Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
Part of what makes the process of science so interesting is the part where scientists invite criticism. It's right there in the scientific method, in the part where we have to see if other experiments confirm original results.
Discussion of scholarly information in research blogsAs some of you know, Mike Thelwall, Judit Bar-Ilan (both are my dissertation advisors) and myself published an article called "Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information" in PLoS One.
In my first post here at Information Culture , I made the argument that in order for science to progress, the results of scientific studies must be shared with others.One of the challenges facing scientists in the modern world is that this research is typically published in journals that individuals and libraries must pay to access, sometimes at exorbitant rates.
The open access publisher PLoS recently announced an innovative type of peer reviewed journal article combining the power of expert review with the accessibility of Wikipedia.
The journals in which scientists publish can make or break their career. A scientist must publish in "leading" journals, with high Journal Impact Factor (JIF), (you can see it presented proudly on high-impact journals' websites).
At some point in elementary school, your teacher taught you about the "scientific method." Typically, this starts with observation and hypothesis forming, continues through experimentation and ends with analysis and conclusions.* But it doesn't really end there.
Two questions I get asked now and then are A. "What do you study?" And B. "What is it good for? (as in "Why should my tax money fund you?"). Now that I have an excellent platform like this SciAm blog, I might as well take advantage of it to answer at least the first question (I'll let you decide if it's worth the taxpayer's money).I study Information or Library Science, and my sub-field is what used to be called Bibliometrics, “the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication,” (Pritchard, 1969).
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