Research Blogging - Research / Scholarship - English

Once upon a time there was a star

2012-05-25T15:14:59Z

Why do we think that Population III stars exist? The term “Population III” could be assigned to two types of stars: “1) the ones which form out of the pristine gas left over after cosmological nucleosynthesis and generated the first metals; and 2) the ones which have been hypothesized to provide the dark matter in galactic halos” – Carr. The first type definitely exists, since we have metals in our disposal, and we know that elements heavier than H and He could only be generated through stellar nucleosynthesis. The second type, however, not necessarily exist, because first galactic halos could also be made of some ancient pre-atomic particles. I am going to discuss the first type of Population III stars. Note that both types of Population III stars might have formed during the first phase of galaxy formation or even before first galaxies were formed....

ResearchBlogging.org, & Bromm V. and Larson R. (2009) The First Stars in the Universe . Scientific American. info:/

Bromm, V. (2010) The Very First Stars: Formation and Reionization of the Universe. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 5(S265), 27. DOI: 10.1017/S1743921310000116

Stacy, A., Greif, T., & Bromm, V. (2010) The first stars: formation of binaries and small multiple systems. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 403(1), 45-60. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.16113.x

Video Tip of the Week: the New PubMed Filters Sidebar

2012-05-23T08:49:17Z

In today’s tip I am linking to a YouTube video from NCBI that briefly explains the new Filters Sidebar feature that has been added to PubMed. We first saw a tweet that the change was coming back on May 2nd, just as I was completing a total update to our full PubMed tutorial*. I struggled with [...]...

Sayers E. W., Barrett T., Benson D. A., Bolton E., Bryant S. H., Canese K., Chetvernin V., Church D. M., DiCuccio M., & Federhen S. (2011) Database resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Nucleic Acids Research, 40(D1). DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkr1184

Let the Buyer Beware

2012-05-22T13:26:00Z

"Modern societies are complex systems" may be the understatement of the year. Obvious or not, however, it must be stated when attempting to model even some minuscule aspect of such a society. Take, for instance......

Tiago P. Peixoto, & Stefan Bornholdt. (2012) No Need for Conspiracy: Self-Organized Cartel Formation in a Modified Trust Game. Physical Review Letters, 108(21), 218702. info:/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.218702

What would you do?

2012-05-21T20:41:54Z

Caroline Tennant Kelly with two of her photos from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement (Source: Sydney Morning Herald at http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-bohemian-and-her-mission-20100416-skgk.html) In 1924 the first university Department of Anthropology in Australia was founded at the University of Sydney. The founding professor was … Continue reading →...

Kidd, Rosalind. (1997) The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs - the untold story. University of Queensland Press. info:/

Discussion of scholarly information in research blogs

2012-05-21T20:37:06Z

Discussion of scholarly information in research blogs As some of you know, Mike Thelwall, Judit Bar-Ilan (both are my dissertation advisors) and myself published an article called “Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information” in PLoS One. Many people showed interest in the article, and I thought I’d write a “director’s commentary” post. Naturally, [...]...

Shema H, Bar-Ilan J, & Thelwall M. (2012) Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PloS one, 7(5). PMID: 22606239

Groth, P., & Gurney, T. (2010) Studying Scientific Discourse on the Web Using Bibliometrics: A Chemistry Blogging Case Study. Proceedings of the WEbSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line. info:/

Is the ability to distinguish 'speech sound contrasts' strictly human?

2012-05-21T06:33:19Z

For various reasons the song of songbirds are currently considered to be the closest animal analogue to language. This raises questions about to what extent particular perceptual and cognitive abilities that are considered to be closely linked to the production, perception and learning of language are present in songbirds. In an upcoming SMART-Talk at the University of Amsterdam on Friday 25 May 2012, Prof. dr Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) will address two of such abilities....

ten Cate, C., Verzijden, M., & Etman, E. (2006) Sexual Imprinting Can Induce Sexual Preferences for Exaggerated Parental Traits. Current Biology, 16(11), 1128-1132. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2006.03.068

Living Fossils and Creationism

2012-05-18T07:28:18Z

Some organisms show little change over a (very) long period of time. Often species that have undergone little morphological change are known as living fossils (for more about the possible definition, and a list of examples, check the Wikipedia page). … Continue reading →...

Garwood, R., Dunlop, J., Giribet, G., & Sutton, M. (2011) Anatomically modern Carboniferous harvestmen demonstrate early cladogenesis and stasis in Opiliones. Nature Communications, 444. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1458

Garwood, R. (2012) Reach out to defend evolution. Nature, 485(7398), 281-281. DOI: 10.1038/485281a

Zhu, M., Yu, X., Lu, J., Qiao, T., Zhao, W., & Jia, L. (2012) Earliest known coelacanth skull extends the range of anatomically modern coelacanths to the Early Devonian. Nature Communications, 772. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1764

Web analytics: Numbers speak louder than words

2012-05-18T04:54:19Z

According to the software which runs this site, this is the 200th post here at O’Really? To mark the occasion, here are some stats via WordPress with thoughts and general navel-gazing analysis paralysis [1] on web analytics. It all started just over six years ago at nodalpoint with help from Greg Tyrelle, the last four years have been WordPressed with help from Matt Mullenwegg. WordPress stats are unfortunately very primitive compared to the likes of Google Analytics and don’t give you access to the server log files either. WordPress probably flatters to deceive by exaggerating page views and encouraging users to post more content. Self-visits to the blog are excluded from these figures. Despite all the usual limitations of the murky underworld of web analytics, here are the stats, warts and all....

Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012) Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PLoS ONE, 7(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869

The Scatter of Medical Research and What to do About it.

2012-05-17T20:35:12Z

Paul Glasziou, GP and professor in Evidence Based Medicine, co-authored a new article in the BMJ [1]. Similar to another paper [2] I discussed before [3] this paper deals with the difficulty for clinicians of staying up-to-date with the literature. But where the previous paper [2,3] highlighted the mere increase in number of research articles over time, the current paper looks at the scatter of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews (SR’s) accross different journals cited in one year (2009) in PubMed....

Hoffmann, Tammy, Erueti, Chrissy, Thorning,Sarah, & Glasziou, Paul. (2012) The scatter of research: cross sectional comparison of randomised trials and systematic reviews across specialties. BMJ. info:/10.1136/bmj.e3223

Bastian, H., Glasziou, P., & Chalmers, I. (2010) Seventy-Five Trials and Eleven Systematic Reviews a Day: How Will We Ever Keep Up?. PLoS Medicine, 7(9). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000326

Genomics, Open Access, and China

2012-05-17T11:26:29Z

The associate editor of the journal Genomics has resigned, stating that he can no longer work for a system that puts profit over access to research. In an article in The Guardian, Winston Hide announced his resignation from “system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to [...]...

Miller RD, Phillips MS, Jo I, Donaldson MA, Studebaker JF, Addleman N, Alfisi SV, Ankener WM, Bhatti HA, Callahan CE.... (2005) High-density single-nucleotide polymorphism maps of the human genome. Genomics, 86(2), 117-26. PMID: 15961272