Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming paradox

It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible and invalid. Certainly the practice of science needs to be improved and scientists are now pursuing this goal. However, in this perspective we argue that this seeming paradox is not new, has always been part of the way science works, and likely will remain so. We first introduce the paradox. We then review a wide range of challenges that appear to make scientific success difficult. Next, we describe the factors that make science work-in the past, present, and presumably also in the future. We then suggest that remedies for the present practice of science need to be applied selectively so as not to slow progress, and illustrate with a few examples. We conclude with arguments that communication of science needs to emphasize not just problems but the enormous successes and benefits that science has brought and is now bringing to all elements of modern society.Comment: 3 figure

Scholarly Database

The Scholarly Database (SDB) aims to serve the needs of researchers and practitioners interested in the analysis, modeling, and visualization of large-scale scholarly datasets. The database currently provides access to 11 major datasets such as Medline, U.S. patents, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health funding awards - a total of about 20 million records. The books, journals, proceedings, patents, grants, technical reports, doctoral and master theses can be cross searched. Results can be downloaded as data dumps for further processing. The online interface at https://sdb.School of Library and Information Science.indiana.edu provides full-text search for four databases (MEDLINE, NSF, NIH, USPTO) using Solar. Specifically, it is able to search and filter the contents of these databases using many criteria and search fields, particularly those relevant for scientometric research and science policy practice

Modelling the Structure and Dynamics of Science Using Books

Scientific research is a major driving force in a knowledge based economy. Income, health and wellbeing depend on scientific progress. The better we understand the inner workings of the scientific enterprise, the better we can prompt, manage, steer, and utilize scientific progress. Diverse indicators and approaches exist to evaluate and monitor research activities, from calculating the reputation of a researcher, institution, or country to analyzing and visualizing global brain circulation. However, there are very few predictive models of science that are used by key decision makers in academia, industry, or government interested to improve the quality and impact of scholarly efforts. We present a novel 'bibliographic bibliometric' analysis which we apply to a large collection of books relevant for the modelling of science. We explain the data collection together with the results of the data analyses and visualizations. In the final section we discuss how the analysis of books that describe different modelling approaches can inform the design of new models of science.Comment: data and large scale maps http://cns.iu.edu/2015-ModSci.html, Ginda, Michael, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Katy B\"orner. "Modelling Science". In Theories of Informetrics: A Festschrift in Honor of Blaise Cronin, edited by Sugimoto, Cassidy. Munich: De Gruyter Sau

Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins.

WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a 'million minds' to annotate a 'million concepts' and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are