Category: Featured Database

The Transformation of the Scientific Paper: From Knowledge to Accounting Unit

Featured Database

Author: Gingras, Yves Description: Since the mid-1990s, observers and actors in the scientific field—as defined in Bourdieu as a structured space of agents and institutions in competition for the accumulation of credit or “symbolic capital”—have commented on the many facets of an ongoing major transformation in the structural conditions of scientific practice: massification of research, mounting pressure to publish, relative decline of government investments, and the arrival into the research system of the ideology of “knowledge management” with its insistence on quantitative evaluation measures of productivity and “impact” of academic…

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Protection of the human gene research literature from contract cheating organizations known as research paper mills

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Author: Byrne, Jennifer A.; Park, Yasunori; Richardson, Reese A. K.; Pathmendra, Pranujan; Sun, Mengyi; Stoeger, Thomas Description: Human gene research generates new biology insights with translational potential, yet few studies have considered the health of the human gene literature. The accessibility of human genes for targeted research, combined with unreasonable publication pressures and recent developments in scholarly publishing, may have created a market for low-quality or fraudulent human gene research articles, including articles produced by contract cheating organizations known as paper mills. This review summarises the evidence that paper mills…

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Timeliness and content of retraction notices for publications by a single research group

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Author: Grey, Andrew; Avenell, Alison; Bolland, Mark Description: Publications of expressions of concern and retractions should be timely, accurate and comprehensive. We assessed these characteristics for 292 publications by a research group about which we submitted concerns about publication integrity to 77 journals and 29 publishers between March 2013 and February 2020. By October 2020, 115 publications were corrected (3), had expressions of concern (18), or were retracted (94). The median (95% CI) time from submission of concerns to the first journal correction was 22.1 (18.2-26.9) months: this did not…

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A social network contagion theory of risk perception

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Author: Scherer, Clifford W.; Cho, Hichang Description: Risk perceptions have, to a great extent, been studied exclusively as individual cognitive mechanisms in which individuals collect, process, and form perceptions as atomized units unconnected to a social system. These individual-level theories do not, however, help explain how perception of risk may vary between communities or within a single community. One alternative approach is based on a network theory of contagion. This approach, emerging largely from organizational and community social network studies, suggests that it is the relational aspects of individuals and…

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Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

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Author: Everett, J.; Faber, N.; Crockett, M. Description: Ingroup favoritism–the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups–is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how…

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Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections

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Author: Supran, G.; Rahmstorf, S.; Oreskes, N. Description: Climate projections by the fossil fuel industry have never been assessed. On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all available global warming projections documented by-and in many cases modeled by-Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that is consistent with subsequent observations. Their projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models. Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp also correctly rejected…

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The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning

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Author: Epley, Nicholas; Gilovich, Thomas Description: Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate’s weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won’t really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that people’s preferences can affect their beliefs. This idea is captured in the common saying, “People believe what they want to believe.” But people don’t simply believe what they want to believe. Psychological research makes it clear that “motivated beliefs” are guided by motivated reasoning–reasoning in…

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Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth

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Author: Cunningham, Calum X.; Williamson, Grant J.; Bowman, David M. J. S. Description: Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (>99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our…

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Direct and indirect influences of political regimes on corruption

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Author: Goel, R.; Nelson, M. A. Description: Objective: This paper studies the direct and indirect impacts of political regimes on corruption. Whereas the interplay of government is fundamental to corrupt acts, the present research sheds new light by showing the direct and indirect influences of dimensions of government structure on corruption. Methods: We employ two different estimation techniques. First, we use OLS regressions, with year and regional dummies. Second, we employ mediation analysis to account for the intermediate role of government size in the relation between government structure and corruption…

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Neurocognitive Basis of Racial Ingroup Bias in Empathy

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Author: Han, Shihui Description: Racial discrimination in social behavior, although disapproved of by many contemporary cultures, has been widely reported. Because empathy plays a key functional role in social behavior, brain imaging researchers have extensively investigated the neurocognitive underpinnings of racial ingroup bias in empathy. This research has revealed consistent evidence for increased neural responses to the perceived pain of same-race compared with other-race individuals in multiple brain regions and across multiple time-windows. Researchers have also examined neurocognitive, sociocultural, and environmental influences on racial ingroup bias in empathic neural responses,…

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