Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

YouTube as a source of information on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine during the COVID-19 pandemic

Posté le par

Authors : Thales Brandi Ramos, Luciana Castilho Bokehi, Raphael Castilho Bokehi, Taynah da Silava Pinheiro, Erika Barreto de Oliveira, Renan da SilvaGianoti Torres, Jose Raphael Bokehi, Sabrina Calil-Elias, Selma Rodrigues de Castilho

This research aimed to analyze the quality of the information conveyed through YouTube videos in Portuguese on the use of two medicines suggested for the treatment of COVID-19: chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

The ‘Brief DISCERN’ questionnaire was applied to assess the quality of the video content as well as baseline characteristics, such as length, views, likes and dislikes, in a total of 90 videos with almost 4,5 million views.

Traditional media accounted for 58,89% of videos. Misleading information was present in most of the videos (63,5%). Despite the ease of access, the videos showed problems in the quality of information.

URL : YouTube as a source of information on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine during the COVID-19 pandemic

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/2.19070206

Open Bioeconomy—A Bibliometric Study on the Accessibility of Articles in the Field of Bioeconomy

Posté le par

Authors : Marianne Duquenne, Hélène Pros, Joachim Schöpfel, Franck Dumeignil

Open access (OA) to scientific information is one of the major challenges and objectives of actual public research policy. The purpose of this paper is to assess the degree of openness of scientific articles on bioeconomy, as one of the emergent research fields at the crossroads of several disciplines and with high societal and industrial impact.

Based on a Web of Science (WoS) corpus of 2489 articles published between 2015 and 2019, we calculated bibliometric indicators, explored the openness of each article and assessed the share of journals, countries and research areas of these articles.

The results show a sharp increase and diversification of articles in the field of bioeconomy, with a beginning long tail distribution. 45.6% of the articles are freely available and the share of OA articles is steadily increasing, from 31% in 2015 to 52% in 2019.

Gold is the most important variant of OA. Open access is low in the applied research areas of chemical, agricultural and environmental engineering but higher in the domains of energy and fuels, forestry and green and sustainable science and technology.

The UK and the Netherlands have the highest rates of OA articles, followed by Spain and Germany. The funding rate of OA articles is higher than of non-OA articles. This is the first bibliometric study on open access to articles on bioeconomy.

The results can be useful for the further development of OA editorial and funding criteria in the field of bioeconomy.

URL : Open Bioeconomy—A Bibliometric Study on the Accessibility of Articles in the Field of Bioeconomy

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8040055

How the publish-or-perish principle divides a science: the case of economists

Posté le par

Author : Hendrik P. van Dalen

The publish-or-perish principle has become a fact of academic life in gaining a position or being promoted. Evidence is mounting that benefits of this pressure is being countered by the downsides, like forms of goal displacement by scientists or unethical practices.

In this paper we evaluate whether perceived work pressure (publishing, acquisition funds, teaching, administration) is associated with different attitudes towards science and the workplace among economists working at Dutch universities.

Publication pressure is high and is related to faculty position and university ranking position. Based on a latent class analysis we can detect a clear divide among economists. Around two third of the economists perceives that this pressure has upsides as well as serious downsides and one third only perceives upsides and no downsides.

Full professors see more than other faculty members the positive sides of the publish-or-perish principle and virtually no downsides. These different perceptions are also reflected in their appreciation of the academic work environment.

URL : How the publish-or-perish principle divides a science: the case of economists

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03786-x

The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (1665–1869)

Posté le par

Authors : Kun Sun, Haitao Liu, Wenxin Xiong

Scientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally.

The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings.

This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability.

It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization.

But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre.

The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.

URL : The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (1665–1869)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03816-8

fiddle: a tool to combat publication bias by getting research out of the file drawer and into the scientific community

Posté le par

Authors : René Bernard, Tracey L. Weissgerber, Evgeny Bobrov, Stacey J. Winham, Ulrich Dirnag, Nico Riedel

Statistically significant findings are more likely to be published than non-significant or null findings, leaving scientists and healthcare personnel to make decisions based on distorted scientific evidence.

Continuously expanding ´file drawers’ of unpublished data from well-designed experiments waste resources creates problems for researchers, the scientific community and the public. There is limited awareness of the negative impact that publication bias and selective reporting have on the scientific literature.

Alternative publication formats have recently been introduced that make it easier to publish research that is difficult to publish in traditional peer reviewed journals. These include micropublications, data repositories, data journals, preprints, publishing platforms, and journals focusing on null or neutral results. While these alternative formats have the potential to reduce publication bias, many scientists are unaware that these formats exist and don’t know how to use them.

Our open source file drawer data liberation effort (fiddle) tool (RRID:SCR_017327 available at: http://s-quest.bihealth.org/fiddle/) is a match-making Shiny app designed to help biomedical researchers to identify the most appropriate publication format for their data. Users can search for a publication format that meets their needs, compare and contrast different publication formats, and find links to publishing platforms.

This tool will assist scientists in getting otherwise inaccessible, hidden data out of the file drawer into the scientific community and literature. We briefly highlight essential details that should be included to ensure reporting quality, which will allow others to use and benefit from research published in these new formats.

URL : fiddle: a tool to combat publication bias by getting research out of the file drawer and into the scientific community

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1042/CS20201125

Social Media and Trust in Scientific Expertise: Debating the Covid-19 Pandemic in The Netherlands

Posté le par

Authors : José van Dijck, Donya Alinead

This article examines the role of social media dynamics in the public exchange of information between scientists (experts), government (policy-makers), mass media (journalists), and citizens (nonexperts) during the first 4 months after the Covid-19 outbreak in the Netherlands.

Over the past decade, the institutional model of science communication, based on linear vectors of information flows between institutions, has gradually converted into a networked model where social media propel information flows circulating between all actors involved.

The question driving our research is, “How are social media deployed to both undermine and enhance public trust in scientific expertise during a health crisis?” Analyzing the public debate during the period of the corona outbreak in the Netherlands, we investigate two stages: the emergency response phase and the “smart exit strategy” phase, discussing how scientific experts, policy-makers, journalists, and citizens appropriate social media logic to steer information and to control the debate.

We conclude by outlining the potential risks and benefits of adopting social media dynamics in institutional contexts of science communication.

URL : Social Media and Trust in Scientific Expertise: Debating the Covid-19 Pandemic in The Netherlands

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120981057

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

Posté le par

Authors : Dan Sholler, Karthik Ram, Carl Boettiger, Daniel S Katz

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success.

Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. The effort to increase data sharing in the sciences is one part of a broader “data revolution” that has prompted discussion about a paradigm shift in scientific research.

Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets.

We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies.

We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions.

Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets.

We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.

URL : Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719836258