhen I was young and working on a Biology degree, my (great) professor read us an abstract and said something along the lines of "They added that definitive conclusion in the end so the paper will be published in a better journal". While anecdotes aren't data, it does seem that scientists sometimes overstate their results in order to be published in higher rank journals. It's easy to blame the mass media whenever the people put on their tin hats, but the responsibility also falls on scientists to report their findings as accurately as possible, even outside the result section.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... 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

December 6, 2010
04:52 PM
314 views

Health reporters: between accuracy and deadlines

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

"What's new, fresh, exciting, different, what people are going to say 'Gee, is that right'? (Newspaper medical reporter, Leask et al., p. 4)Being a health journalist isn't easy. There's the deadline, there's the expert who still hasn't called you back, the editor who wants a nice picture to go with the report...The authors of "Media coverage of health issues and how to work more effectively with journalists" interviewed sixteen Australian reporters, editors and producers in print, radio and TV in order to learn more about the challenges they face. They were asked about their job in general and about reporting avian/pandemic influenza in particular (the study took place between October 2006 and August 2007). NewsworthinessTo be "newsworthy" a story has to have the right timing, at the pick of the hunt for news. Journalists are looking for sensation (the avian flu is the new Black Death!) for actual news (like a new medical development) and controversy. For TV, the story better have good visuals. Journalists are aware of stories from other news outlets and choose which news to reports and from what angle so they'd be able to distinguish themselves from the competition. They often use local sources and aim for local audiences as ways of providing that interesting, novel angle. SourcesJournalists' sources can be passive (PR) or active (calling experts and reading medical journals). Naturally, journalists prefer to interview people who are "accessible, independent, highly respected in their field, and preferably doctors." They want their sources to provide fast information, which can be easily digested by their audience. That is especially true for reporters without much scientific or medical background. In TV, the images often determine whether a story will be broadcast and how prominent it will be. EthicsThe authors of the paper not that "as in other studies, journalists articulated an overwhelming commitment to keeping the public informed". Journalists try to reduce sensationalism by accurate, in-depth reporting. The journalists in the study often commented that they have to be critical and objective in their reporting. That's quite a different approach from the one which was common a few decades ago, when journalists were mostly functioned as science cheerleaders (read Dorothy Nelkin's excellent book "Selling Science" for more details). SpecialistsLike in the paper I blogged about in my previous post, the current paper found that "specialist health and medical reporters had much greater capacity to produce better quality health stories." These specialist reporters usually have better understanding of the technical aspects of medical issues. They also enjoy more autonomy within news organizations and rely more on their own contacts and sources than on PR. Their prestige as 'pros' allows them to advocate which stories are most 'worthy' to run. Getting your health story in the news: a short guide for the confused scientistTiming. Call the journalist in the morning, which is "peak story sourcing time". For broad distribution, try contacting the news agencies.Be available. Return phone calls fast, drop other things if you have to. Provide pre-prepared resources. Anything from definitions to images, and don't forget the sound-bite quotes.Find a personal touch. Give the journalists an easy way to appeal to the average person. Stay networked. Be in touch with medical reporters, provide them with scientific background and stories*Appeal to ethical values. Find good moral reasons why the journalist needs to see (and write about) things your way. Leask J, Hooker C, & King C (2010). Media coverage of health issues and how to work more effectively with journalists: a qualitative study. BMC public health, 10 PMID: 20822552Nelkin, D. (1995). Selling science: How the press covers science and technology (rev. ed.). New York: Freeman.*Feeding them might help as well.... Read more »

Nelkin, D. (1995) Government Printing Ofﬁce. Nelkin, D. (1995). Selling science: How the press covers science and technology (rev. ed.). New York: Freeman. info:/

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Why is this post inappropriate?

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Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

Why is this post inappropriate?

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