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- December 31, 2011
- 02:54 AM
- 192 views
Correlation between reference managers and the WoS
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- December 14, 2011
- 09:08 PM
- 531 views
Reinventing Discovery, Part II
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- December 7, 2011
- 06:25 PM
- 265 views
Reinventing Discovery: Book Review, Part I
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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 19, 2011
- 10:00 PM
- 463 views
Generic drug trials: more transparency needed
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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 14, 2011
- 05:50 PM
- 395 views
The Wikipedia Gender Gap, Part III
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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:/
- August 10, 2011
- 03:17 AM
- 389 views
The Wikipedia Gender Gap, Part II
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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 7, 2011
- 11:25 PM
- 543 views
The Wikipedia Gender Gap, Part I
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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:/
- June 27, 2011
- 06:40 PM
- 492 views
More about t-citings
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- 425 views
Coverage of common causes of death in the UK media
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- May 20, 2011
- 11:12 PM
- 559 views
You're just a number: introduction to the h-index
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- May 7, 2011
- 06:11 PM
- 703 views
Students and pseudo-scientific beliefs
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
"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:/
- April 4, 2011
- 11:44 AM
- 755 views
Pig's blood, tobacco control and mass media
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- March 8, 2011
- 11:28 AM
- 624 views
International Women's Day and the science blogging gender gap.
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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:/
- March 5, 2011
- 01:12 PM
- 753 views
State of the library and information science blogosphere
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- February 6, 2011
- 09:00 PM
- 743 views
Misrepresentation of ADHD in scientific journals and in the mass media
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- December 6, 2010
- 04:52 PM
- 255 views
Health reporters: between accuracy and deadlines
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
"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 ........ 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:/
- November 25, 2010
- 07:01 PM
- 368 views
Who writes health news?
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
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
- November 20, 2010
- 01:07 PM
- 313 views
The pursuit of happiness
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
Happiness is an elusive term (though for most people, it includes one form or another of chocolate) and, to many people's surprise, it doesn't have much to do with money. Aaker, Rudd & Mogilner (forthcoming, 2011) reviewed the current happiness literature and came up with a list of five principles for happiness-maximizing ways to spend time. Spend your time with the right people. People who socialize more often tend to be happier than those who spend most of their time alone. Happiness is as........ Read more »
Aaker, J. L., Rudd, L., & Mogilner, C. (2011) If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, Consider Time. Journal of Consumer Psychology. info:/
- November 14, 2010
- 02:16 PM
- 333 views
Seek and ye shall find (friends online)
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
Who makes new friends on social networks online? If we are going by the "rich get richer" assumption, we would expect to find that people who are already socially active will find even more friends on SNS. On the other hand, it's possible that those who have troubles forming offline relationships will socialize more on the Web (the "social compensation" model). The third possibility is the "seek and ye shall find" model: people who believe it's possible to create online friendships would be mor........ Read more »
Tufekci, Z. (2010) Who Acquires Friends Through Social Media and Why? "Rich Get Richer" versus "Seek and Ye Shall Find". Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM, 2010). info:/
- November 4, 2010
- 09:15 PM
- 272 views
Introducing new vaccines into poor African nations
by Hadas Shema in Science Blogging in Theory and Practice
The GAVI alliance (used to be called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations) was founded in 2000 in order to help vaccinate children in poor nations. GAVI funds vaccines in any nation with a GNI per capita of less than $1,000. Glatman-Freedman et al. (published November 2010) investigated the factors involved in successful introduction of the Hib (Haemophilus influenza) and HepB (Hepatitis B) vaccines into poor nations. The Hib and HepB vaccines are expensive. The basic battery of va........ Read more »
Glatman-Freedman, A., Cohen, M., Nichols, K., Porges, R., Saludes, I., Steffens, K., Rodwin, V., & Britt, D. (2010) Factors Affecting the Introduction of New Vaccines to Poor Nations: A Comparative Study of the Haemophilus influenzae Type B and Hepatitis B Vaccines. PLoS ONE, 5(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013802
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