Articles in both the lay and professional literature have extolled the virtues of humor, many giving the impression that the health benefits of humor are well documented by the scientific and medical community. The concept that humor or laughter can be therapeutic goes back to biblical times and this belief has received varying levels of support from the scientific community at different points...

Both plant biologists and animal biologists seek to understand how their focal organisms have evolved to interact with the environment. Despite this similarity in goals, the differing biology of plants and animals as well as other factors have led these scientific communities to diverge. Scientific discoveries that have occurred in each community in relative isolation may advance progress in th...

Most scientific information is published in a small number of prestigious journals that address mainstream science [4]. At the same time, developing countries encompass almost a quarter of the world’s scientists but only less than 6% of research spending [4]. Journals from this “scientific periphery” [10] are poorly visible in the scientific community: the Science Citation Index (SCI), one of t...

As a new-style computer-mediated communication system, the blog has been gaining popularity among various Web users. Blog communities come into being in the process of self-organized communication between bloggers and the community structures are reflected by the embedded social networks. This study research the communication patterns of scientist bloggers with the data from the largest Chinese...

The GENIE project aims to deliver a Grid-based, modular, distributed and scalable Earth System Model for long-term and paleo-climate studies to the environmental sciences community. In this paper we address the scientific problem of the vulnerability of the thermohaline circulation to the global climate, and describe our e-scientific solution using a Grid-based architecture involving Condor com...

Scientific communities can be seen as a specific type of Communities of Practice (CoP). In this paper we analyze scientific communities from the CoP point of view. We show how models and design principles from CoP can be interpreted and adapted for scientific communities. Taking the CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) community as an example, we instantiate the adapted design princ...

Software is the backbone of scientific computing. Yet, while we regularly publish detailed accounts about the results of scientific software, and while there is a general sense of which numerical methods work well, our community is largely unaware of best practices in writing the largescale, open source scientific software upon which our discipline rests. This is particularly apparent in the co...

There are two approaches for evaluating scientific papers. The classic way is to choose well established representatives of the specific scientific community and have them evaluate their colleague’s work. The other method of evaluation, the so called peer-evaluation method, is where peers (famous or otherwise) of the author evaluate the paper. Peer-evaluation resembles the diffusion process in ...

In this time at which the Scientific Publishing world is changing so much, it is wonderful to note that Elsevier Ltd. contributes to the advancement of our scientific community through such a concrete step. Scientific Societies provide a way of advancing the interests of the community of scientists. Scientific journals depend on scientists to do the research, write papers, serve as editors and ...