Tag Archives: preprints

Citations and media coverage

Posted on July 6, 2020 by VM

According to a press release accompanying a just-published study in PLOS ONE: Highly cited papers also tend to receive more media attention, although the cause of the association is unclear. One reason I can think of is a confounding factor … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged citations, Open Access, paywall, PLoS ONE, positivity bias, preprints, scientific publishing | Leave a comment

The costs of correction

Posted on June 6, 2020 by VM

I was slightly disappointed to read a report in the New York Times this morning. Entitled ‘Two Huge COVID-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms’, it discussed the implications of two large studies of COVID-19 recently being retracted by … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged COVID-19, Elisabeth Bik, hydroxychloroquine, New England Journal of Medicine, New York Times, peer review, preprint papers, preprints, scientific literature, scientific publishing, The Lancet | Leave a comment

Poor journalism is making it harder for preprints

Posted on May 12, 2020 by VM

There have been quite a few statements by various scientists on Twitter who, in pointing to some preprint paper’s untenable claims, point to the manuscript’s identity as a preprint paper as well. This is not fair, as I’ve argued many times before. … Continue reading →

Posted in Op-eds, Science | Tagged Ars Technica, COVID-19, journalism, misinformation, peer review, preprint papers, preprint repositories, preprints, press release, science journalism, scientific literature, scientific publishing, The Lancet | Leave a comment

Distracting from the peer-review problem

Posted on February 23, 2020 by VM

From an article entitled ‘The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research‘ published by Reuters: A Reuters analysis found that at least 153 studies – including epidemiological papers, genetic analyses and clinical reports – examining every aspect of the disease, now called … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Uncategorized | Tagged bioRxiv, cherry-picking, COVID-19, Elisabeth Bik, peer review, preprint papers, preprints, Reuters, Smut Clyde, The Lancet | Leave a comment

Another controversy, another round of blaming preprints

Posted on February 1, 2020 by VM

On February 1, Anand Ranganathan, the molecular biologist more popular as a columnist for Swarajya, amplified a new preprint paper from scientists at IIT Delhi that (purportedly) claims the Wuhan coronavirus’s (2019 nCoV’s) DNA appears to contain some genes also … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Scicomm, Science | Tagged 2019 nCoV, Anand Ranganathan, bad journalism, bad science, bioRxiv, hegemony, IIT Delhi, Jonathan Pruitt, post-publication peer-review, preprint server, preprints, scientific journals, The American Naturalist, The Hindu, The Wire Science, transparency, Wuhan coronavirus | Leave a comment

To see faces where there are none

Posted on November 22, 2019 by VM

This week in “neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they’re doing”: a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and whose institution’s media office crafted a press release without thinking … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged arXiv, Björn Brembs, conspiracy theories, Elisabeth Bik, image manipulation, impact factor, Ingelfinger rule, journal rank, Nature Medicine, Ohio State University, open knowledge, pareidolia, peer review, preprints, research fraud, William Romoser | Leave a comment

The case for preprints

Posted on May 9, 2018 by VM

Daniel Mansur, the principal investigator of a lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina that studies how cells respond to viruses, had this to say about why preprints are useful in an interview to eLife: Let’s say the paper that … Continue reading →

Posted in Scicomm | Tagged impact factor, paywall, preprints, research, scientific publishing | Leave a comment