The Scientist has an attack of CNS disease

The Scientist this week tells us that

"Peer review isn’t perfect [who knew?]— meet 5 high-impact papers that should have ended up in bigger journals."

Wait, what? These high-impact papers got those citations despite ending up in "second tier" journals, so I doubt the authors have been crying into their beer about this "injustice". This is an example of CNS Disease, a term coined by Harold Varmus to characterise the obsession with Cell, Nature and Science. Not all high-impact papers must published in one of these journals, and not all papers published in these journals will be high impact. Biomedical publishing is not just a game in which editors sort articles by predicted future impact - at least, I hope it's not.

Authors chose their publication venue for all sorts of reasons, and it's hard to predict which new work will set the world on fire. Take BLAST - it was a "quick and dirty" algorithm that gave similar results to the Smith and Waterman algorithm only much faster, and the gain in speed came at a loss of accuracy. Only use by scientists in practice could decide whether this was a good approach. Focussing on the umpteen thousand citations to BLAST is missing the point: the important thing about BLAST is the millions or billions of hours of computer time saved by using it. As Joe, the other denizen of Journalology Towers, said recently:

"Lord protect us from the idea that an academic publication might have any value beyond its ability to accumulate citations."

Journalology roundup #7

Scooped by a blog. A then PhD student Reed Cartwright came up with the same hypothesis on his blog as an accepted paper in Plant Cell, so the author offered him co-authorship on the paper. A nice feel-good story, but by Reed's admission "There are maybe three sentences in the published paper that I had anything to do with". I might be a spoil-sport, but I think that an acknowledgement would have made more sense! Reed's blog is here.

Physician-Industry Relationships. "Most physicians (94%) reported some type of relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, and most of these relationships involved receiving food in the workplace (83%) or receiving drug samples (78%). More than one third of the respondents (35%) received reimbursement for costs associated with professional meetings or continuing medical education, and more than one quarter (28%) received payments for consulting, giving lectures, or enrolling patients in trials".

The Scientist's take on the Shelley Batts figure reuse affair.

Characteristics Associated with Citation Rate of the Medical Literature. "Large trials, with group authorship, industry-funded, with industry-favoring results, in oncology or cardiology were associated with greater subsequent citations". This is the kind of journalology research I love to see!

Open Access & Science Publishing. Results of a Study on Researchers’ Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing

In the eye of the Open Access storm. "Publisher Matthew Cockerill is one of the father figures of open access. So, exactly how open is he?". A profile of our Dear Leader.

Number crunching

Duncan at nodalpoint has suggested "A crude score for benchmarking scientists", which looks at publications in Nature, Science or PNAS. Why suggest such a conservative measure reliant upon a restricted view of publishing, when there are already metrics like the Hirsh index? You can calculate the H-index of an individual researcher from citations in Google Scholar. It's not perfect, and there are numerous corrections and alternatives to it, but let's not simplify things too much.