48,127 research outputs found
Citation Counts and Evaluation of Researchers in the Internet Age
Bibliometric measures derived from citation counts are increasingly being
used as a research evaluation tool. Their strengths and weaknesses have been
widely analyzed in the literature and are often subject of vigorous debate. We
believe there are a few fundamental issues related to the impact of the web
that are not taken into account with the importance they deserve. We focus on
evaluation of researchers, but several of our arguments may be applied also to
evaluation of research institutions as well as of journals and conferences.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 3 table
A Scientometric Prediction of the Discovery of the First Potentially Habitable Planet with a Mass Similar to Earth
The search for a habitable extrasolar planet has long interested scientists,
but only recently have the tools become available to search for such planets.
In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into
the hundreds, and with it the expectation that the discovery of the first
Earth-like extrasolar planet is not far off. Here we develop a novel metric of
habitability for discovered planets, and use this to arrive at a prediction for
when the first habitable planet will be discovered. Using a bootstrap analysis
of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first
Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest
date being early May 2011. Our predictions, using only the properties of
previously discovered exoplanets, accord well with external estimates for the
discovery of the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet, and highlights
the the usefulness of predictive scientometric techniques to understand the
pace of scientific discovery in many fields.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in PLoS ON
Information is not a Virus, and Other Consequences of Human Cognitive Limits
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape
the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of
available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts
how people allocate their attention to social media content. As a consequence,
the position of information in an individual's social feed, as well as explicit
social signals about its popularity, determine whether it will be seen, and the
likelihood that it will be shared with followers. Accounting for these
cognitive limits simplifies mechanics of information diffusion in online social
networks and explains puzzling empirical observations: (i) information
generally fails to spread in social media and (ii) highly connected people are
less likely to re-share information. Studies of information diffusion on
different social media platforms reviewed here suggest that the interplay
between human cognitive limits and network structure differentiates the spread
of information from other social contagions, such as the spread of a virus
through a population.Comment: accepted for publication in Future Interne
"Goethe's Plant Morphology: The Seeds of Evolution"
I argue that Goethe’s scientific writings carry in them the seeds of the theory of evolution. Goethe’s works on plant morphology reflects the conflicting ideas of his era on the discreteness and on the stability of species. Goethe’s theory of plant morphology provides a link between the discontinuous view of nature, as exemplified in works of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), and the continuous view of nature, as exemplified in the work of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
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The Expanding Landscape of Alternative Splicing Variation in Human Populations.
Alternative splicing is a tightly regulated biological process by which the number of gene products for any given gene can be greatly expanded. Genomic variants in splicing regulatory sequences can disrupt splicing and cause disease. Recent developments in sequencing technologies and computational biology have allowed researchers to investigate alternative splicing at an unprecedented scale and resolution. Population-scale transcriptome studies have revealed many naturally occurring genetic variants that modulate alternative splicing and consequently influence phenotypic variability and disease susceptibility in human populations. Innovations in experimental and computational tools such as massively parallel reporter assays and deep learning have enabled the rapid screening of genomic variants for their causal impacts on splicing. In this review, we describe technological advances that have greatly increased the speed and scale at which discoveries are made about the genetic variation of alternative splicing. We summarize major findings from population transcriptomic studies of alternative splicing and discuss the implications of these findings for human genetics and medicine
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