Poonam Pandey and peer-review
One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey's "death" and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish "anything". To be su…
scientific publishing
23 posts
The identity of scientific papers
This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie's response to a suggestion in an editorial "first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter" – that scientists s…
The Frida Kahlo NFT
Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, Art is reborn into Eternity. fridanft.org In July this year, a Mexican businessman named Martin Mobarak allegedly destroyed a painting by Frida Kahlo in order t…
The paradoxical virtues of primacy in science
Primacy is a false virtue imposed by the structures of modern science – yet it is also necessary to right some wrongs.…
The toxic affair between Covaxin and The Lancet
That Covaxin has been leading a ceaselessly beleaguered life is no mystery – but The Lancet journal may not know that it has been pressed into the questionable service of saving the vaccine's repu…
PeerJ's peer-review problem
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publi…
Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 for tweet
If I had been Bharat Biotech's teacher and "Where is your data?" had been an examination question, Bharat Biotech would have received 1 out of 10 marks. The correct answer to where is…
A non-self-correcting science
While I'm all for a bit of triumphalism when some component of conventional publication vis-à-vis scientific research – like pre-publication anonymous peer review – fails, and fails publicly, I sp…
Citations and media coverage
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 rea…
The costs of correction
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…
Poor journalism is making it harder for preprints
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 we…
Freeman Dyson's PhD
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…