There’s a new species of journal lurking in the medical publishing jungle, but it doesn’t seem to have a name. As a zoologist turned writer (ie somebody obsessed by taxonomy and words) this bothers me so I hope somebody will christen them soon. To launch this campaign, I’ll begin by describing what the new type […]
Category: Liz Wager
Liz Wager: Mournful numbers
I love the fact that many words have multiple meanings. This multiplicity sometimes sets up strange resonances or odd mental images, especially if you pick the wrong meaning initially. The other day I was running a publication workshop and talking about tables and figures, when I got horribly tangled up by the fact that figures […]
Liz Wager: Are we making too much fuss about patient confidentiality?
In my last blog, I addressed calls for raw research data to be made available. Like most other discussions about publishing data I started from the assumption that individual information must be kept confidential at all costs. That’s a helpful stance when considering the classic doctor-patient relationship but I wonder if it is always necessary […]
Liz Wager: Does the Wakefield et al case mean we should demand public access to raw data?
The latest chapter in the sad saga of the Wakefield et al paper on the MMR vaccine raises some difficult questions about access to individual patient data. It is possible that the apparent discrepancies between the patient records and the publication might have come to light a whole lot sooner, perhaps even before publication, if […]
Liz Wager: Can we immunise Brazilian science against fraud?
I’m in Sao Jose dos Campos, near Sao Paulo, Brazil, on the last leg of BRISPE 1 – the First Brazilian meeting on Research Integrity, Science & Publication Ethics, which started in Rio de Janeiro last week. Brazilian science is, apparently, booming. A recent article in Science described it as “riding a gusher.” An astrophysicist […]
Liz Wager on falling in love with email again
There are days when I curse the existence of email. I curse it when I have been training all day yet feel obliged to sit up half the night to plough through the 50 messages that have popped uninvited into my in-box. I grind my teeth when people in meetings check their Blackberries every 5 […]
Liz Wager warms to qualitative research
I’m just back from running a course in Kenya and, as usual, it was an eye-opening experience – but perhaps not in the way you might expect. I’ll admit that, until now, I have been a bit sceptical about qualitative research. […]
Liz Wager: Should editors punish misbehaving authors?
I’ve been wondering about the role of journals in punishing miscreant authors. A senior publisher told me he was uneasy about COPE’s retraction guidelines because although they suggest that redundant publications should be retracted, they recommend that the first publication should remain. The publisher felt that this was condoning and rewarding multiple publication and that […]
Liz Wager: Something of rascality
At COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) we regularly receive cases of duplicate publication and undisclosed conflicts of interest. I was therefore intrigued to come across an accusation of publication misconduct in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ relating to the year 1769, which suggests such crimes have a long history. […]
Liz Wager on stem cell scientists’ criticisms of peer review
Stem cell researchers from some major international institutions have written an open letter to journal editors complaining that they have received unreasonable and obstructive reviews (Euro Stem Cell) […]