253,142 research outputs found
Statistical Reporting with Philip's Sextuple and Extended Sextuple: A Simple Method for Easy Communication of Findings
The advance of science and human knowledge is impeded by misunderstandings of various statistics, insufficient reporting of findings, and the use of numerous standardized and non-standardized presentations of essentially identical information. Communication with journalists and the public is hindered by the failure to present statistics that are easy for non-scientists to interpret as well as by use of the word significant, which in scientific English does not carry the meaning of "important" or "large." This article promotes a new standard method for reporting two-group and two-variable statistics that can enhance the presentation of relevant information, increase understanding of findings, and replace the current presentations of two-group ANOVA, t-tests, correlations, chi-squares, and z-tests of proportions. A brief call to highly restrict the publication of risk ratios, odds ratios, and relative increase in risk percentages is also made, since these statistics appear to provide no useful scientific information regarding the magnitude of findings
Homo Virtualis: existence in Internet space
The study of a person existence in Internet space is certainly an actual task, since the Internet is not only a source of innovation, but also the cause of society's transformations and the social and cultural problems that arise in connection with this. Computer network is global. It is used by people of different professions, age, level and nature of education, living around the world and belonging to different cultures. It complicates the problem of developing common standards of behavior, a system of norms and rules that could be widely accepted by all users. On the other hand, the Internet space can be viewed as a new form of existence where physical laws do not work, and in connection with this, social ones are often questioned. This paper focuses on how social norms regulate relations in Internet space. The authors represents the typology of deviant behavior in the network. The empirical basis of the research includes the sociological survey of students of the senior courses in the Institute of Computer Science and Technology of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. Sociological survey allows to identify students’ understanding of Internet space. The selection of students is conditioned by the fact that IT professionals are considered simultaneously as ordinary users of the network and as future professionals in this field
Theory and Practice of Data Citation
Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means
of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in
science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes
of data are collected and analyzed to discover complex patterns through
simulations and experiments, and most scientific reference works have been
replaced by online curated datasets. Yet, given a dataset, there is no
quantitative, consistent and established way of knowing how it has been used
over time, who contributed to its curation, what results have been yielded or
what value it has.
The development of a theory and practice of data citation is fundamental for
considering data as first-class research objects with the same relevance and
centrality of traditional scientific products. Many works in recent years have
discussed data citation from different viewpoints: illustrating why data
citation is needed, defining the principles and outlining recommendations for
data citation systems, and providing computational methods for addressing
specific issues of data citation.
The current panorama is many-faceted and an overall view that brings together
diverse aspects of this topic is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to
describe the lay of the land for data citation, both from the theoretical (the
why and what) and the practical (the how) angle.Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables, pre-print accepted in Journal of the Association
for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 201
Replication, Communication, and the Population Dynamics of Scientific Discovery
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the
roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of
research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal
framework that jointly represents hypothesis formation, replication,
publication bias, and variation in research quality. We develop a mathematical
model of scientific discovery that combines all of these elements. This model
provides both a dynamic model of research as well as a formal framework for
reasoning about the normative structure of science. We show that replication
may serve as a ratchet that gradually separates true hypotheses from false, but
the same factors that make initial findings unreliable also make replications
unreliable. The most important factors in improving the reliability of research
are the rate of false positives and the base rate of true hypotheses, and we
offer suggestions for addressing each. Our results also bring clarity to verbal
debates about the communication of research. Surprisingly, publication bias is
not always an obstacle, but instead may have positive impacts---suppression of
negative novel findings is often beneficial. We also find that communication of
negative replications may aid true discovery even when attempts to replicate
have diminished power. The model speaks constructively to ongoing debates about
the design and conduct of science, focusing analysis and discussion on precise,
internally consistent models, as well as highlighting the importance of
population dynamics
Studying the Emerging Global Brain: Analyzing and Visualizing the Impact of Co-Authorship Teams
This paper introduces a suite of approaches and measures to study the impact
of co-authorship teams based on the number of publications and their citations
on a local and global scale. In particular, we present a novel weighted graph
representation that encodes coupled author-paper networks as a weighted
co-authorship graph. This weighted graph representation is applied to a dataset
that captures the emergence of a new field of science and comprises 614 papers
published by 1,036 unique authors between 1974 and 2004. In order to
characterize the properties and evolution of this field we first use four
different measures of centrality to identify the impact of authors. A global
statistical analysis is performed to characterize the distribution of paper
production and paper citations and its correlation with the co-authorship team
size. The size of co-authorship clusters over time is examined. Finally, a
novel local, author-centered measure based on entropy is applied to determine
the global evolution of the field and the identification of the contribution of
a single author's impact across all of its co-authorship relations. A
visualization of the growth of the weighted co-author network and the results
obtained from the statistical analysis indicate a drift towards a more
cooperative, global collaboration process as the main drive in the production
of scientific knowledge.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure
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