Contents
The number of clusters must be incorporated into the analysis. Otherwise, results often seem, falsely, to be statistically significant8, 9. Increasing the number of individuals within clusters can increase power, but the gains are minute compared with increasing clusters. Designs with only one cluster per treatment are not valid as randomized experiments, regardless of how many individuals are included. Frequent errors, once recognized, can be kept out of the literature with targeted education and policies.
- This is a wonderful study of power and charisma and the primal hold it can have on men in a setting which will be unfamilar to most young British readers.
- This is all done to prevent researchers from ‘data-dredging’ their results.
- Similarly, there’s no shortage of proposals for reform of the current system.
- When she was a girl, the city ended at the Hotel El Embajador; beyond that point, it was all farms and fields.
- All it takes is for people to gather together in the coffee break and talk.
Now I am not suggesting we abandon peer-review; I retain my faith in the quality control provided by expert assessment of manuscripts before publication, but this should simply be a technical check on the work, not an arbiter of its value. The long tails of barely referenced papers in the citation distributions of all journals — even those of high rank — are evidence enough that pre-publication peer review is an unreliable determinant of ultimate worth. I had a closer look at citation data for a small number of journals in my field. DC’s citation distribution plot was great but it didn’t capture the distribution that underlies the JIF.
The Journal of Failure to Replicate
When governments don’t take a sufficiently activist role in the field of medicines, public opinion pushes them further. In the 1990s and 2000s, advocates gave voice to passionate outrage over the devastating human cost of patent-priced HIV/AIDS medicines, which limited access to sufferers who could afford expensive treatments. US activists threw the ashes of AIDS victims on the lawn of the White House, while African activists called treatment-resistant government ministers murderers. The protests led to the dismantling of patent price barriers—and then to massive public programs to distribute the medicine at low or no cost. So it’s little wonder that, for nearly all of human history, societies have treated medicine as a commonly held benefit.
“Lifestyle” drugs that address male pattern baldness or sexual performance are exhaustively researched and marketed, yet the past half-century has seen just one drug developed to treat tuberculosis, which kills more than a million people each year. A landmark study published by the British medical journal The Lancet showed that of the 1,556 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 2004, only twenty-one were for tropical diseases. The history of pharmaceutical innovations, especially vaccine developments and life-saving treatments for infectious and chronic diseases, shows that the critical research behind these developments was created outside the patent system.
Instead we need to find ways to attach to each piece of work the value that the scientific community places on it though use and citation. The first thing that happens when you attempt this analysis is that you realise how unreproducible the Thomson-Reuters JIFs are. This has been commented on in the past (e.g. here), yet I had the same data as the company uses to calculate JIFs and it was difficult to https://1investing.in/ see how they had arrived at their numbers. After some wrangling I managed to get a set of papers for each journal that gave close to the same JIF. The answer to why Thomson-Reuters don’t do this is probably for ease of computation. The JIF requires only three numbers for each journal, whereas calculating the median would require citation information for each paper under consideration for each journal.
Wrong Number: A closer look at Impact Factors
The average value of a VW diesel has dropped 19 per cent since just before the scandal began. In August of 2015, the average was USD 13,196; this May it was USD 10,674, according to Kelley Blue Book. He further said that investigation over “cheat device” was going on even in the US and EU and the company has yet not been directed to pay any compensation.
If researchers switch from these pre-specified outcomes, without explaining that they have done so, then they break the assumptions of their statistical tests. That carries a significant risk of exaggerating findings, or simply getting them wrong, and this in turn helps to explain why so many trial results eventually turn out to be incorrect. These initiatives can generate conflict, because they set out to hold individuals to account. Most researchers maintain a public pose that science is about healthy, reciprocal, critical appraisal. But when you replicate someone’s methods and find discrepant results, there is inevitably a risk of friction.
What is included in my trial?
The journal is the project of biotech company Amgen Inc. and biochemist Bruce Alberts. The journal is a response to evidence that many scientific findings that are still relied upon cannot be replicated. To me this is a problem of stoichiometry Nonrenewable Resources in science, to use a nerdy metaphor. In order for scientific progress to be optimal we need to have the perfect mix of researchers doing new and speculative research vs doing confirmatory research or applied research.
After all, it would save human lives as well as billions of dollars every year. Last year, US social media and politicians exploded with anger when a young pharmaceutical company executive increased the price of a toxoplasmosis drug by some 5,000 percent overnight. Over a hundred leading US cancer physicians co-authored an article decrying the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, noting that the cost of cancer medicine averages over $100,000 per patient annually. The inefficiency of the enclosed medicine is paired with the creation of real barriers to medicine innovation across the board. By definition, a reward system based on artificial exclusivity will wall off knowledge from being shared.
In his own words, Mr. Esposito is a “publishing consultant”, working for publishers involved in research publishing. He advises these companies on strategies concerning, among other issues, open access. Until this writing, he has penned 253 articles for the blog of theSociety for Scholarly Publishing, an organization representing academic publishers. His continued success as consultant to some of said society members can also be taken as an indication that his advice is being followed by his clients. In brief, the word of Mr. Esposito has carried and continues to carry some significant weight with publishers. Fortunately, Emilie Marcus, CEO of Cell Press and Editor-in-Chief of Cell, was at the meeting to explain it to us.
Any information reported needs to be freely available for re-analysis and not in the hands of a company. Google Scholar is a potential solution but it needs to be more open with its data. They already have a journal ranking which provides a valuable and interesting alternative view to the JIF. This analysis supports the idea that there are different tiers of journal . But the JIF is the bluntest of tools to separate these journals.
Over the last year and a half, Volkswagen has introduced various initiatives that address customer concerns related to after-sales and spare parts availability. To maintain transparency between the brand and its customers, Volkswagen has now placed a standard menu pricing across its dealer workshops in India. The menu pricing comprises of all the costs that a customer could potentially incur, depending on the service required on the respective model. Those competitive issues over who gets to sell what based upon copying or innovation have receded way back into the mists of time.
Community & Events
In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society.
In my opinion, this metric would be most useful when assessing scholarly output. They are normalised to account for the differing number of papers in each dataset. A JIF for 2013 is worked out by counting the total number of 2013 cites to articles in that journal that were published in 2011 and 2012. This number is divided by the number of “citable items” in that journal in 2011 and 2012. This is not just my opinion but an increasingly recognized problem within science.
Attempts to coordinate global intellectual property rules led to the 1883 Paris Convention and the 1886 Berne Convention, and eventually to the creation of the United Nations’s World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967. But nations who signed on to those agreements retained the ability to determine the length of patents and what products would be covered. For many nations, that flexibility meant excluding medicines from patent protection. For example, Germany’s patent law of 1877 labeled medicines as “essential goods,” along with food and chemicals, and prohibited any attempts to patent them.
These and others are described in depth in an upcoming publication7. We strongly support open data7, and scientists should not regard all requests for data as harassment. Good researchers do not turn away when confronted by alternative views. However, their openness can be exploited by opponents who are keen to stall inconvenient research. When people object to science because it challenges their beliefs or jeopardizes their interests, they are rarely committed to informed debate. A man of politics as well as literature, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International from 1977 to 1979, and headed the government commission to investigate the massacre of eight journalists in the Peruvian Andes in 1983.
The deal was one of the foundational documents of the World Trade Organization, and immediately became the most significant intellectual property agreement of modern times. But there was little in the way of binding international law to back up that position. So the industry pushed directly for the US government to make intellectual-property protection a priority in all trade negotiations. Of course, inserting monopoly patent rights into trade agreements runs counter to those agreements’s stated purpose of dismantling barriers to global competition.
This book is a must-read, a sure page-turner that’s guaranteed not to disappoint. Though this book is about Trujillo, it could well be about any of the world’s savage, cruel dictators, past or present – Uganda’s Amin, Nigeria’s Abacha, Belarus’s Lukashenko,Germany’s Hitler etc. Told from different perspectives including the daughter of a cabinet minister, various members of the opposition and Trujillo himself, this novel fizzes with invention and insights into the nature of human power and human fragility. The final third of the book dealing with the transition after Trujillo’s fall is particularly riveting. This is a wonderful study of power and charisma and the primal hold it can have on men in a setting which will be unfamilar to most young British readers.
Add a Comment