How the brain mediates behavior is a question relevant to a broad range of disciplines including evolutionary biology, basic neuroscience, psychiatry, and population health. Experiments in animals have traditionally used two distinct approaches to explore brain-behavior relationships; one uses naturally existing behavioral models while the other focuses on the creation and investigation of medi...

The process of collecting and organizing sets of observations represents a common theme throughout the history of science. However, despite the ubiquity of scientists measuring, recording and analysing the dynamics of different processes, an extensive organization of scientific time-series data and analysis methods has never been performed. Addressing this, annotated collections of over 35 000 ...

When I turned my focus from debates on the philosophy of science to the philosophy of biology and life sciences in the mid-1980s, one of the most interesting things that struck me was that the results of these debates failed to penetrate any biological discipline. Yet biological disciplines have methods, methodological discussions, and a scientific history with developmental stages. Like all ot...

Introduction. This paper examines and synthesizes previous research in scientific collaboration, scholarly communication, scientific collaboratories, scientific disciplines, invisible colleges and virtual communities to identify factors that may impact the design, adoption and use of a collaboratory within librarianship and information science. Results. A taxonomy of factors that appear to impa...

The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences, first formulated in the 19(th) century, predicts that, moving from simple and general phenomena (e.g. particle dynamics) to complex and particular (e.g. human behaviour), researchers lose ability to reach theoretical and methodological consensus. This hypothesis places each field of research along a continuum of complexity and "softness", with prof...

In recent years, the notion of complex systems proved to be a very useful concept to define, describe, and study various natural phenomena observed in a vast number of scientific disciplines. Examples of scientific disciplines that highly benefit from this concept range from physics, mathematics, and computer science through biology and medicine as well as economy, to social sciences and psycho...

The South African Family Practice is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which strives to provide primary care physicians (and their teams), as well researchers, with broad range of scholarly work in the disciplines family medicine, health care, rural district and other related fields. SAFP publishes original research, clinical reviews, pertinent commentary that advance knowledge base these dis...