Scoop: new data-set of the world’s most-cited researchers finds hundreds who’ve amassed more than half their citations (!!) from themselves or their co-authors. By me and @DalmeetS .
Richard Van Noorden
6,102 posts
Richard Van Noorden
@Richvn
Features editor, Nature. E: r⟦dot⟧vannoorden⟦at⟧nature⟦dot⟧com or richardvannoorden⟦at⟧protonmail⟦dot⟧com. Also @richvn on mastodon and bluesky.
Joined January 2009
- Scientists working with the WHO have acknowledged errors in their COVID excess deaths study. They revised excess death figures for Germany, down 37%, & Sweden, up 19%. Germany now well below UK. Not yet on WHO official site: update later in year.🧵 nature.com/articles/d4158…
- Weird. Author of Nature paper @PatrickTBrown31 says he looked solely at effects of warming on wildfires, ignoring vegetation and human ignition pattern changes, to mold research to journal's desire. Yet peer-review file shows issue raised in review & authors argued against it!
Last week, I described our paper on climate change and wildfires: x.com/PatrickTBrown3… I am very proud of this research overall. But I want to talk about how molding research presentations for high-profile journals can reduce its usefulness & actually mislead the public. - Some researchers say that at least a quarter of randomized clinical trials in some fields are untrustworthy (perhaps fake?!), but still cited in reviews that guide medical practice. How big is this problem & what's the evidence? Here's my look in @Nature
- How large is science's fake-paper problem? Massive, finds a new ML text-analysis by @ClearSkiesAdam. It suggests paper mills rise to 1.5-2% of all papers; 3% in biomed. That's 70,000 papers last year alone, >400,000 overall. As a 'conservative estimate'. nature.com/articles/d4158…
- Fascinating to see how to use GPT-3 [ChatGPT's predecessor] to edit a scientific manuscript (adapted from @miltondp 's January preprint, for this @nature article about generative AI and science ) nature.com/articles/d4158…
- Below: what Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote on 24 Jan, the same day a report from China was published in the Lancet. Now Horton lambasts scientists and government for not taking the warnings of this Lancet report seriously enough. Yes ... but at the time, he urged caution tooA call for caution please. Media are escalating anxiety by talking of a “killer virus” + “growing fears”. In truth, from what we currently know, 2019-nCoV has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language.
- “For the first time, octopuses have been spotted throwing things — at each other.” By @Emma_Marris | @Nature nature.com/articles/d4158…
GIF - Replying to @jburnmurdochis it possible you can separate out Covid's lethality to unvaccinated people vs to vaccinated people, as comp'd to flu? Cos this averaging may lead unvaccinated people to think 'it's no more lethal than flu'. Which, for them, is wrong.
- On the pandemic's true death toll. Certainly millions more than official counts, but how many millions, and how is this work done? by @davidneiladam (1/4)
- In 2018, two scientists let Nature reporters chronicle their lives as they launched their first labs. We all had no idea of the global and personal crises to come. Here's their story, with many thanks to @danbose and @dozenoaks for their generosity.
- "Influenza, polio and more have shown that infections can change lives even decades later. Why the complacency over possible long-term effects of COVID-19?" by @lfspinney in @nature
- A big development for text-mining? @carlmalamud has released online a giant, free index of 355 billion words and sentences in 107 million science papers. By @hollyelse in @nature
- I’m on the hunt to commission a fresh batch of feature stories for Nature. DM/email with pitches or queries about what we’re looking for!
