Search

The article presents several rules for restructuring papers to avoid losing readers. Authors are instructed to focus their papers on a central contribution and to concentrate on the context-content-conclusion (C-C-C) scheme. They are also advised to optimize a paper's logical flow by avoiding zig-zag and using parallelism and to include complete story in the abstract.

An editorial is presented which discusses the collaborative writing with multiple authors which has additional challenges including varied levels of engagement of coauthors, provision of fair credit through authorship or acknowledgements and acceptance of diversity of work styles. Also discussed are the 10 simple rules for collaboratively writing a multi-authored paper which include to build a writing team wisely; to create a data management plan and to jointly decide on authorship guidelines.

While women are generally underrepresented in STEM fields, there are noticeable differences between fields. For instance, the gender ratio in biology is more balanced than in computer science. We were interested in how this difference is reflected in the interdisciplinary field of computational/quantitative biology. To this end, we examined the proportion of female authors in publications from the PubMed and arXiv databases. There are fewer female authors on research papers in computational biology, as compared to biology in general. This is true across authorship position, year, and journal impact factor. A comparison with arXiv shows that quantitative biology papers have a higher ratio of female authors than computer science papers, placing computational biology in between its two parent fields in terms of gender representation. Both in biology and in computational biology, a female last author increases the probability of other authors on the paper being female, pointing to a potential role of female PIs in influencing the gender balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author talks about several rules that a person can follow to develop good reading habits in graduate school and beyond. Topics discussed include the importance of developing the habit of reading on a daily basis; the need to develop comprehension skills; and the need to study the history of one's discipline. Also mentioned are the importance of creating a list of relevant journals, the need to read books, and the benefits of using a reference manager.

We join the increasing call to take computational education of life science students a step further, beyond teaching mere programming and employing existing software tools. We describe a new course, focusing on enriching the curriculum of life science students with abstract, algorithmic, and logical thinking, and exposing them to the computational “culture.” The design, structure, and content of our course are influenced by recent efforts in this area, collaborations with life scientists, and our own instructional experience. Specifically, we suggest that an effective course of this nature should: (1) devote time to explicitly reflect upon computational thinking processes, resisting the temptation to drift to purely practical instruction, (2) focus on discrete notions, rather than on continuous ones, and (3) have basic programming as a prerequisite, so students need not be preoccupied with elementary programming issues. We strongly recommend that the mere use of existing bioinformatics tools and packages should not replace hands-on programming. Yet, we suggest that programming will mostly serve as a means to practice computational thinking processes. This paper deals with the challenges and considerations of such computational education for life science students. It also describes a concrete implementation of the course and encourages its use by others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents guidelines for drawing scientific comics for efficient communication of difficult ideas. Suggestions mentioned include finding the right shapes for use in conveying the appropriate message one is trying to make, making one's comics simple to convey a complicated idea easier to understand, and taking time to ensure that the details in one's comics are right.

This article offers tips for students to complete a graduate degree in biological sciences in Latin America. Topics discussed include the features that underlie the performance of graduate programs around the world, the importance of investigating the graduate program and the adviser, scholarship programs for graduate students, and the need to follow administrative procedures from admission to graduation.

You can help your principal investigator on the oversight of grant rules and procedures, keeping protocols up to date, writing reports, and fulfilling requests from the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Regardless, what is important is for the administrator to be curious about science and make the effort to get a basic familiarity with the scientific discipline and academic working environment they are supporting. Although human resources, principal investigators, and lab managers are a large part of the onboarding process for a new employee, administrative staff are typically involved in the process as well. [Extracted from the article]

Open-source software projects are also communities of effort. "...developers who join an organization through these programs are half as likely to transition into long-term community members than developers who do not use these programs... although developers who do succeed through these programs find them valuable". 47 Fagerholm F, Guinea AS, Münch J, Borenstein J. The role of mentoring and project characteristics for onboarding in open source software projects. [Extracted from the article]

The article offers information on the challenging scientific problems faced by humanity. Topics discussed include information on the efforts to empower Africans to join the global neuroscience community; discussions on the BRAIN initiative in the U.S. and the Human Brain Project in Europe; and the information on the limiting factor for computational neuroscience development in Africa.

An editorial is presented on rules for providing a meaningful research experience to high school students. Topics discussed include ten rules for becoming an effective research mentor for high school students and their training, research opportunities as undergraduates and career consideration in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and bridging the gap between scientists and the general public on scientific research.

The article presents ten simple rules for hosting a regular webinar series with particular emphasis on resource-constrained communities like many in Africa. Topics include aligning a webinar theme to the expectations of the audience; settling on a convenient and user friendly webinar platform; and announcing webinars through mailing lists and social media platform.

The article reviews progress made by scientists in bioinformatics and propose strategies for boosting bioinformatics capacity. It mentions information on Eastern Africa Network for Bioinformatics Training (EANBiT), which aims at developing practitioners who can develop and use bioinformatics approaches to biosciences. It presents use of biosciences in treating infectious diseases such as the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), and tuberculosis (TB).

The article offers information on the periodical's `Topic Pages' project as a way to help fill important gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of computational biology content and to credit authors for their contributions. It mentions that hypercycle theory is now more accessible not only for advanced readers, but also for ordinary people who seek knowledge on the computational aspects of the origins of life.

Quantitative reasoning and techniques are increasingly ubiquitous across the life sciences. However, new graduate researchers with a biology background are often not equipped with the skills that are required to utilize such techniques correctly and efficiently. In parallel, there are increasing numbers of engineers, mathematicians, and physical scientists interested in studying problems in biology with only basic knowledge of this field. Students from such varied backgrounds can struggle to engage proactively together to tackle problems in biology. There is therefore a need to establish bridges between those disciplines. It is our proposal that the beginning of graduate school is the appropriate time to initiate those bridges through an interdisciplinary short course. We have instigated an intensive 10-day course that brought together new graduate students in the life sciences from across departments within the National University of Singapore. The course aimed at introducing biological problems as well as some of the quantitative approaches commonly used when tackling those problems. We have run the course for three years with over 100 students attending. Building on this experience, we share 11 quick tips on how to run such an effective, interdisciplinary short course for new graduate students in the biosciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents simple rules for developing serious scientific videogames. One rule is that the goal of the game should be defined in a clear way in terms of science and teaching. Another rule is that equilibrium has to be created between scientific accuracy and player accessibility. Another rule is that one should let the players interact with scientific data.

The article offers tips on how to develop collaborative lessons.

The article discusses several rules for undergraduates to help them intellectually enrich their research experiences, in view of benefits of research in undergraduate education, and their struggle in understanding purpose of work. Topics include need for undergraduates to start early to explore research interests and goals for career; having a background knowledge in the research area using resources like Massive Open Online Courses; and having positive relationships with research colleagues.

The article offers tips on preparing short and swift scientific presentations. Since immediacy is important, preparing one primary message for the audience is suggested. Slides can be used to present a clear story by discussing one major point per slide. Using simple visuals is recommended. The style, graphical design, language and imagery of the presentation should be consistent.

The article offers suggestions for development of multi-site collaborations for enhancement of data sharing approaches. Topics discussed include observation of increment in research productivity through enhancement of software services; involvement of several algorithms along with different software tools as research products; enhancement of software as open-source; security of data use agreements; and engagement with different software social platforms.

Bioinformatics.ca has been hosting continuing education programs in introductory and advanced bioinformatics topics in Canada since 1999 and has trained more than 2,000 participants to date. These workshops have been adapted over the years to keep pace with advances in both science and technology as well as the changing landscape in available learning modalities and the bioinformatics training needs of our audience. Post-workshop surveys have been a mandatory component of each workshop and are used to ensure appropriate adjustments are made to workshops to maximize learning. However, neither bioinformatics.ca nor others offering similar training programs have explored the long-term impact of bioinformatics continuing education training. Bioinformatics.ca recently initiated a look back on the impact its workshops have had on the career trajectories, research outcomes, publications, and collaborations of its participants. Using an anonymous online survey, bioinformatics.ca analyzed responses from those surveyed and discovered its workshops have had a positive impact on collaborations, research, publications, and career progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors discusses the guidelines for the authors to submit the scientific figures in their articles. Topics discussed include the importance of scientific visualization, identification of the message through the image and use of a effective color for design of a scientific figure. Also mentioned is several tool which are exist for creating the figures include the R, a computer programming language, Matplotlib, based on python, and ImageMagick, a software which convert bitmap images.