Inadvertent Support
Everyday, thousands of colleagues use social media to express surprise, dislike, or even outrage for the impact factor, for articles …
Category Archives: Opinion
Magnanimity pays off
Francis Crick exceeded the brilliance of his famous double helix model by this magnanimous act:
Premature human engineering
The news buzz alive with excitement about human genome editing, even human germline engineering. Successful germline engineering requires (1) a technology …
Which publications are citable?
The number of references to a scientific publication is frequently used as an objective measure for the significance of the …
Valor
Very few human acts are more inspiring than courage and defiance in the face of insuperable evil. While such defiance and courage …
Evolving scientific culture
Scientific research depends crucially on the scientific culture. Unhealthy culture cannot support healthy research.
High quality journals with low quality peer-reviews
There is much outcry about the increasing competition in scientific research. Yet, I do not hear comparable outcry about the …
Strikingly important it is not
I read a research article in which the authors asserted the “striking importance” of their results in about 20 – …
Exceptional papers do not need exceptional journals
If you are truly convinced your research result is important and you are right, you may not need to publish it in a “high impact” prestigious journal. The success of incremental research depends upon being published and promoted by prestigious magazines and journals.
“Publishing in PLOS Genetics will hurt my reputation”
I have heard extreme opinions defending and opposing the importance of scientific journals and magazines. The extremes have desensitized my …
