Evolution of Wikipedia’s medical content: past, present and future

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Authors : Thomas Shafee, Gwinyai Masukume, Lisa Kipersztok, Diptanshu Da, Mikael Häggström, James Heilman

As one of the most commonly read online sources of medical information, Wikipedia is an influential public health platform. Its medical content, community, collaborations and challenges have been evolving since its creation in 2001, and engagement by the medical community is vital for ensuring its accuracy and completeness.

Both the encyclopaedia’s internal metrics as well as external assessments of its quality indicate that its articles are highly variable, but improving. Although content can be edited by anyone, medical articles are primarily written by a core group of medical professionals.

Diverse collaborative ventures have enhanced medical article quality and reach, and opportunities for partnerships are more available than ever. Nevertheless, Wikipedia’s medical content and community still face significant challenges, and a socioecological model is used to structure specific recommendations.

We propose that the medical community should prioritise the accuracy of biomedical information in the world’s most consulted encyclopaedia.

URL : Evolution of Wikipedia’s medical content: past, present and future

Alternative location : http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2017/08/24/jech-2016-208601

The unbearable emptiness of tweeting — About journal articles

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Authors : Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Rodrigo Costas, Kimberley Isett, Julia Melkers, Diana Hicks

Enthusiasm for using Twitter as a source of data in the social sciences extends to measuring the impact of research with Twitter data being a key component in the new altmetrics approach. In this paper, we examine tweets containing links to research articles in the field of dentistry to assess the extent to which tweeting about scientific papers signifies engagement with, attention to, or consumption of scientific literature.

The main goal is to better comprehend the role Twitter plays in scholarly communication and the potential value of tweet counts as traces of broader engagement with scientific literature. In particular, the pattern of tweeting to the top ten most tweeted scientific dental articles and of tweeting by accounts is examined.

The ideal that tweeting about scholarly articles represents curating and informing about state-of-the-art appears not to be realized in practice. We see much presumably human tweeting almost entirely mechanical and devoid of original thought, no evidence of conversation, tweets generated by monomania, duplicate tweeting from many accounts under centralized professional management and tweets generated by bots.

Some accounts exemplify the ideal, but they represent less than 10% of tweets. Therefore, any conclusions drawn from twitter data is swamped by the mechanical nature of the bulk of tweeting behavior. In light of these results, we discuss the compatibility of Twitter with the research enterprise as well as some of the financial incentives behind these patterns.

URL : The unbearable emptiness of tweeting — About journal articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183551

Prevalence and citation advantage of gold open access in the subject areas of the Scopus database

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Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, Yolanda Santana-Jiménez

The potential benefit of open access (OA) in relation to citation impact has been discussed in the literature in depth. The methodology used to test the OA citation advantage includes comparing OA vs. non-OA journal impact factors and citations of OA versus non-OA articles published in the same non-OA journals.

However, one problem with many studies is that they are small -restricted to a discipline or set of journals-. Moreover, conclusions are not entirely consistent among research areas and ‘early view’ and ‘selection bias’ have been suggested as possible explications. In the present paper, an analysis of gold OA from across all areas of research -the 27 subject areas of the Scopus database- is realized.

As a novel contribution, this paper takes a journal-level approach to assessing the OA citation advantage, whereas many others take a paper-level approach. Data were obtained from Scimago Lab, sorted using Scopus database, and tagged as OA/non-OA using the DOAJ list.

Jointly with the OA citation advantage, the OA prevalence as well as the differences between access types (OA vs. non-OA) in production and referencing are tested. A total of 3,737 OA journals (16.8%) and 18,485 non-OA journals (83.2%) published in 2015 are considered. As the main conclusion, there is no generalizable gold OA citation advantage at journal level.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.06242

We can shift academic culture through publishing choices

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Author : Corina J Logan

Researchers give papers for free (and often actually pay) to exploitative publishers who make millions off of our articles by locking them behind paywalls.

This discriminates not only against the public (who are usually the ones that paid for the research in the first place), but also against the academics from institutions that cannot afford to pay for journal subscriptions and the ‘scholarly poor’.

I explain exploitative and ethical publishing practices, highlighting choices researchers can make right now to stop exploiting ourselves and discriminating against others.

URL : We can shift academic culture through publishing choices

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11415.2

What do we know about grant peer review in the health sciences?

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Authors : Susan Guthrie, Ioana Ghiga, Steven Wooding

Background

Peer review decisions award >95% of academic medical research funding, so it is crucial to understand how well they work and if they could be improved.

Methods

This paper summarises evidence from 105 relevant papers identified through a literature search on the effectiveness and burden of peer review for grant funding.

Results

There is a remarkable paucity of evidence about the overall efficiency of peer review for funding allocation, given its centrality to the modern system of science. From the available evidence, we can identify some conclusions around the effectiveness and burden of peer review.

The strongest evidence around effectiveness indicates a bias against innovative research. There is also fairly clear evidence that peer review is, at best, a weak predictor of future research performance, and that ratings vary considerably between reviewers. There is some evidence of age bias and cronyism.

Good evidence shows that the burden of peer review is high and that around 75% of it falls on applicants. By contrast, many of the efforts to reduce burden are focused on funders and reviewers/panel members.

Conclusions

We suggest funders should acknowledge, assess and analyse the uncertainty around peer review, even using reviewers’ uncertainty as an input to funding decisions. Funders could consider a lottery element in some parts of their funding allocation process, to reduce both burden and bias, and allow better evaluation of decision processes.

Alternatively, the distribution of scores from different reviewers could be better utilised as a possible way to identify novel, innovative research. Above all, there is a need for open, transparent experimentation and evaluation of different ways to fund research.

This also requires more openness across the wider scientific community to support such investigations, acknowledging the lack of evidence about the primacy of the current system and the impossibility of achieving perfection.

URL : What do we know about grant peer review in the health sciences?

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11917.1