Does it matter that ScienceDaily republishes press releases?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Charles Day

ScienceDaily is aptly named. The popular website has been posting copious news about science since its foundation 18 years ago. And I do mean “copious.” On 2 April, for instance, I counted 95 news items!

Given that ScienceDaily‘s staff page lists just two people, founder Dan Hogan and his wife Michele Hogan, the productivity seems remarkable—until you realize that all those stories, at least the ones I checked, are repackaged press releases from elsewhere.

As far as I can tell, the repackaging is minimal. Earlier this week, I posted a link on Physics Today‘s Facebook page to a Fraunhofer press release about a truck-mounted laser that can scan roads while the truck drives at highway speeds. The ScienceDaily version lacks the original’s figure, but the text is identical.

Further evidence of ScienceDaily‘s light editorial touch comes from a search for the British spellings “metre” and “litre.” As an American news outlet, ScienceDaily can be expected to swap the spellings for the American variants—if it did more than simply cut and paste the original British English press releases, that is.

ScienceDaily does not hide what it does. At the end of each story you’ll find a short description of the source, a note about editing, advice on citing the story, and a disclaimer. Here’s what’s appended to the piece about the truck-mounted laser scanner:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Use one of the following formats:

APA

MLA Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (2013, April 2). Surveying roads at 100 km/h. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 3, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2013/04/130402091250.htm

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Whether ScienceDaily‘s behavior is unethical is not clear-cut. On the one hand, the website links to the original press release and to the institution that issued it. On the other hand, disclaiming the views in the article while recommending that ScienceDaily‘s version of the story be cited rather than the original comes across as a bid for the benefits of publication without the concomitant editorial responsibility.

But does it matter that ScienceDaily reproduces press releases? Could the practice even be good for the promotion of science?

Most, if not all, the science press releases I encounter are well-written and accurate. And although some of them sound overly enthusiastic, they tend not to exaggerate or misrepresent the implications of the research. Some press releases are better than the stories they prompt, perhaps because the people who write them spend more talking to researchers to get the science right than some reporters might.

There’s another reason to tolerate, if not welcome, what ScienceDaily and similar websites do. To quote the website’s advertising page,

ScienceDaily‘s Web site traffic averages about 45,000 daily visits, generating in excess of 150,000 page views a day, or a total of roughly 1.3 million visits / 4.5 million page views a month.

That’s a lot of people reading informative, professionally produced content about science.

Unexpected consequences of journal rank

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Charles Day

In October 2008 I attended an international workshop on iron-based superconductors, which was held at the Institute of Physics (IOP) in Beijing. The topic was hot. Just six months earlier, Hideo Hosono of the Tokyo Institute of Technology had published the discovery that had begotten the field: Fluorine-doped LaOFeAs becomes superconducting below 26 K.

Despite the new superconductor’s modest critical temperature, the discovery was surprising. At first glance, iron’s magnetism should disrupt, rather than promote, the electron pairing that underlies superconductivity. The discovery was also exciting because it soon looked likely that the superconductivity was not of the common, low-temperature sort that Heike Kamerlingh Onnes had discovered in metals in 1911. Rather, it appeared to resemble the exotic, high-temperature sort that Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz had discovered in copper oxides in 1986.

Figure 1 from my August 2009 Physics Today article, “Iron-based superconductors.” The original caption read: “Superconductivity in the new Fe-based materials takes place in a corrugated layer made up of Fe and one of two pnictogens (phosphorus, arsenic) or one of two chalcogens (selenium, tellurium). Four structural families, depicted schematically on the right, incorporate the layer with a characteristically different interlayer. In the 1111 family, the interlayer consists of a rare earth (blue) and oxygen (green); in the 122 family, an alkaline earth (violet); and in the 111 family, an alkali (gray). There’s no interlayer in the 11 family; to preserve the layer’s charge balance, the pnictogen is replaced by a chalcogen. (Adapted from K. Ishida, Y. Nakai, H. Hosono, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 78, 062001, 2009.)”

By the time of the IOP workshop in October, various groups around the world, notably in China, had been feverishly searching for relatives of LaOFeAs in hopes of raising the critical temperature. With equal urgency, theorists vied to explain how the superconductivity arises.

Where to publish?

Physicists who were working iron-based superconductors in those early months faced a dilemma when it came to publishing their results. Most of them opted to post their results on the arXiv e-print server before or just after submitting their manuscripts to journals—for reasons selfish and unselfish: Not only would arXiv stamp the eprints with a priority-establishing date, but the e-prints would become available to everyone working in the field.

But if researchers submitted their papers to Nature or Science, they risked losing priority. At the time, the two high-impact journals forbade prepublication on arXiv. Science still does. Researchers would therefore have to delay posting on arXiv until their paper had been published or, worse, rejected.

The dilemma was not hypothetical. In his talk at the workshop, IOP’s Xing-Jiang Zhou lamented with wry humor the publishing fate of his study of potassium-doped SrFe₂As₂ using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Rejected first by Nature and then by Physical Review Letters, the paper appeared in Physical Review B in November, five months after he’d originally submitted it.

That outcome is hardly bad. Phys. Rev. B bills itself as the world’s largest, most comprehensive journal in condensed-matter physics. But the resubmissions cost Zhou time and, perhaps, citations. As he observed in his talk, his IOP colleague, Hong Ding, sent his ARPES study of potassium-doped BaFe₂As₂ to Europhysics Letters, which published it on 14 July, nine days after the journal had received it. Whereas Zhou’s paper has garnered 37 citations, Ding’s has garnered 664.

Deep impact

Zhou’s cautionary tale reentered my mind last week when I encountered an e-print by Björn Brembs of the University of Regensburg in Germany and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol in the UK. Entitled “Deep impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank,” the paper marshalls evidence from numerous sources to argue that the perceived ranking of journals, especially by impact factor, has a negative influence on the scientific enterprise.

Impact factors apply to journals, not individual papers. It is not justifiable, Brembs and Munafò claim, to transfer the cachet of a journal’s truly high-impact papers to the journal itself and, by association, to all the journal’s papers. What’s more, the correlation between a journal’s impact factor and a paper’s citations, which was never strong, is currently weakening.

The perceived value of journal rank amplifies a general tendency among researchers: the urge to publish results that, while purporting to advance science significantly, are supported by uncertain empirical evidence. That urge, brought on by competition for prestige and funding, could also be behind what Brembs and Munafò’s study uncovered: that journal rank correlates with the rates of both retractions and fraud.

Brembs and Munafò also object to the additional expense, in time and money, of getting papers into high-impact journals and to what they decry as the negotiated—and therefore unscientific—nature of the impact factor. According to Brembs and Munafò, Thomson Reuters, the keeper of the impact factor, is willing to accede to publishers’ requests to alter how a journal’s impact factor is calculated—to the publishers’ advantage, of course.

At face value, Brembs and Munafò’s study, which is 5300 words long and has 120 references, amounts to a crushing indictment of journal rank and its influence on science. Whether or not you agree with their conclusions, the study is certainly thought-provoking and worth reading. Indeed, for me the most interesting aspect is not their assault on journal rank, but their discussion of alternatives.

Surprisingly perhaps, Brembs and Munafò are not fans of either flavor of open access. Gold open access (authors pay all the publication costs; access is free to everyone) is dismissed as elitist, on the ground that only researchers at the richest institutions can afford the page charges. Green open access (authors are required to deposit a copy of their papers in a public archive) requires enforcement from authorities and extra work from authors.

Rather than reform journals or make them open access, Brembs and Munafò advocate dispensing with them altogether. In place of journals, they favor

bringing scholarly communication back to the research institutions in an archival publication system in which both software, raw data and their text descriptions are archived and made accessible, after peer-review and with scientifically-tested metrics accruing reputation in a constantly improving reputation system. This reputation system would be subjected to the same standards of scientific scrutiny as are commonly applied to all scientific matters and evolve to minimize gaming and maximize the alignment of researchers’ interests with those of science (which are currently misaligned).

Given that any scholarly publication system depends above all on scientists to write, review, edit, read, and cite papers, the system that emerges in the future, whatever its form or source of funding, will be the one that wins the support and cooperation of scientists.

Mind-reading computers

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Charles Day

Last year, the website of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper became the world’s most-visited English-language news source. Although the Mail‘s website owes its popularity to a menu rich in celebrities, crime, and royals, it offers readers something that my stuffier hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, lacks: a top-level section devoted to science.

Granted, the Mail’s science coverage tends toward the sensational, but it does encompass superluminal neutrinos, the Higgs boson, and other weighty topics. The story that led the science section on 1 February 2012 was both sensational and important, as you can tell from the headline:

Mind-boggling! Science creates computer that can decode your thoughts and put them into words.

The story’s origin lies in an article published in PLoS Biology by Brian Pasley of the University of California, Berkeley, and his collaborators. Fifteen patients who suffered either epilepsy or brain cancer agreed to let Pasley’s team attach an array of electrodes to their brains while their skulls were opened for surgery. The electrodes recorded signals from neurons located in a part of the brain, the auditory cortex, that interprets spoken language.

Before the patients underwent surgery, they listened to single words and whole sentences. Pasley and his collaborators correlated the electrical recordings with the words’ acoustic spectra. A machine-learning algorithm then derived a mapping that could reproduce an acoustic spectrum from a neural recording.

Predicting what someone hears based on his or her brain activity is impressive, but it hardly qualifies as mind reading. However, it turns out that the auditory cortex is also responsible for encoding speech. When Pasley’s team asked each patient to think of words without uttering them, the algorithm accurately predicted what those unspoken words were. In that sense, the algorithm really did read the patients’ minds.

Pasley’s algorithm occupies one front in a broad campaign to understand how the human brain works. On another front, biophysicists are developing ways to map the topography of the brain’s interconnected neurons. Given that the human brain contains on the order of 10¹¹ neurons, each of which is connected to up to 1000 other neurons, assembling a complete neuronal map could turn out to be infeasible—and perhaps unnecessary.

A detailed map of a single, characteristic neighborhood of the brain might yield enough information to identify the physical features that underlie thought and memory. But knowledge of those features alone might fall short of demonstrating that someone understands the brain. If that turns out to be the case, then a convincing demonstration might entail building a simulated brain.

The anatomy and physiology of such a brain wouldn’t necessarily resemble those of our own. Indeed, the first prototype could turn out to consist of a building-sized stack of optical tables where pulsed beams of light—the information-carrying signals—bounce off mirrors and pass through prisms. Provided that the simulated brain’s topology and interconnections are described using the same mathematical equations that apply to a human brain, such a demonstration would be valid.

And if that fantasy becomes a reality, simulation would have attained a new and higher status in science. Rather than providing a way to calculate a theory’s validation, the simulation would be the validation.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 104 of the July/August 2012 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

The Elements: An Illustrated History of the Periodic Table

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Charles Day

Even though my interest in science developed in my early teens, and even though my love of reading developed earlier, I didn’t read many books about science in my childhood. In fact, only two science books stand out in my memory: Nigel Calder’s The Key to the Universe: A Report on the New Physics (Penguin, 1978) and Jane Werner Watson and Rudolph F. Zallinger’s Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles (Paul Hamlyn, 1960).

Calder’s book, which I read soon after it came out, influenced my decision to study physics at university. Watson and Zallinger’s book made an earlier and different impression. The 10-year-old me was enthralled by Zallinger’s vivid and lively illustrations, such as the one above. Not only were the dinosaurs and other creatures depicted as they might have been, but so too were the plants and landscapes.

Those memorable books came to mind when I read—or, rather, dipped into—a book that Tess Woods of Newman Communications had sent me to review, Tom Jackson’s The Elements: An Illustrated History of the Periodic Table (Shelter Harbor Press, 2012). The book is one of three in the Ponderables series. The others, also written by Jackson, are about mathematics and astronomy.

The bulk of Elements consists of 100 short, chronologically arranged chapters. The first, “Stone Age Chemistry,” discusses fire, food, and cave paintings. The last covers the recently discovered Higgs boson. In between, Jackson tells the story of humankind’s gradually growing awareness of chemical science and its applications.

It’s a measure of Jackson’s skill that I couldn’t tell at what age group his book is aimed. Inquisitive high schoolers and adults alike will enjoy and learn from what’s inside. Despite my professional interest in science, I discovered something new from almost every chapter. Did you know that the first plastic polymer, Parkesine, was invented in 1856 by Alexander Parkes and that it found use, decades later, as celluloid film stock? Or that the Periodic Table’s resemblance to an upside-down game of Solitaire is not a coincidence? I didn’t.

But Elements is more than a collection of interesting facts. Much of chemistry is ultimately about the arrangement and rearrangement of electrons. As if to emphasize that point, Jackson weaves the history of electromagnetism into his story. Readers learn about the first batteries, electrolysis, Coulomb’s law, J. J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron, and other electromagnetic milestones. Radioactivity and quantum mechanics are also covered.

The book is also more than a history of past discoveries. Its penultimate section, “Imponderables,” outlines seven open questions in chemistry, including these three: Why is nature one-sided? Is bismuth radioactive? Does francium exist? The book’s effect on young readers, I hope, will be to inspire some of them to meet the continuing challenge of understanding the universe and its contents.

The book’s effect on older readers, I expect, will be to impress on them the sheer scale of scientific progress. No other human endeavor—not art, not literature, not politics, not even exploration—can match the immensity of science’s upward leap from making fire to discovering the Higgs.

The impact factor’s declining impact

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Charles Day

One of the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics was Charles Kao (shown here), who laid the empirical and theoretical groundwork for fiber-optic communications. His breakthrough paper, written in 1966 with George Hockham, appeared in IEE Proceedings, the journal of Britain’s Institution of Electrical Engineers.

The IEE and its proceedings no longer exist. The society merged with the Institution of Incorporated Engineers in 2006 to form the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Papers on fiber optics now appear in IET Communications.

I don’t know what IEE Proceedings‘s impact factor was in 1966, but its successor’s impact factor in 2011 is 0.963. In case you’re unfamiliar with the definition of impact factor, a value of 0.963 means that papers published in IET Communications in 2009–10 were cited in 2011 an average of 0.963 times.

An impact factor of less than one is modest. According to Google Scholar, Kao and Hockham’s paper has been cited 453 times, which is far from modest.

A weakening relationship

Given the technological importance of fiber-optic communication, it’s not surprising that Kao and Hockham’s paper has appeared in so many reference lists, despite being published in a low-profile British engineering journal. In general, however, ambitious scientists tend to submit their best papers to high-impact-factor journals. Whether scientists like it or not, impact factor has become a measure of scholarly value. And if the best papers do indeed appear in the best journals, citations should correlate positively with impact factor.

But while impact factor continues to loom large in academia, scientists and other scholars increasingly discover individual papers through search engines and arXiv, which ignore a paper’s publishing home and impact factor. If scientists begin to publish without regard to a journal’s perceived prestige, then the positive correlation between citations and impact factor will weaken.

Thanks to a new paper by George Lozano, Vincent Larivière, and Yves Gingras, we don’t have to speculate about the relationship between impact factor and citations. The three authors, who are all based at the University of Montreal, analyzed bibliometric data from 1900 to 2011. They calculated impact factors and determined citation rates in three subject areas: natural and medical sciences combined, social sciences combined, and physics alone.

In all three areas, the correlation between impact factor and citations grew steadily stronger from 1900 to around 1990, when it peaked and then began to weaken. The trend was sharpest in physics, whose practitioners were among the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of internet publishing; it was weakest in the social sciences.

Lozano, Larivière, and Gingras also determined what fraction of the 5% most cited papers appeared in the 5% most cited journals. From 1900 to 1960, the most cited journals attracted on average a more-or-less steady 1.4% of the most cited papers. Eugene Garfield and Irving Sher developed and introduced the impact in the early 1960s. Thereafter, whether coincidentally or not, more and more of the most cited papers appeared in the most cited journals. By around 1990, the percentage had peaked at 2.2%. By 2011 it had fallen to 1.9%.

The use of impact factor to evaluate papers and, by extension, authors evidently irks Lozano, Larivière, and Gingras. To a list of six existing criticisms of the use of impact factor in academia, they add their own finding and argue (with my emphasis added) that:

As the relationship between paper citation rates and [impact factor] continues to weaken, and as more important papers increasingly appear in more diverse venues, it will become even less justifiable to automatically transfer a journal’s reputation and symbolic capital on to even its most recently published papers. This should force a return to direct assessments of paper quality, by actually reading them.

Science in American Vogue

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Charles Day

The spring newsletter of the National Association of Science Writers leads with a reprint of a blog post by Hillary Rosner entitled “Their so-called journalism, or what I saw at the women’s mags.” Rosner is an experienced writer and editor who specializes in environmental science. Her website lists articles she’s written for the New York Times, Audubon, Popular Science, and other publications. She also contributed to Al Gore’s 2006 book about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

Rosner’s bibliogaphy doesn’t include articles for Vogue, Elle, Self, Cosmopolitan, or any other women’s magazines. Her blog post suggests why. A profile she pitched about Lone Drøscher Nielsen, a conservationist who runs an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo, was rejected by “a lovely editor at a high-profile women’s magazine that from time to time runs articles about strong women doing worthwhile work.” The problem: The orangutans’ rainforest habitat is being wiped out to make way for oil palms, whose fruit yields a thick, greasy oil used in cosmetics—cosmetics made by half the high-profile magazine’s advertisers.

That a magazine editor would avoid upsetting advertisers is regrettable but understandable. Most magazines and newspapers are in business to make money. Does your local newspaper review real estate agents or used car dealers? Mine, the Washington Post, doesn’t—perhaps because its classified section is full of ads for houses and used cars.

Rosner’s complaint about the treatment of science in women’s magazines goes far beyond a rejected pitch. One editor asked her to alter scientists’ quotes in a story. Another changed a breast cancer survivor’s account of how she discovered a lump on her breast. The most egregious offense against journalistic ethics that Rosner experienced was the recasting of a story to suit an editor’s preconceived thesis of the topic, a thesis contradicted by Rosner’s reporting.

As a freelance in today’s weak economy, Rosner told her readers that she’s not in a position to reject assignments. “But,” she wrote, “as I started thinking back on some of my horror tales . . . I realized I no longer give a shit. I feel like this stuff needs to air out.”

I admire Rosner’s stand—which is why I’m writing about it. But as a skeptical scientist and journalist, I wanted to see for myself whether science coverage in women’s magazines is as dire as Rosner led me to believe. So I bought the May issue of American Vogue.

Flipping through the issue, I encountered science first on page 88, in the form of letter to the editor. The writer, a pharmacology student from San Francisco called Alda Karic, evidently appreciated an article from Vogue‘s February issue on the abuse of over-the-counter drugs. Her letter urged her fellow readers to consult pharmacists when they have questions about OTC drugs.

Science appeared next on page 216. Florence Kane, a former Vogue fashion reporter, wrote about the diagnosis she received, while pregnant, of Crohn’s disease. The story was personal, affecting, and, as far as I could tell, medically accurate. So far so good on the science front—at least in this one issue of Vogue. I was also pleased to see that Vogue shuns horoscopes.

But on page 286, I came across the kind of story that had appalled Rosner. In “Lab to table,” Newsweek reporter Eve Conant examined whether genetically modified foods are safe to eat. (Whether GM foods are safe to cultivate is different question.) The story was alarmist, unbalanced, and too light on the underlying science.

For one thing, the story lacked a meaningful discussion of why GM foods might be presumed to be harmful. Genetic modification either alters sequences already in an organism’s DNA or inserts new sequences. The end result is a modified protein or a new protein. In general, the proteins we eat are broken down in the stomach and duodenum first into peptides and then into amino acids. At that point, whatever form and function the protein had, GM or otherwise, is lost.

Granted, the neurotoxins produced by the botulism bacterium, the death cap mushroom, the black mamba snake, and other poisonous organisms are either proteins or peptides. Still, no one—except perhaps a villain like James Bond’s antagonist Ernst Stavro Blofeld—would genetically modify, say, the DNA of a Granny Smith apple to insert the sequence of a neurotoxin that’s deadly to humans.

In her Vogue story Conant briefly mentions studies that involved feeding GM peas to mice and GM soy to hamsters. The mice became more prone to allergies and the hamsters were sterile by the third generation. But she included so little information that I couldn’t track down the studies or identify who performed them.

Conant did not mention a 2004 report by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that “to date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population.” Indeed, Conant gave unwitting support to the NAS finding by pointing out that she and millions of other Americans have been consuming GM food, mostly without their knowledge, for years. If eating GM food had ever sickened her or her family, friends, and colleagues, she didn’t say.

I agree with Conant that consumers ought to know what they’re eating. And, as the NAS report recommends, we should be vigilant about adverse health effects. It is not unreasonable to expect that a GM food could provoke a severe allergic reaction, for example. But it would be a tragedy if humans eschewed GM foods out of ignorance or out of fear because they’ve been scared by articles like Conant’s. As the world’s population grows and its climate warms, GM foods could well be the only way to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.

Testing editors

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Charles Day

In its issue of March 1965, the British literary journal Critical Quarterly published an article by poet and historian Robert Conquest entitled “Christian symbolism in Lucky Jim.” Lucky Jim was the debut novel by Conquest’s friend Kingsley Amis. Published in 1954, Lucky Jim follows the travails of Jim Dixon, a young and disillusioned historian at the University of Swansea. The novel is bawdy, satirical, farcical, and—as far as I recall—quite devoid of Christian symbolism.

That Conquest’s article is a spoof might be apparent from its opening. After establishing an appropriately high-brow tone in the first paragraph, Conquest goes on to cite imaginary critical studies that are simultaneously plausible and silly:

At one time the attention of critics was directed in the main to the work of an overtly symbolic nature. In recent years, however, we have come to see more clearly than was originally the case that writing which at a superficial level may appear to be simple or “realist” in fact provides equally valuable material for critical research.

That Lucky Jim is essentially a symbolic novel is now, of course, no longer disputed. Interesting work has already been done on its various levels of effect. I need only mention Professor Brezé’s Le Saveur du Néant: Essence et Existence en “Jim-la-chance” (Paris 1962); Dr. James Conrad’s Amis and Ariosto (Leeds 1959); Dr. Uruspiyev’s “Shtastlivetsat Dzhim” ot gledishteto na Marksisticheskyat Dialektik (Sofia 1956); Mrs. Joyce Hackensmith’s The Phallus Theme in Early Amis (Concord 1957) . . .

I have been unable to discover whether the editors of Critical Quarterly were fooled by Conquest’s joke or whether they colluded with him to produce it. But some readers evidently did not see the humor. The editors received so many earnest responses to the article that they had to own up to the spoof in the next issue.

By now, I expect you might be recalling another, more recent spoof. In 1994 physicist Alan Sokal sent a deliberately nonsensical article about gravity to the editors of Social Text. The article appeared after cursory editing, confirming what Sokal had intended to prove: That the treatment of science in Social Text and some other journals of social and cultural criticism is both trivial in its content and obtuse in its expression. He announced his hoax in a famous article in the magazine Lingua Franca.

Math paper retracted because it “contains no scientific content”

Presumably, the editors of scientific journals are rarely the targets of hoaxes. Even so, editors must be vigilant for articles that contain concocted data, stolen ideas, or bad science. Earlier this week, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of the blog Retraction Watch posted about a paper that was retracted by the journal Computers and Mathematics with Applications because it lacked scientific content.

Clues to the paper’s worthlessness are less subtle than Conquest’s fake references. Its one-sentence abstract reads: “In this study, a computer application was used to solve a mathematical problem.” The second author’s email address is ohm@budweiser.com. And the paper’s main text contains just 348 words. “How on Earth does this stuff get past editors, peer reviewers, and publication staffs?” asked Retraction Watch’s Oransky, “And how did it remain in print for two years?”

Academic publishers, especially commercial ones, are under pressure because of the prices they charge for publishing research that, in some cases, has been funded by taxpayers. Taxpayers, say the critics, ought to have free access to what they’ve already paid for. Publishers counter by arguing that editing adds value to research papers and is correspondingly costly.

That argument is undermined by sloppy or barely existent editing. Ironically, the publisher whose pricing policies have attracted the most criticism and have even provoked a boycott, Elsevier, is responsible for Computers and Mathematics with Applications.

Translated from the French, the title is “The taste of nothingness: essence and existence in Lucky Jim.” Translated from the Bulgarian, the title is Lucky Jim from the standpoint of Marxist dialectic.”

Do we need a new social medium for science?

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Charles Day

Christie Wilcox is a PhD student in biology at the University of Hawaii. She also writes the Science Sushi blog for Scientific American, which is where I stumbled across a provocative series of posts that she wrote last October. Under the title “Social media for scientists”, Wilcox urged scientists to blog, tweet, and use other social media to engage the interest of both the general public and their fellow scientists.

Wilcox made several arguments to support her call to action. By using social media, scientists could help raise the public’s low level of scientific knowledge. They could communicate directly with the people who ultimately pay for—and in some cases benefit from—their research without relying on the dwindling ranks of science journalists. And they could provide the general public with a more rounded, appealing impression of who scientists are and what they do.

Even if scientists don’t want to engage the general public, they should still use social media to tell the world about their research. Here’s a quote from the third part of Wilcox’s series:

Science is a labor of love. You do what you do because you think it matters, and you publish your research because you think it’s worth talking about. What better way to make sure your research is talked about than to start the conversation?

Just ask Peter Janiszewski, of Obesity Panacea. Last year, he and his colleague published a fascinating paper in the prestigious journal Diabetes Care. The problem was, it went unnoticed. For three months, his study wasn’t blogged about. It wasn’t picked up by the press. No one seemed to care.

But Peter cared. He decided that the paper fit well into his blog’s theme, and wrote a 5-part series on the topic of metabolically-healthy obesity, the final post of which was a discussion of his recently published paper.

The series was a hit. Peter’s blog posts received over 12,000 pageviews and more than 70 comments from readers during the week of the series. As Peter recounts, “Put another way, the same research which I published in a prestigious medical journal and made basically no impact, was then viewed by over 12,000 sets of eyes because I decided to discuss it online.” A few days later, an article about his study was published on MSNBC.com.

Wilcox anticipated that some of her scientist readers would claim that they don’t have time to blog and tweet. Fine, she wrote: Ask your colleagues to share the load. As for whether the public would visit a scientist’s blog or follow his or her tweets, Wilcox countered that even a popular audience of just three people is better than zero, which is the audience scientists get when they do nothing.

Too many, too infrequent

I agree with Wilcox that scientists should talk to and listen to the public without the mediation of journalists, editors, and science show presenters. I’m skeptical, however, that the current set of social media provides truly effective tools for promoting dialog between scientists and the public.

For one thing, too many scientists work on the same topics. Last year Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B published 634 papers on graphene between them. Even if each group published a productive six papers each, the prodigious total still implies there are more than 100 graphene groups.

Should each of those groups start a blog? Despite graphene being one of the hottest topics in physics, I doubt the public has the appetite for 100 blogs about the material. Granted, many of the blogs would be in Chinese, German, and other languages. Still, even 10 graphene blogs are likely to be too many.

Another problem with scientists using social media is that the pace of scientific research is far slower than the customary—and therefore expected—rate of tweeting, blogging, and Facebook posting. A typical scientist faces the dilemma of either tweeting often about incremental, even trivial advances, or rarely about real advances. Neither option will attract readers.

What’s missing, I think, is a social medium that lets scientists and the general public converse in a way that’s convenient and rewarding for both groups. Current social media don’t meet that need because they mediate communication between specific individuals. Members of the public who are interested in, say, particle physics can’t easily follow or subscribe to that topic. They have to either choose particle physicists to read or set up news filters that may or may not find prime particle physics content.

Fortunately, there is a social medium that could serve as model for a forum where scientists and the general public could converse: the arXiv e-print server. Imagine a website where scientists upload not preprints, as they do on arXiv, but accessible, easy-to-read descriptions of the their latest research. Imagine that the website has an interface that lets members of the public browse, search, collect, and share posts that interest them. Imagine, too, that the website makes it easy for scientists and members of the public to exchange comments.

If such a website existed, a scientist who produced one brilliant, quirky, or otherwise interesting piece of research per year could engage members of the public without having to set up and maintain a Twitter account or blog. Members of the public would get to see the fruits of scientific research without having to watch the fruits grow.

So what should we call this site and who should build it?

Gleanings from the softer side of a profession

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Charles Day

Earlier this year Frances Bajet, a publicist at Cambridge University Press in New York City, sent me an advance copy of Henry Petroski’s An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession. The book lives up to its subtitle. Browsing through its pages I found entries on asphalt cookies, concrete canoes, practical jokes (“if at all possible, involve a cow”), and slide rules.

But the book also has a harder side. Petroski writes about engineering’s history, practice and impact on society. Collectively, his numerous, diverse entries gave me a renewed sense of awe and respect for engineers. The book also made me wonder why I didn’t choose to become an engineer myself.

My hometown of Conwy, North Wales, doesn’t lack engineering marvels that might have inspired the younger me. A massive 13th-century castle dominates the town. Two of the bridges that span the River Conwy were built by 19th-century titans of civil engineering, Thomas Telford and Robert Stephenson. In high school, I enjoyed, and was good at, metalwork (“shop” in American parlance).

But I preferred science. The aeronautical engineer and investigator of fluids Theodor von Kármán once said, “The scientist describes what is; the engineer creates what never was.” Even if I’d been familiar with Kármán’s famous quote, the physicist’s quest to understand nature was more attractive to me than the engineer’s quest to build new and useful machines.

I know of at least four Nobel Prize–winning physicists who studied engineering before switching to physics: Paul Dirac, Edward Purcell, Carlo Rubbia, and Eugene Wigner. The influence of engineering on Dirac is hard to discern. His most famous contribution to physics was to unify two abstract theories, quantum mechanics and special relativity.

Rubbia wanted to become a physicist in high school, but he switched to engineering when he failed to win a prestigious scholarship. Fate brought him back to physics when one of the scholarship winners resigned his scholarship, which created an opening. The autobiography that Rubbia wrote for the Nobel Foundation leaves you with the impression that he considered his escape from engineering not only lucky but also welcome.

To their evident benefit, Purcell and Wigner pursued engineering further than Dirac and Rubbia did. Purcell earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in from Purdue University. His discoveries of nuclear magnetic resonance in solids and the 21-cm radiation in the cosmos depended on the construction and operation of novel electronic detectors.

Wigner earned a PhD in chemical engineering at what is now the Technical University of Berlin. After graduating, he worked for his father’s chemical engineering company. Wigner’s engineering background is evident not so much in his theoretical contributions to quantum mechanics, but in his work as a nuclear engineer. He designed the first large-scale nuclear reactors that ran at the Hanford Site in Washington State.

Petroski’s An Engineer’s Alphabet abounds in evidence that the various kinds of engineering are, like physics, challenging and rewarding. Whether today’s high school students pursue engineering, physics, or neither is their choice. But that choice should be made freely and with a familiarity of what those two broad, rich subjects offer.

I hope, therefore, that Petroski’s book finds its way into the hands of students and that someone writes a similar book about physics that is just as entertaining, informative, and inspiring.

Charles Day

In praise of longer papers

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Charles Day

In today’s New York Times, the newspaper’s media columnist David Carr described a new online media outlet called the Atavist. Defying the trend to publish ever shorter, catchier items, the Atavist publishes (to quote from its website)

original nonfiction and narrative journalism for digital devices like the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook. Our stories are longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books, written by experienced reporters and authors and designed digitally from the start. Each story has extensive free text and audio excerpts here at the site, with links to where you can buy and read them in full.

Carr’s article got me thinking about physics papers. If you have a hot result and want to publish it in Physical Review Letters, Nature, or Science, then make sure your write-up is short—no more than four pages for PRL, and no more than five pages for the longest format in Nature and Science.

Some papers really don’t need to be especially long. Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous paper of May 1953, “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” occupied just over two pages of Nature. In December 1962 Nick Holonyak and S. F. Bevacqua spent just under two pages of Applied Physics Letters in describing the world’s first LED.

But other papers, like the narrative journalism that the Atavist publishes, need plenty of space for their authors to properly introduce and describe their findings. Although Albert Einstein’s most cited paper, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” (which he wrote in 1935 with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen) is about three pages long, arguably his most important paper, “The Foundation of General Relativity” of 1916, filled 53 pages of Annalen der Physik.

The cost of producing an additional “page” of an online journal is far lower than it is for a print journal. Given that physicists nowadays browse, search for, and even read papers online, I wonder if the time has come to revisit the short-is-best presumption.

Like other modern consumers of information, physicists must be judicious in choosing what to read. Short papers might seem to bring some relief, but do they? If, to understand a short paper, you have to consult its references or—a pet peeve of mine—have to read online appendices, have you saved any time?

And even if a short paper, its appendices, and its key antecedents, don’t take longer to read than a longer, self-contained paper, a longer paper could be clearer and easier to digest thanks to its single, coherent narrative.

Anthony Leggett shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the superfluid phases of helium-3. He published his original research in PRL and other physics journals, but the paper that is cited the most—and the only paper of his mentioned by the Nobel committee in its background material—is his 1975 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics. It’s 83 pages long.