Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science

Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science

This essay makes the underlying assumption that scientific information is an economic commodity, and that scientific journals are a medium for its dissemination and exchange. While this exchange system differs from a conventional market in many senses, including the nature of payments, it shares the goal of transferring the commodity (knowledge) from its producers (scientists) to its consumers ...

Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science. The Market for Exchange of Scientific Information: The Winner’s Curse, Artificial Scarcity, and Uncertainty in Biomedical Publication

The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winners curse”, a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresenta...

Standard filtration practices may significantly distort planktonic microbial diversity estimates

Fractionation of biomass by filtration is a standard method for sampling planktonic microbes. It is unclear how the taxonomic composition of filtered biomass changes depending on sample volume. Using seawater from a marine oxygen minimum zone, we quantified the 16S rRNA gene composition of biomass on a prefilter (1.6 μm pore-size) and a downstream 0.2 μm filter over sample volumes from 0.05 to ...

Database Publication Practices

There has been a growing interest in improving the publication processes for database research papers. This panel reports on recent changes in those processes and presents an initial cut at historical data for the VLDB Journal and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Publication Practices in Physics