Bibliometrics

A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences

Science advances through rich, scholarly discussion. More than ever before, digital tools allow us to take that dialogue online. To chart a new future for open publishing, we must consider alternatives to the core features of the legacy print …

Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature

We have empirically assessed the distribution of published effect sizes and estimated power by analyzing 26,841 statistical records from 3,801 cognitive neuroscience and psychology papers published recently. The reported median effect size was D = …

Poor replication validity of biomedical association studies reported by newspapers

Objective To investigate the replication validity of biomedical association studies covered by newspapers. Methods We used a database of 4723 primary studies included in 306 meta-analysis articles. These studies associated a risk factor with a …

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals

Background There is increasing interest to make primary data from published research publicly available. We aimed to assess the current status of making research data available in highly-cited journals across the scientific literature. Methods and …

Risk of Bias in Reports of In Vivo Research: A Focus for Improvement

The reliability of experimental findings depends on the rigour of experimental design. Here we show limited reporting of measures to reduce the risk of bias in a random sample of life sciences publications, significantly lower reporting of …

Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

Background Sharing research data provides benefit to the general scientific community, but the benefit is less obvious for the investigator who makes his or her data available. Principal Findings We examined the citation history of 85 cancer …

Sneaked references: Cooked reference metadata inflate citation counts

We report evidence of an undocumented method to manipulate citation counts involving 'sneaked' references. Sneaked references are registered as metadata for scientific articles in which they do not appear. This manipulation exploits trusted …

Toward Reproducible Computational Research: An Empirical Analysis of Data and Code Policy Adoption by Journals

Journal policy on research data and code availability is an important part of the ongoing shift toward publishing reproducible computational science. This article extends the literature by studying journal data sharing policies by year (for both 2011 …