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Citation metrics are increasingly used to appraise published research. One challenge is whether and how to normalize these metrics to account for differences across scientific fields, age (year of publication), type of document, database coverage, and other factors. We discuss the pros and cons for normalizations using different approaches. Additional challenges emerge when citation metrics need to be combined across multiple papers to appraise the corpus of scientists, institutions, journals, or countries, as well as when trying to attribute credit in multiauthored papers. Different citation metrics may offer complementary insights, but one should carefully consider the assumptions that underlie their calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women comprise a minority of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. Quantifying the gender gap may identify fields that will not reach parity without intervention, reveal underappreciated biases, and inform benchmarks for gender balance among conference speakers, editors, and hiring committees. Using the PubMed and arXiv databases, we estimated the gender of 36 million authors from >100 countries publishing in >6000 journals, covering most STEMM disciplines over the last 15 years, and made a web app allowing easy access to the data (). Despite recent progress, the gender gap appears likely to persist for generations, particularly in surgery, computer science, physics, and maths. The gap is especially large in authorship positions associated with seniority, and prestigious journals have fewer women authors. Additionally, we estimate that men are invited by journals to submit papers at approximately double the rate of women. Wealthy countries, notably Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, had fewer women authors than poorer ones. We conclude that the STEMM gender gap will not close without further reforms in education, mentoring, and academic publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contribution of chemist Rosalind E. Franklin in the discovery of double helix and highlights the changes and developments in the research practices and genomic collaborations as of 2016. Topics discussed include the rise of coauthorship in scientific papers, the underrepresentation of women in terms of authorship and the differences between the propensity of men and women to collaborate in research.

The article discusses a study related to the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) that emerges objecting to the construction of both the numerator and denominator of the metric. It mentions addition of data on the stability of RCR values with reference to article citation rates of older articles. It also highlights analysis of the year-by-year changes in RCR values of articles funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

We can regard the wider incentive structures that operate across science, such as the priority given to novel findings, as an ecosystem within which scientists strive to maximise their fitness (i.e., publication record and career success). Here, we develop an optimality model that predicts the most rational research strategy, in terms of the proportion of research effort spent on seeking novel results rather than on confirmatory studies, and the amount of research effort per exploratory study. We show that, for parameter values derived from the scientific literature, researchers acting to maximise their fitness should spend most of their effort seeking novel results and conduct small studies that have only 10%–40% statistical power. As a result, half of the studies they publish will report erroneous conclusions. Current incentive structures are in conflict with maximising the scientific value of research; we suggest ways that the scientific ecosystem could be improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movement towards open science is a consequence of seemingly pervasive failures to replicate previous research. This transition comes with great benefits but also significant challenges that are likely to affect those who carry out the research, usually early career researchers (ECRs). Here, we describe key benefits, including reputational gains, increased chances of publication, and a broader increase in the reliability of research. The increased chances of publication are supported by exploratory analyses indicating null findings are substantially more likely to be published via open registered reports in comparison to more conventional methods. These benefits are balanced by challenges that we have encountered and that involve increased costs in terms of flexibility, time, and issues with the current incentive structure, all of which seem to affect ECRs acutely. Although there are major obstacles to the early adoption of open science, overall open science practices should benefit both the ECR and improve the quality of research. We review 3 benefits and 3 challenges and provide suggestions from the perspective of ECRs for moving towards open science practices, which we believe scientists and institutions at all levels would do well to consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer-reviewed journal publication is the main means for academic researchers in the life sciences to create a permanent public record of their work. These publications are also the de facto currency for career progress, with a strong link between journal brand recognition and perceived value. The current peer-review process can lead to long delays between submission and publication, with cycles of rejection, revision, and resubmission causing redundant peer review. This situation creates unique challenges for early career researchers (ECRs), who rely heavily on timely publication of their work to gain recognition for their efforts. Today, ECRs face a changing academic landscape, including the increased interdisciplinarity of life sciences research, expansion of the researcher population, and consequent shifts in employer and funding demands. The publication of preprints, publicly available scientific manuscripts posted on dedicated preprint servers prior to journal-managed peer review, can play a key role in addressing these ECR challenges. Preprinting benefits include rapid dissemination of academic work, open access, establishing priority or concurrence, receiving feedback, and facilitating collaborations. Although there is a growing appreciation for and adoption of preprints, a minority of all articles in life sciences and medicine are preprinted. The current low rate of preprint submissions in life sciences and ECR concerns regarding preprinting need to be addressed. We provide a perspective from an interdisciplinary group of ECRs on the value of preprints and advocate their wide adoption to advance knowledge and facilitate career development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increased concern about poor scientific practices arising from an excessive focus on P-values. Two particularly worrisome practices are selective reporting of significant results and ‘P-hacking’. The latter is the manipulation of data collection, usage, or analyses to obtain statistically significant outcomes. Here, we introduce the novel, to our knowledge, concepts of selective reporting of nonsignificant results and ‘reverse P-hacking’ whereby researchers ensure that tests produce a nonsignificant result. We test whether these practices occur in experiments in which researchers randomly assign subjects to treatment and control groups to minimise differences in confounding variables that might affect the focal outcome. By chance alone, 5% of tests for a group difference in confounding variables should yield a significant result (P < 0.05). If researchers less often report significant findings and/or reverse P-hack to avoid significant outcomes that undermine the ethos that experimental and control groups only differ with respect to actively manipulated variables, we expect significant results from tests for group differences to be under-represented in the literature. We surveyed the behavioural ecology literature and found significantly more nonsignificant P-values reported for tests of group differences in potentially confounding variables than the expected 95% (P = 0.005; N = 250 studies). This novel, to our knowledge, publication bias could result from selective reporting of nonsignificant results and/or from reverse P-hacking. We encourage others to test for a bias toward publishing nonsignificant results in the equivalent context in their own research discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That a scientist might shape and cultivate a personal brand is a relatively new concept but one that is finding increasing acceptance in this new age of rapid communications and social media. A key driver is the abrupt rise in well-funded and organized antiscience movements, especially in North America and Europe, such that society now benefits from scientists with strong personal brands and public personas who are willing to engage general audiences. In this sense, branding itself can advance science, the sharing of information, and the promotion of science as a public good. Still another dimension to branding is that it affords an opportunity to mentor younger scientists and helps you to become an important role model for the next generation. There is also a practical side, as today, fewer scientists spend their entire career at a single institution, so owning a strong brand can sometimes create easier paths for transitions and mobility. However, brand cultivation ideally begins in collaboration with your institutional office of communications and is done in a way that is seen as a win for both you and your university or research institution. Described here are some steps to consider when embarking on brand cultivation and how to avoid some of the potential pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration plays an increasingly important role in promoting research productivity and impact. What remains unclear is whether female and male researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) disciplines differ in their collaboration propensity. Here, we report on an empirical analysis of the complete publication records of 3,980 faculty members in six STEM disciplines at select U.S. research universities. We find that female faculty have significantly fewer distinct co-authors over their careers than males, but that this difference can be fully accounted for by females’ lower publication rate and shorter career lengths. Next, we find that female scientists have a lower probability of repeating previous co-authors than males, an intriguing result because prior research shows that teams involving new collaborations produce work with higher impact. Finally, we find evidence for gender segregation in some sub-disciplines in molecular biology, in particular in genomics where we find female faculty to be clearly under-represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oversupply of postdoctoral scholars relative to available faculty positions has led to calls for better assessment of career outcomes. Here, we report the results of a study of postdoctoral outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, and suggest that institutions have an obligation to determine where their postdoc alumni are employed and to share this information with current and future trainees. Further, we contend that local efforts will be more meaningful than a national survey, because of the great variability in training environment and the classification of postdoctoral scholars among institutions. We provide a framework and methodology that can be adopted by others, with the goal of developing a finely grained portrait of postdoctoral career outcomes across the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]