JAMA 15 Dec 2010 Vol 304 2595 New England is a wonderful place: from its little towns a nation was born, full of the idiosyncracies of seventeenth century Britain. The cadences of the 1611 Bible can still be heard in the speeches of President Obama, and even on hoardings advertising health products; miles, pints, and […]
I developed a strong interest in medicine and becoming a doctor at the beginning of high school. I liked the idea of being of service, the social respect doctors are afforded, and the bread and butter (financial reward) was fair enough. […]
While teaching two courses on “getting published” in Dhaka I had a marvellous opportunity to gather insights into why researchers from a low income country have problems writing and getting published. Most of the researchers were juniors from ICDDR, B (formerly the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), a well established and highly successful […]
Delays in publication are not new and neither, it seems, are bureacratic hurdles which mean that institutions fail to recognise important things. According to Wikipedia the Royal Society had no money to print Newton’s Principia Mathematica because “the Society had just spent its book budget on a history of fish.” But, luckily, Edmund Halley realised the […]
Duplicate or highly similar publications are unethical and unacceptable in the biomedical literature. Déjà Vu, a freely accessible database of highly similar and duplicate publications, is a valuable tool for journal editorial staff to identify whether a submitted article has previously been published and has the potential to be a powerful deterrent to this behaviour. […]
Just back from my first visit to India, which the Lonely Planet guide rightly says is much more of a continent than a country. Three days in Delhi and three in Mumbai barely scratched the surface, but left me resolved to return there for longer. The day before we left home Delhi was bombed by […]
News of the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to smash its first atoms on 10 September, makes me wonder not about subatomic particles but about adjectives. When I teach researchers how to report their work, I generally advise them to be wary of qualifying adjectives as they seem out of place in scientific papers. […]
Recent changes to the BMJ’s copyright licence and the information it includes in research articles means that they can be formally listed as open access articles in PubMed Central and other repositories. So should we change the labels of open access research articles on our website from “free” to “open access”? […]
A recently published BMJ paper on sex at 70 attracted the attention of the medical columnist for the New York Times. It also caught the attention of NYT readers, as evidenced by the 100+ responses to the article that have so far been posted online. The Swedish study reported on the results of four surveys […]