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The article focuses on research which found that the share of economics papers in leading journals focused on pure theory fell from 1983 to 2011. Topics discussed the include number of National Bureau of Economic Research papers released in 2017 that featured the use of administrative data in the U.S., a study which found that white men in America earned significantly more than black men and benefits of sharing tax records with researchers.

The article focuses on the continuous citation of retracted papers in studies and ways to prevent them.

The article informs that facial expressions are not usually a reliable guide to how people feel. It mentions that analysis of research papers that examined the relationship between facial expressions and underlying emotions has uncovered that there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that there are such things as recognisable facial expressions for basic emotions which are universal across cultures such as happiness, and unhappiness. It also mentions the comments of Lisa Feldman Barrett.

The article discusses the need for results of scientific research to be shared publicly and quickly and not be restricted by journal publications which happen to play a key role in winning research money and promotions. Three changes for providing quick public access to research findings are suggested including scientific data made accessible through online repositories prior to journal publications along with open peer review of papers, and using tools like artificial intelligence.

The article looks at the possible scientific fraud perpetrated by stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk in South Korea. Hwang, of Seoul National University, made headlines when he published a paper in which he claimed to have derived lines of stem cells from cloned human embryos. Co-author Roh Sung-il claimed Hwang had admitted falsifying data on nine of the 11 stem-cell lines that formed the basis of his findings. Despite being on the list of authors, Roh, who is the head of the MizMedi Women's Hospital, an infertility clinic in Seoul, and who had collaborated with Hwang in the past, said he was not aware of the paper until after it had been published.

The article discusses the outlook for open-access publishing. On February 3rd America's National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world's biggest sponsor of medical research, announced that from May it will expect the research work which it has helped to finance to be made available online, to all comers, and free, within a year of that research having been published in a journal. The NIH also plans to make it easy for researchers to do its bidding by spending $2m-4m a year supporting an electronic archive into which these papers can be deposited. This will be managed by America's National Library of Medicine. The $30 billion that it spends on research each year leads to the publication of around 60,000 papers annually--some 11% of the total published in the medical field.

This article reports on changes to the traditional peer-review process for the publication of papers in academic journals. The process used to begin with a team of researchers submitting the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then send it to their peers for review. Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal. Now the Internet is allowing free access to scientific results. Also, research is becoming more collaborative so that, before they have been finalised, papers have been reviewed by several authors.

The article questions the accuracy of scientific papers. John Ioannidis, a Greek epidemiologist, estimates that 50 percent of scientific papers eventually turn out to be wrong. Ioannidis makes his claim in PLoS Medicine, an online journal published by the Public Library of Science. His thesis that many scientific papers come to false conclusions is not new. Ioannidis began by looking at specific studies, in a paper published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association". Having established the reality of his point, he then designed a mathematical model that tried to take into account and quantify sources of error. Factors that contribute to false results are small sample sizes, studies that show weak effects and poorly designed studies that allow the researchers to fish among their data until they find some kind of effect. Overall, more than half of all published research is probably wrong.

The article provides observations regarding the scientific debate on gamma-ray bursts. Sir Martin Rees, England's Astronomer Royal, has become embroiled in a controversy that raises questions about the way that scientific papers are published. the misunderstanding was over who first came up with the idea that the gamma rays in bursts are generated by inverse Compton scattering. In September, he and his colleagues pre-printed a paper on the subject which did not acknowledge the contribution to the field of two researchers called Arnon Dar and Nir Shaviv. Sir Martin revised the pre-printed version. But the incident raises questions, and not just about possible libels. On the face of things, pre-printing is a good idea. It exposes a paper to wider scrutiny than the old system did, which should improve its accuracy--as happened in this case. But it also suggests that the price of getting one's ideas into the public domain rapidly is a need to keep them continuously revised in order to avoid criticism, however moderately or immoderately expressed.

This article discusses the question of fairness in the publication of research as the bedrock of scientific careers and the foundation of grant applications. A change has been created in open-access publishing, in which papers are freely available immediately upon publication. Also discussed is a bill introduced by John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat senator from Connecticut, which compels all U.S. federal government agencies to develop public-access policies relating to research conducted by agency employees or from funds administered by that agency.

Scientific and medical journals are not the sort of places many mistakes are to be expected. Yet Emili García-Berthou and Carles Alcaraz, researchers at the University of Girona in Spain, have found that 38 percent of a sample of papers in "Nature," and a quarter of those sampled in the "British Medical Journal"--two of the world's most respected journals--contained one or more statistical errors. Not all of these errors led to erroneous conclusions, but the authors of the study reckon that four percent of the errors may have caused non-significant findings to be misrepresented as being significant. Of course, mistakes happen in the best-run organisations, and there is no suggestion that any of the errors observed was a deliberate fraud. But there do seem to have been rather a lot of them. One solution might be for researchers to publish raw data as well as statistical analysis and conclusions. The real answer, however, surely lies with the researchers themselves.

Monkeys can be made to move robot arms with their thoughts. The ability to control a mechanical arm with nothing more than a passing thought may seem like a fancy of science fiction. But that is precisely what two monkeys have done in a study conducted by Miguel Nicolelis and his colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina. Moreover, according to Dr Nicolelis, people may be able to do the same within the next five years. That would allow amputees, and those who are paralysed, to be fitted with artificial limbs they could control. The study is described in a paper in this month's Public Library of Science: Biology. Once a monkey could perform these tasks routinely, the researchers disconnected the joystick and switched control of the cursor (and the arm) to a computer that was processing signals from wire electrodes implanted in the monkey's brain.While a monkey was using the joystick, the researchers noted how often different cells fired action potentials when she moved the cursor in a particular way.

The article focuses on inkjet imaging devices, computer printers which have been improved by engineering. Today, an inkjet printer costing less than $50 will spit out crisp color pictures, sharp text and brilliant graphics as good as any laser printer costing 30-40 times more. For all its originality, the idea behind the inkjet is far from new. Throughout the 1970s, research into the technology focused on piezoelectric methods. There were inkjets that sprayed microscopic dots of ink through hundreds of tiny nozzles on to paper. Hewlett-Packard Co. insists that the co-operation has developed into a healthy competitive relationship between the two companies, and moved the state of the art further than it would otherwise have gone.

The article focuses on the White's tree frog, a large green amphibian found in Australia, which can climb slippery slopes and perch upside down. White's tree frog secretes mucus from its toe pads, and experts in the field have long thought that it is this fluid which helps the frog to cling on. In a paper published in "Interface," a journal of Britain's Royal Society, Walter Federle, of Cambridge University, and his colleagues demonstrate that the toe pads of the frogs are in direct and dry contact with whatever they are standing on, squeezing out the mucus layer. Whatever is holding the frog to the surface, it is not its mucus.

The article mentions assortive mating, which means that who chooses whom is sometimes predictable. A paper published in the Journal of Ethology by Christina Payne and Klaus Jaffe, of Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela, describes a visit they made to the National Canine Exposition in Caracas. Dr Payne and Dr Jaffe asked their volunteers to try to guess which dogs within a group belonged to which human. Dr Payne and Dr Jaffe checked the correlation between the likelihood of a volunteer making a correct pairing and the amount of time dog and human had cohabited. Although they have yet to prove it, the hypothesis that Dr Payne and Dr Jaffe are considering is that people's preferences for dogs that resemble themselves is an accidental manifestation of another phenomenon.

The article discusses how researchers led by Gane Ka-Shu Wong, of the Beijing Institute of Genomics have developed a genetic blueprint of Bombyx mori, the domesticated silkworm, in a paper published in Science. Dr Wong's team also made a significant contribution to the elucidation of the genome of another Asian species, the chicken. Wong and his colleagues were particularly involved in comparing the genome of the wild red jungle fowl of South East Asia, the ancestor of the domestic chicken, with several agricultural varieties. Their findings confirm China's rise to prominence as a power in the world of genomics. It also allows biologists to start comparing species from related, but not too closely related, groups of organisms. Not surprisingly, the analyses showed that birds have a lot in common with mammals, such as humans, rats and mice, and moths with flies. The two insect lines, for example, share two-thirds of their genes. That suggests these areas have some crucial, but as yet unperceived, function.

From the Luddites onwards, workers whose jobs have been destroyed by scientific advances have voiced their complaints loudly. Such people might be amused by a paper in a January 2004 issue of Nature, in which a group of scientists describe a way of automating science itself. The robot scientist developed by Ross King of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, and his colleagues, does everything a flesh-and-blood scientist does--or, rather, it does what philosophers of science say that scientists ought to do. That is, it formulates hypotheses from observations, conducts experiments to test them, and then formulates new hypotheses from the results. It was fitted with artificial intelligence software that could perform the logical processes involved in making decisions, and this software was given a representation of the pathway chosen (one of those by which amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are made) from which to work.

Many genes in the human are considered useless, but research may indicated some of the "junk" genes have a purpose. It is a cliché of genetics that most of the genome is junk. A retrotransposon is a group of "freeliving" genes which reproduces by hiding in the chromosomes of its hosts, causing that host to copy it at the same time that it copies its own genes. Sometimes, however, a retrotransposon forgets how to have a life of its own, and is just passed down the generations along with the host's genes. Natural selection would be expected to get rid of them. However, in a paper in "Current Biology," Clare Lynch and Michael Tristem, of Imperial College, London, suggest an answer. Dr. Lynch and Dr. Tristem think that its persistence, and the fact that its genes do not seem to have been damaged by random mutations, are due to the fact that it was "turned" at some point in the past, and is now assisting the hosts. In other words, it is no longer a parasite.

A new understanding of what goes on under volcanoes. How is a volcano "plumbed in" to the Earth? Does Mount Pinatubo have any U-bends in its pipe-work and how many twists and turns are there in the conduits underlying Mount Etna's fireworks? The answer is fundamental to understanding how volcanoes work, and could be crucial to predicting when a particular volcano is next going to blow. The answer lies in the magma itself. Dr Putirka and Dr Condit reckon that lava (as magma is called once it has erupted on to the surface) from a particular volcano will have been altered chemically by its journey through the crust in ways that betray the details of that journey. In a paper in this month's Geology, they apply their method to lava from the Springerville volcanic field in Arizona. Since the depths at which magma forms pools under a volcano are likely to influence the type of volcanic eruption at the surface, this information could help to predict a volcano's behaviour.

Focuses on the difficulties associated with determining the number of genes in the human genome. Three papers published in the June, 2000 edition of 'Nature Genetics' which propose vastly different numbers of human genes; Reasons that counting the genes is difficult, including the fact that human DNA contains much more non-genetic than genetic matter.

Focuses on a paper by the British scientist Brian Brooker of the Institute of Food Research, on the air bubbles that appear in baked goods. Role of fat as an additive; Information that commercial bakers have long known that including a small amount of fat gives a bigger loaf from a given weight of dough, and also yields a more uniform texture when the bread comes out of the oven; Description of the method to prevent the bubbles.