Papernomics. Sciences as Games and Means of Censorship (original) (raw)
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PAPERNOMICS Meddling with the Sciences
The journals are basically the only channel through the scientists can make the result of their research know to their colleagues. Scientific journals select the information they publish and guarantee its quality by means of a double blind procedure of censorship by peers. If on the one hand this procedure seems logical as a method for including a study within a consolidated scientific field it is also true that it can function as a mechanism for censorship. If, furthermore, a scientific field such as pharmacology is intimately linked to the business interest of large companies then the companies and journals not only became providers of guidance, but also censors who conceal part of the truth and obstruct scientific advance to defend the economic interest of their patents.
2009
Con la publicacion del sexto ejemplar, la Revista Ingenieria Biomedica llega a su tercer ano de circulacion. En esta edicion celebramos la noticia, recibida hace varios meses, de la Indexacion de la Revista en categoria C en el Indice Bibliografico Nacional-Publindex, maximo escalafon al que pueden aspirar las revistas con tan solo dos anos de existencia. Desde el momento de la creacion y consolidacion de nuestra publicacion, el trabajo del Comite Editorial se ha enfocado en establecer procesos de calidad con miras a la indexacion de la misma en importantes indices nacionales e internacionales. De esta manera, este logro se convierte en un primer peldano para continuar avanzando en la realizacion de este objetivo. La importancia de incluir la Revista en un indice como Publindex tiene ventajas capitales, pues no solo incrementa su visibilidad sino que reitera la calidad de los procesos de evaluacion de los trabajos publicados y genera un ambiente de confianza en los investigadores pa...
Public Understanding of Science – a peer-review journal for turbulent times
Public Understanding of Science, 2012
Scientific publications began as the exchange of polite letters among Gentlemen of Leisure interested in natural philosophy, during the period of the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. The 19th century saw the proliferation of national academies of sciences and societies for the advancement of science to the wider public. The formation of scientific disciplines was to follow, each with its own reviews for reporting new theories, observations and experiments to peers, and for critiquing the work of others in public debate. In the 21st century, this enterprise of scientific publication has grown to gigantic proportions-narrowly defined as "producing peer-review journal articles." Databases of scientific publications (Scopus, ISI, Eigen-factor) track something in the area of 12,000 scientific journals (for example Web of Science, 2009: 11,261 journals, of which about 1/5 are social science), and something in the area of 700,000 published papers per year (2009). Such estimates differ widely and depend on the database. Björk et al. (2009) put this figure at 1.35 million for 2006, and Scopus (at www.SCimago.com) puts this figure at over 30 million citable documents for 2010. However we count, the bulk of this production is still located in the USA and in Europe, but Asia and Latin America are catching up fast. And all this remains a conservative measure of the real scientific effort. Most tracking exercises have a bias towards English language, the lingua franca of modern science, leaving many linguistically conscious researchers with a tough dilemma between pride in the mother tongue or an international impact. Moreover, even within the English language context, databases are incomplete, and some journals exist "off map." With a total of 465 papers peer-reviewed and published between January 1992 and December 2010, Public Understanding of Science is clearly a small fish in this large publishing ocean, and also a small fish within its own world, the social sciences. All the same, PUS strives vigorously to support the work of researchers studying the modern scientific mentality in a global perspective. PUS works for its authors: the impact story so far Citations impact has become the currency by which to identify and trade information about academic journals, and academic researchers increasingly depend on it for their careers. But impact ratings come in many different forms and format. It is necessary to establish some perspective on the matter.
The Status of Scientific Publication in the Information Age
The principal argument of this paper is that existing practices of scientific publishing ill-fit information-oriented sciences which are fundamentally concerned with complexity, constraint, uncertainty and contingency. It is argued that better exploitation of the full gamut of technological possibilities for scientific communication could support a much richer coordination of understanding between scientists. The barriers to achieving this lie with mechanisms of scarcity production in education, which are fundamentally driven by outdated publication practices. The argument builds on the social ontology of Searle, suggesting that scientific publishing declares " status functions " which simultaneously declare scarcity at many levels of education-in the process feeding economic mechanisms within education which have become pathological. In response, I argue that a richer ecology of types of communication by scholars exploiting and experimenting with new technologies can not only mitigate the pathology of publication, but can create better conditions for the advancement of learning and coordination of scientific understanding.
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
This paper is part of the reflection initiated in 2016 following the 20th anniversary of the Public Understanding of Science Journal, analyzing both the thematic evolution of the journal itself and broader aspects of the evolution of the field. Here, we aim to analyze developments in PUS based on all the papers published in the field's two major journals: Science Communication and Public Understanding of Science. We propose to study the field based on the epistemic relations established between texts resulting from the references they include. Thus, although the aforementioned journals constitute our source of information, by incorporating in the analysis the references of all the papers in these journalswhich include books and other journalswe significantly expand the scope and build the epistemic links that are established by the texts analyzed in a very specific way. Evolução do campo "Compreensão Pública da Ciência" a partir da análise bibliométrica de seus dois periódicos mais importantes RESUMO Este artigo faz parte da reflexão iniciada em 2016 após o 20°a niversário do jornal Public Understanding of Science Journal, analisando tanto a evolução temática da própria revista assim como aspectos mais amplos da evolução do campo. Aqui, pretendemos analisar os desenvolvimentos em PUS com base em todos os artigos publicados nos dois principais jornais da área: Science Communication e Public Understanding of Science. Propomos estudar o campo a partir das relações epistêmicas estabelecidas entre os textos decorrentes das referências por eles inseridas. Assim, embora os jornais referidos constituam nossa fonte de informação, ao incorporar na análise as referências de todos os artigos desses jornaisque incluem livros e outros jornaisampliamos significativamente o escopo e construímos os vínculos epistêmicos que se estabelecem nos textos.
THE UTILITY OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS
This article investigates the function of scientific papers in the production of scientific knowledge. For this production, the citations made of these papers in the scientific literature can be considered as economic utilities. The work of the scientist is described as the production of citations by means of citations. The number of citations received by a given paper can be used to measure the paper's formal utility. The formal utility of scientific papers is studied empirically. It is concluded that the references contained in a scientific paper are a major determinant of its future utility.
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2021
This paper is part of the reflection initiated in 2016 following the 20th anniversary of the Public Understanding of Science Journal, analyzing both the thematic evolution of the journal itself and broader aspects of the evolution of the field. Here, we aim to analyze developments in PUS based on all the papers published in the field's two major journals: Science Communication and Public Understanding of Science. We propose to study the field based on the epistemic relations established between texts resulting from the references they include. Thus, although the aforementioned journals constitute our source of information, by incorporating in the analysis the references of all the papers in these journalswhich include books and other journalswe significantly expand the scope and build the epistemic links that are established by the texts analyzed in a very specific way. Evolução do campo "Compreensão Pública da Ciência" a partir da análise bibliométrica de seus dois periódicos mais importantes RESUMO Este artigo faz parte da reflexão iniciada em 2016 após o 20°a niversário do jornal Public Understanding of Science Journal, analisando tanto a evolução temática da própria revista assim como aspectos mais amplos da evolução do campo. Aqui, pretendemos analisar os desenvolvimentos em PUS com base em todos os artigos publicados nos dois principais jornais da área: Science Communication e Public Understanding of Science. Propomos estudar o campo a partir das relações epistêmicas estabelecidas entre os textos decorrentes das referências por eles inseridas. Assim, embora os jornais referidos constituam nossa fonte de informação, ao incorporar na análise as referências de todos os artigos desses jornaisque incluem livros e outros jornaisampliamos significativamente o escopo e construímos os vínculos epistêmicos que se estabelecem nos textos.