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September 30, 2010
12:19 PM
4,145 views

Hyping Astronomy

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

Astronomers from the Carnegie Institution and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered and earth-sized planet called Gilese 581. It's 20 light-years away, which makes it an unlikely traveling destination, but this is exciting news nonetheless. The abstract is enthusiastic yet cautions, saying that:"The estimated equilibrium temperature of GJ 581g is 228 K, placing it squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of the star and offering a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet around a very nearby star."The press release is about the same, emphasizing the potential habitability of the planet, how hard it was to locate it and explains a bit about radial velocity. It more-or-less follows the rules I mentioned in a previous post. The news, however, say: "Odds of life on nearby planet '100 percent,' astronomer says." (Fox News and others).What went wrong? Where did the over-hyping come from? Unfortunately, Prof. Steven Vogt, one of the discoverers, told AP that "We don't have any direct way to sense that there's life there, my own personal opinion is that it is hard to imagine that life has not taken a foothold there."He also said: "Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it." It went downhill from there. So, we have a scientist hyping his findings, and media all-to-ready to hype it. The results are false (or at least unverified) headlines. (video: Steven Vogt talking to AP)Hat tip: Yoav Landsman (Hebrew)Vogt, S. S., Butler, P. R., Rivera, E. J., Haghighipour, N., Henry, G. W., & Williamson, M. H. (2010). The Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey: A 3.1 M_Earth Planet in the Habitable Zone of the Nearby M3V Star Gliese 581 Arxiv : 1009.5733v1... Read more »

Vogt, S. S., Butler, P. R., Rivera, E. J., Haghighipour, N., Henry, G. W., & Williamson, M. H. (2010) The Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey: A 3.1 M_Earth Planet in the Habitable Zone of the Nearby M3V Star Gliese 581. Arxiv. info:/1009.5733v1

September 18, 2010
04:21 PM
3,571 views

Don't say you found aliens (unless you actually have)

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

Unlike with health and medicine press releases (Woloshin and Schwartz have a few good papers about the matter) I haven't seen much research about other scientific press release. That's why I was glad to find the paper "Credibility of science communication: An exploratory study of astronomy press releases" by Nielsen et al. (2007).They conducted 11 in-depth interviews with journalists, scientists and public information officers, and came up with several conclusions regarding the accuracy and credibility of astronomy press releases.Credibility was defined by the interviewees as "being honest and doing your homework." Hype was defined as overstating the importance of results in order to increase visibility. Credibility problems with press releasesProblems were usually caused by either the press release trying to make the issuing institution look better, or trying to make other institutions look worse. The level of communication effort: finding some well-known person to tell the media how much the research described in the press release is significant to science.The wording of the press release: even if it is possible you found alien life, keep that question mark at the end of "Alien life found?".Dictating the timing of a press release: we just happened to discover something really important, just in time for the annual budget meeting! Other time-related sins are publishing the press release before the peer-review paper is out, and timing the release to screw up the competition's own press release or event. Omission of reference to other scientists' work: this isn't the 17th century. It is hardly likely you did everything by yourself, or haven't built on some previous research.Unjust comparison with other facilities.Good ways to avoid lack of credibility (which can be in science, unlike in politics, problematic) is to have internal referees to the press release before its publication. Also, the importance of a peer-reviewed paper backing the press release can't be overstated.Despited everything said here, the authors' overall conclusion is that "...credibility problems for astronomy press release do not exist, though examples certainly exist." I find this conclusion very encouraging. Nielsen, L. H., Torpe Jørgensen, N., Jantzen, K., & Christensen, L. L. (2007). Credibility of science communication: An exploratory study of astronomy press releases Proceedings from the IAU/National Observatory of Athens/ESA/ESO Conference, Athens, Greece.... Read more »

Nielsen, L. H., Torpe Jørgensen, N., Jantzen, K., & Christensen, L. L. (2007) Credibility of science communication: An exploratory study of astronomy press releases. Proceedings from the IAU/National Observatory of Athens/ESA/ESO Conference, Athens, Greece. info:/

December 14, 2011
09:08 PM
1,338 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

October 30, 2010
09:16 PM
1,139 views

How the NEJM became an advertising platform for the pharmaceutical industry

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

These days it's common practice for authors, peer-reviewers and even editors of medical journals to declare conflicts of interest, if those exist. However, the medical journal normally don't issue them same declarations. Journals publish regularly industry-supported papers reporting large clinical trials. Reprints of those trials are regularly bought by pharmaceutics companies and distributed to clinicians. The result is an increase of the journals' income as well as an increase in their prestige, since papers read by a large number of clinicians are likely to increase those papers' citation rates and the journals' impact factor.In order to study conflicts of interest in journals, Lundh et al. (October 2010) chose six high-impact medical journals: Annals of Internal Medicine (Annals), Archives of Internal Medicine (Archives), BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet and NEJM and studied the proportions of industry-supported randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The authors focused on citations from 1996-1997 for 1995 papers and 2007 citations for 2005-2006 RCTs. They categorized funding as industry support, mixed support, nonindustry support and no statement about support. Then came the tricky part: getting financial data from the journals about their income from advertisements, reprints and industry-supported supplements as percentage of the journals' total income as well as the total number of reprints sold. BMJ and Lancet (British) provided the data, but the other four journals (American) refused to do so. Given that lack of cooperation, the authors had to become creative. The journals' owners are the American College of Physicians (ACP) for Annals, the American Medical Association (AMA) for JAMA and Archives, and the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS) for NEJM. The authors obtained their publicly available tax forms, that included data on the total income from all types of publishing. The societies, however, publish each more than one journal, so the authors couldn't determine incomes for individual journals. They had to calculate the relative income from industry sources, to which they received confirmation from ACP, but not from AMA and MMS. In 2005-2006, 32% of the RCTs published in NEJM had industry support. However, for BMJ, only 7% of the RCTs were industry-supported. Declines in proportion of industry-supported trials were statistically significant for Annals and Archives. Citations and industry supportFor 1996-1997 trials, there was a significant correlation between citations and industry support for Lancet and NEJM. The correlation was statistically significant for all journals in 2005-2006. The authors write that "Industry-supported trials published in Annals, Archives and Lancet in 2005-2006 were cited more than twice as often as nonindustry trials and one and a half times more in BMJ, JAMA and NEJM". Impact FactorThe authors calculated the IF of each one of the journals without the industry-supported trials. The NEJM had the largest decrease in IF, followed by the Lancet. The BMJ's IF barely changed. Implications for mass media reportingNEJM is the most prestigious medical journal in the world. Moriarty et al. (2010) found that it was the most cited source in news stories about cancer research (see my last post). If a third of the clinical trials published in NEJM are published by the industry, which means they are more likely to have positive results for the funding company (Lexchin et al., 2003), and taking into account that the NEJM is a very popular source of health news, that means the industry doesn't just gain influence with clinicians by publishing in NEJM, but with the general public as well. Lexchin, J. (2003). Pharmaceutical industry sponsorship and research outcome and quality: systematic review BMJ, 326 (7400), 1167-1170 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.326.7400.1167Moriarty CM, Jensen JD, & Stryker JE (2010). Frequently cited sources in cancer news coverage: a content analysis examining the relationship between cancer news content and source citation. Cancer causes & control : CCC, 21 (1), 41-9 PMID: 19784789Lundh, A., Barbateskovic, M., Hróbjartsson, A., & Gøtzsche, P. (2010). Conflicts of Interest at Medical Journals: The Influence of Industry-Supported Randomised Trials on Journal Impact Factors and Revenue – Cohort Study ... Read more »

Lexchin, J. (2003) Pharmaceutical industry sponsorship and research outcome and quality: systematic review. BMJ, 326(7400), 1167-1170. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.326.7400.1167

Moriarty CM, Jensen JD, & Stryker JE. (2010) Frequently cited sources in cancer news coverage: a content analysis examining the relationship between cancer news content and source citation. Cancer causes , 21(1), 41-9. PMID: 19784789

Lundh, A., Barbateskovic, M., Hróbjartsson, A., & Gøtzsche, P. (2010) Conflicts of Interest at Medical Journals: The Influence of Industry-Supported Randomised Trials on Journal Impact Factors and Revenue – Cohort Study. PLoS Medicine, 7(10). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000354

October 20, 2010
06:33 AM
1,081 views

The Matthew Effect Strikes Again

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

The new Bornmann, de Moya Anegón and Leydesdorff paper, published in PLOS ONE, shows that highly cited papers tend to reference other highly cited papers more often. That is true especially for the life science and health science disciplines. Ms. Corbyn from Nature News saved me the need to summarize the paper by writing an excellent article about it. Based on their findings, Bornmann et al. suggested to concentrate funding on already highly-cited researchers and research groups ("A concentration of resources on these elite structures seems to be practical especially for the life sciences and health sciences"). This is already happening, to some extent, but if the authors' offer is to be accepted, I suspect highly-cited authors will forever remain at the top, simply because they will get most of the funding. Now, citations don't exist in a social vacuum; despite the tendency to see them as "objective" representations of papers which have influenced other scholarly works, they are affected by factors like the paper's publishing journal, personal connections, coverage of the paper in the mass media, and more. Bornmann et al.'s recommendation might cause funding agencies to end up giving their money to the most popular, connected researchers, who are already well-established in their discipline. Bornmann, L., de Moya Anegón, F., & Leydesdorff, L. (2010). Do Scientific Advancements Lean on the Shoulders of Giants? A Bibliometric Investigation of the Ortega Hypothesis PLOS ONE, 5 (10) : 10.1371/journal.pone.0013327... Read more »

Bornmann, L., de Moya Anegón, F., & Leydesdorff, L. (2010) Do Scientific Advancements Lean on the Shoulders of Giants? A Bibliometric Investigation of the Ortega Hypothesis. PLOS ONE, 5(10). info:/10.1371/journal.pone.0013327

April 4, 2011
11:44 AM
1,052 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 5, 2011
01:12 PM
1,030 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
986 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

May 7, 2011
06:11 PM
937 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:/

August 7, 2011
11:25 PM
834 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:/

March 8, 2011
11:28 AM
833 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:/

May 20, 2011
11:12 PM
794 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

June 27, 2011
06:40 PM
761 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:/

August 19, 2011
10:00 PM
743 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
656 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:/

June 9, 2011
07:41 PM
648 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

August 10, 2011
03:17 AM
629 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:/

November 25, 2010
07:01 PM
573 views

Who writes health news?

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

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 Australian Media Doctor site.Media doctor sites are the media's health news watch dogs. They rate health stories according to criteria like "Quantified the benefits of intervention" and "Did not rely heavily on a media release". Today there are several media doctor sites in Canada, Hong-Kong, and United States (called Healthnewsreview, but works according to the same principles. However, my favorite health stories watchdog is the British NHS "Behind the news" service: it takes a news story and discusses its sources, the type of study behind the story (cohort, double-blind, etc.), how it was conducted, the results and their interpretation, and the conclusion. All that in everyday language. It's brilliant.Back to the study at hand: over the years (February 2004 to March 2009) 1,337 stories from 12 Australian media outlets have been reviewed. Out of those, 320 stories didn't have a byline; 193 were written by nonspecialist journalists; 415 came from news agencies (Australian Associated Press [AAP], Associated Press [AP], Agence France Presse [AFP], and Reuters) and 39 came from foreign media outlets (BBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.); 142 stories were written by health/science journalists, and 228 stories were written by specialist health journalists (journalists who had 10 or more stories posted on the Media Doctor web site during the period of the study).(Figure based on the paper's categories of authorship).Quality speaking, stories by specialized health journalists scored the highest (59.6) while stories without bylines had the lowest score (44.1; you know it's bad when nobody wants to take credit for it). From the news agencies, AP scored highest on quality. Is there a solution for low-quality health journalism?The authors suggest, of course, that future journalists should be trained better regarding evidence-based medicine while they're still in college, and that major media outlets should invest in specialized health journalists. However, since the authors are aware these suggestions are costly, they suggest that some of the responsibility for good health reporting should lie with research institutions, funding bodies, and the researchers themselves, who all have to supply the media with accurate and balanced information about their studies. They see the promotion of good science as part of the requirements from those conducting health research, and believe better scientists-journalists collaboration will lead to better health reporting. 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... 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

October 5, 2010
10:41 PM
544 views

When is webometrics most useful?

by Hadas Shema in Information Culture

Like many terms in Information Science (including 'Information Science' itself) the term 'webometrics' is pretty vague. Björneborn and Ingwersen (2004) defined webometrics as "the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the Web drawing on bibliometric and informetric approaches." I guess this definition will have to do for the time being. Thelwall*, Klitkou, Verbeek, Stuart and Vincent (2010) set out to find in which fields webometrics is most effective. The result is quite a long paper, that I'm going to be very general about its conclusions. As expected, webometrics doesn't have the same effectiveness in every field. It is at its best with emerging and/or "hot" fields. That is because web publication is easier and faster than publication in traditional scientific outlets, and researchers can publish ongoing results with little delay.In some disciplines plenty of their products aren't regularly published in journals (social sciences, humanities, applied fields, etc.) and therefore aren't as well-covered by bibliometrical databases as disciplines with a journal-publishing culture. Bibliometrics is also bound to have a poor coverage of multidisciplinary fields, because their outputs are published in various outlets and are often cited in different manners. In general, webometrics analysis gives better results in fields with standards and/or norms for web publishing, but the results might not be reliable in fields where a small number of research groups and their projects (databases, web portals and so on) have an disproportional web presence. Collaborations are often better caught in webometric analysis, since not all collaborative works have "official" outputs. Webometrics works better for smaller fields. It's harder to get a complete picture of large fields with current methods. Last but not least: webometric analysis is usually faster and cheaper than bibliometric one.Thelwall and his colleagues concluded that "whilst webometrics is still inferior to bibliometrics for most purposes it seems that it has advantages for some types of field, particularly new, small fields, and can deliver policy-relevant (process) indicators to promote effective collaboration and communication," (in short: use with caution). Appropriate disclosure: Prof. Thelwall is one of my dissertation advisors . My favorite from his long list of achievements is that he managed to publish a serious research paper including a YouTube cat video. Thelwall, M., Klitkou, A., Verbeek, A., Stuart, D., & Vincent, C. (2010). Policy-relevant Webometrics for individual scientific fields Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61 (7), 1464-1475 DOI: 10.1002/asi.21345... Read more »

Thelwall, M., Klitkou, A., Verbeek, A., Stuart, D., & Vincent, C. (2010) Policy-relevant Webometrics for individual scientific fields. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(7), 1464-1475. DOI: 10.1002/asi.21345

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