Search

At seven focus groups held across the United States, natural resource professionals were asked how they found the science needed to do their jobs. Although searching for science online was mentioned in all groups and by all demographics, how search results were used differed. Early-career professionals used them to find scientific articles to read. Mid- to late-career professionals used them to identify author(s) to contact to discuss results. Open access articles were highly preferred. Viewing webinars and videos was also mentioned frequently. Webinars are falling out of favor while short videos are becoming more popular. Attending scientific meetings remains a preferred approach, but professionals later in their career like them for different reasons than early-career professionals. The two career cohorts also differ in why they like electronic newsletters. Rapid adoption of new technologies to disseminate science has already impacted professionals' behavior, yet it is not clear that researchers have kept up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, scientific communications are recorded and made available online. While researchers carefully draft the words they use, the quality of the recording is at the mercy of technical staff. Does it make a difference? We presented identical conference talks (Experiment 1) and radio interviews from NPR’s Science Friday (Experiment 2) in high or low audio quality and asked people to evaluate the researcher and the research they presented. Despite identical content, people evaluated the research and researcher less favorably when the audio quality was low, suggesting that audio quality can influence impressions of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the collaboration of middle school science teachers across the U.S. to develop MySciLife, a website aimed at engaging and motivating science students. Topics covered include modules available in the website, how students receive feedback from their classmates and teacher on the MySciLife platform and security and safety features of the website for students using the site.

This study uses discourse analysis to explore online science communication experiences from the perspectives of 43 female opinion leaders. Women described their experiences in terms of their lifelong love for science and their ever-growing interest in communication. For them, a career in science communication is a conscious career choice rather than an “alternative” career path. Communicators performed various functions depending on the sensitivity of their topics and whether their communications are self-focused or audience-focused. Accordingly, four types of science communicators emerged from the data: Expressive/Escapist, Advocate/Normalizer, Edutainer, and Performer/Sharer. This diversity challenges societal stereotypes that reduce female experiences in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonscience majors often rely on general internet searches to locate science information. This practice can lead to misconceptions because the returned search information can be unreliable. We used the social media site Twitter to address this problem in our general education course, BSCI 421 Diseases of the 21st Century. For this intervention, the course instructor modeled the use of reputable science sources (e.g., The Scientist, CDC.gov) by following these sources on Twitter and using these sources in her own tweets to the class. Pretest results asking students how they found credible science information demonstrated that students relied on general Google searches (84%), but after the Twitter intervention, this reliance decreased (40%; p < .01) in favor of using reputable science sources. Students use of CDC.gov increased significantly from 36% to 96% (p < .01) and use of science periodicals from 12% to 52% (p < .01). Nearly all students (96%) stated that they would continue to use these same reliable sources after completing the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several websites including World Professional Association for Transgender Health located at http://www.wpath.org/, Bad Science at www.badscience.net, and Ethics and Global Politics at http://www.ethicsandglobalpolitics.net/.

The contribution of microbiology to the scientific advances of modern experimental biology has very often made the difference. Despite this, its role as an independent discipline has slowly started to fade away. This situation has been worsening due to (i) a marginal role of microbiology in academic curricula and (ii) a low or misplaced interest by the public at large towards this field of study. In order to counter this phenomenon, microbiology researchers and passionate scientists have made several efforts to engage and inform the broad public and academic policymakers about the importance of microbiology as an independent discipline. One of the approaches used in this direction is to support the teaching of microbiology in schools. BiOutils, a science communication platform based within a microbiology lab, has been committed to this goal since its creation in 2007. In this article, we describe how the platform is able to work in synergy with school teachers, providing engaging activities that can be performed in schools' classrooms. Our aim is to provide a perspective on how every microbiology lab with little costs and efforts can support the teaching of a discipline that will remain independent thanks to the fascination that they will be able to transmit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several educational web sites including the Mathigon website (http://mathigon.org), Beyond Penguins and Polar Beers from the Ohio State University and the National Gallery of Art (http://www.nga.gov).

The article analyzes a Web of Science data between 1900 and 2012 focusing on the growth and increasing multidisciplinarity of physics. Topics discussed are the influence of access to resources, the increasing number of authors and productivity to the growth of physics literature, the impact of physics papers based on the number of citations each paper acquired within 10 years of its publication, and the subfields of physics using the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS).

The article reviews the web site Dimensions, located at www.digital-science.com/products/dimensions/, from Digital Science.

We analyse why the open access movement split into two paths, gold and green, and try to explain the reasons behind the choices between them that were made in the UK and USA. The analysis shows that lobbying in favor of the gold path had its origins in the publication policies of The New England journal of medicine: its director, Franz J. Ingelfinger, introduced the publication rule of not accepting manuscripts that previously had been circulating as pre-prints, known as the "Ingelfinger rule". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed and assessed a multiauthor science blog on the topic of nanotechnology and sustainability as a tool to improve the written communication and public engagement skills of graduate students. Focus group studies revealed that after participation in the blog, student authors felt more confident and capable of communicating technical topics to general audiences. Students' research mentors viewed this as an important component of their students' education, as indicated by survey data. Important design aspects of this effort include participation of an editor as well as having flexible content and target-audience guidelines. We have explicitly outlined aspects of the effort we see as critical in order to enable others to replicate this model in related settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed a discrete sample of the most frequent contributors to the journal El professional information (EPI) for the period 2009-2013. We studied the presence of these authors in social networks and the impact of their EPI publications indexed in Web of Science using different altmetrics. The results showed that 77% had a public profile on Google Scholar Profiles and 70% had an account on both LinkedIn and Mendeley. This platform has served as the tool with higher statistics and obtained the highest correlation with the number of citations in Web of Science (0.516). Other networks were Twitter (55%) and Slideshare (47%); despite its lower presence in the sample, Slideshare offers users higher visibility, receiving the highest number of user hits. We also present detailed altmetrics for 47 EPI authors, ending with a reflection on the difficulty of analysing altmetrics at author level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the development, activities and legacy of the workgroup for the Information Retrieval in Remote Databases by means of Terminal project, which met in CAICYT (Centro Argentino de Información Científica y Tecnológica) between 1981 and 1987. It addresses issues such as the professional development of its members, changes in the membership, user training activities, ways of conducting searches, economic problems, strengths and limitations of the service. Finally, some aspects of the foregoing that may be useful at present are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make an assessment of the global status of research in nuclear science and technology (NST) publications. Design/methodology/approach – The present bibliometric study is based on bibliographic data that were retrieved from the Web of Science during 2001-2010. In all, 85,198 records published by the 35 journals under the category of NST in the database of Journal Citation Reports were assessed in terms of many aspects. A further assessment has been made using advanced bibliometric indicators such as field citation scores and collaboration network analysis using the NetDraw software. Findings – Unlike research-prolific countries, the annual growth rates of publications for most developing countries have experienced an evident leap. The highest scientific impact and productivity among the publications belonged to the International Journal of Radiation Biology (10.46). A limited group of prolific authors produced a considerable portion of the publications, among whom, Japanese authors had the most contributions. The USA is in the centre of the international collaborative network illustration and is also the main partner of most of the research-prolific countries. Nuclear physics has the greatest field normalised measured impact ratios (CPP/FCSm = 4.2) among the publications, which signifies its inherent impact on NST research. In general, like the inter-institutional collaborative publications, the internationally collaborative publications are more frequently cited and therefore have a higher scientific impact. Originality/value – The paper could aid to show collaborative research in the NST journals and assess the research performance of the NST. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how citizens select science information online based on their preexisting issue attitudes. Voluntary national samples browsed through an online news magazine featuring divergent viewpoints about four controversial science topics (stem cell, evolution, genetically modified foods, and global warming). Their online activities, including article selection and the length of exposure, were unobtrusively measured by behavior tracking software. Participants tended to choose science information that challenged rather than supported their views concerning stem cell and genetically modified foods. However, those who perceived that they had sufficient science knowledge and were religious exhibited confirmation-bias, preferring congruent to incongruent information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study employs a content analysis approach to analyze the Websites of four major science centers in Taiwan. The aim is to determine if their Websites meet the criteria of 'Evaluating Science WWW Resources' established by North Carolina State University. The criteria consist of five categories and 29 items. The five categories are: Science Content Issues, Navigation, Website Design, Performance, and Multimedia Issues. The results of this study indicate that the Websites of the four science centers mostly conformed to the criteria, and their e-resources are sufficient for the general public. However, several recommendations are proposed based from the results. In Science Content Issues, a description about the responsible authors including their credentials, emails, and biographical information should be added so that the content can be validated by scientists or professional educators. In Multimedia Issues, Web 2.0 social networks may be added to allow users to share information in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Metric Information Studies (EMI) provide essential tools for understanding the behavior of scientific domains, given the possibility of evaluation through methodologies and indicators that can identify trends and implement improvements. Theoretical and bibliometric approach to the field of communication is presented, from the characterization and evaluation of the scientific community practices through bibliometric indicators. Indicators of scientific production and productivity of authors, institutions, countries and keywords, citation indicators from the network of cited documents and relational indicators in the co-occurrence descriptors and authors are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific productivity is one of the engines of development in the 21st century. The most common way of its measurement is through publication in peer-review articles. Current research indicates that there is a strong connection between country's development and its share in the world publication of scientific articles. Transition countries are still catching-up with the most developed countries in terms of scientific productivity, which is especially evident in Western Balkan countries. As one of the rare attempts to assess obstacles to scientific productivity in transition countries, this study investigates different factors and their effects to the scientific productivity. The obstacles are the results of the historical reasons, inadequate systems for advancement in the scientific community, and problems with the development and/or implementation of strategies for scientific development of the particular country. In addition, without efficient measurement of scientific productivity, it is hard to analyse its behaviour. Papers written by authors from transition countries are often published in local journals that are covered insufficiently by the Web of Science. Therefore, up-to-date systems for tracking scientific publications in transition countries are of the highest importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the evolution of Spanish communication research published as scientific articles between 1980 and 2010. It quantifies the volume of this production with two different samples: the first sample includes national journals and offers original and unprecedented data; the second one includes international journals, defined as those indexed by the Web of Science. As a whole, more than 6,000 articles were analysed. Additionally, the collaboration patterns in authorship and internationality were also studied. On the one hand, collaboration was measured through indicators of multiple authorship and the evolution of co-authorship indexes. On the other hand, internationality was measured through the share of Spanish authors in international journals, the weight of international collaborations and the language used in national journals. Data obtained illustrate a growth and maturity process of communication as a scientific discipline: at the end of the period analysed, a tension between growing collaboration and internationalization and traditional publication patterns was found. Through the period studied, the birth of new faculties with communication studies and the growing number of journals have feed the own growth of the number of articles. However, other elements such as scientific assessment have also played a role in the internationalization of authors. As a whole, this article offers a first image of the evolution of communication as an academic discipline in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The open-access (OA) journals among the 1003 journals sponsored by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) were identified. Information about the following aspects of the journals were collected and analysed: when each journal was established, its publication cycle, its system model, its region, its discipline, the time between an issue's publication and the posting of the online version, the number of issues that have been made OA, and length of time that it has had an OA policy. On the basis of these results, problems associated with OA journals sponsored by CAST were found and relevant approaches that can promote OA publication in China were recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study carried out to evaluate the contribution of Turkey to the scientific repertory related to the field of ovarian cancer. The researchers involved in the study performed retrospective analysis of ovarian cancer published in research papers by using the Web of Science software. The study revealed that Turkish authors had published 400 papers in the journal "Science Citation Index" and the researchers also observed improvement in scientific activities of Turkey.

The article reviews the web site Science Kids, available at www.sciencekids.co.nz.

This article examines the merits of WebQuests in facilitating students’ in-depth understanding of science concepts using the four principles of learning gathered from the National Research Council reports How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999) and the How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom (2005) as an analytic framework. Modifications needed to make a well-constructed WebQuests for science teaching aligned to the four principles include (1) integrating student science interests and cultural and social backgrounds to curricular goals and then using this as means to design WebQuests, (2) providing students opportunities to examine science-related Internet websites to discriminate credible and false information and then giving them the opportunity to include and use the websites for the task step in WebQuests, and (3) providing cognitive tools and guidance within the process step so that students are engaged in argumentation and negotiation akin to a community of scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Communication processes that unfold in web environments have been increasingly naturalized in everyday life enabling new possibilities of circulation, production and appropriation of scientific contents. In this context of sociotechnological conditions that facilitate the construction of scenarios for dialogue between the scientific world and society, science and technology institutions are using web communication devices with various objectives and strategies. This paper explores the immersion of scientific institutions in the web and the communication uses of its institutional websites, which can be conceived as platforms for contents distribution, and in turn, can become scenarios of relatively horizontal communication exchanges. We present a reflective story on the experience of production for the new website of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology of Argentina (INTA), including a description of the processes of content management, the competences and roles of the institutional actors involved, and the actions performed in each instance. Finally, based on the definition of criteria and categories for observing an institutional website, we make an analytic review of the INTA website in order to identify their strengths and propose actions that can help it become a genuine media for social communication and collective construction of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital repositories have been with us for more than a decade, and despite the considerable media and conference attention they engender, we know very little about their use by academics. This paper sets out to address this by reporting on how well they are used, what they are used for, what researchers' think of them, and where they thought they were going. Nearly 1,700 scientific researchers, mostly physical scientists, responded to an international survey of digital repositories, making it the largest survey of its kind. High deposit rates were found and mandates appear to be working, especially with younger researchers. Repositories have made significant inroads in terms of impact and use despite, in the case of institutional repositories, the very limited resources deployed. Subject repositories, like arXiv and PubMed Central, have certainly come of age but institutional repositories probably have not come of age yet although there are drivers in place which, in theory anyway, are moving them towards early adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the article by Yoav Bar-Anan and Brian A. Nosek on scientific utopia. They say that the authors provide a vision for more radical advances to science dissemination through the Internet. They suggest some other ways to capitalize on the Internet for the improvement of many faces of the scientific process.

The article reviews several web sites including Get Set, located at getset.london2012.com from official London 2012 education programme, Get in the Zone, located at www.getinthezone.org.uk from Wellcome Trust and scientistsinsport.com, located at www.scientistsinsport.com. from GlaxoSmithKline and King's College London.

Due to a growing trend of exploring scientific knowledge on the Web, a number of studies have been conducted to highlight examination of students' online searching strategies. The investigation of online searching generally employs methods including a survey, interview, screen-capturing, or transactional logs. The present study firstly intended to utilize a survey, the Online Information Searching Strategies Inventory (OISSI), to examine users' searching strategies in terms of control, orientation, trial and error, problem solving, purposeful thinking, selecting main ideas, and evaluation, which is defined as implicit strategies. Second, this study conducted screen-capturing to investigate the students' searching behaviors regarding the number of keywords, the quantity and depth of Web page exploration, and time attributes, which is defined as explicit strategies. Ultimately, this study explored the role that these two types of strategies played in predicting the students' online science information searching outcomes. A total of 103 Grade 10 students were recruited from a high school in northern Taiwan. Through Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses, the results showed that the students' explicit strategies, particularly the time attributes proposed in the present study, were more successful than their implicit strategies in predicting their outcomes of searching science information. The participants who spent more time on detailed reading (explicit strategies) and had better skills of evaluating Web information (implicit strategies) tended to have superior searching performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beta website of Science-Forums.net was developed by Information International Associates, Inc. (IIa) through the Department of Energy (DOE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. By leveraging scientist/researcher information in databases managed by DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), Science-Forums.net will allow scientists to easily collaborate on a scientific topic of interest. In addition to potentially yielding commercial applications, the functionality of Science-Forums.net is well suited to OSTI's family of scientific and technical information (STI) websites for research and development. The objective of the SBIR--"Interactive Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Scientific Communication in the Digital Library Environment"--was to research and identify web-based tools and other concepts that will foster online interaction and collaboration among scientists and researchers. These tools can facilitate scientific discovery and innovation. Phase I methods included (1) survey of available technologies, (2) analysis and prioritization of technologies, (3) design and planning of a foundational tool for online interaction, (4) development and implementation of approaches to obtain feedback from researchers and scientists, (5) research into privacy and communications examples and guidelines to address government privacy and survey requirements, and (6) investigation into scientists' use and interest in social media tools for research and communication. Phase II has focused on (1) development of the tool into a beta-ready site for feedback from a test group of previously identified, interested researchers, (2) refinement of the privacy policy and user terms and conditions documents, and (3) further research of bibliographic/metadata controls to create and exchange documents and other content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes nuclear crisis research publication in globally measured from Histcite software and other tools. The results show that the growth of Global literature in nuclear crisis deposition and make the quantitative assessment of the research in terms of year-wise research output, geographical distribution of research output, nature of collaboration, characteristics of highly productive institution and the channel of communication used by the scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several websites related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) including the website of technology section of the Discovery Channel located at www.yourdiscovery.com/technology/index.shtml, the website of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) located at www.imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/science.html, and www.haydenplanetarium.org.

The article discusses a progamme of scanning workshops held in French-speaking African countries to digitise documents of participating institutions, established by the Research Institute for Development (IRD) in Bondy, France, through the System for Scientific and Technical Information (SIST) project of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (MAEE). It also comments on the installation of the Bibliothèques électroniques en partenariat (BEEP) Internet server by the IRD to facilitate African institutions' sharing of scientific information. Topics include metadata, value-added services, and the use of Greenstone software.

Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (WoS) is undoubtedly a great tool for scientiometrics purposes. It allows one to retrieve and compute different measures such as the total number of papers that satisfy a particular condition; however, it also is well known that this tool imposes several different restrictions that make obtaining certain results difficult. One of those constraints is that the tool does not offer the total count of documents in a dataset if it is larger than 100,000 items. In this article, we propose and analyze different approaches that involve partitioning the search space (using the Source field) to retrieve item counts for very large datasets from the WoS. The proposed techniques improve previous approaches: They do not need any extra information about the retrieved dataset (thus allowing completely automatic procedures to retrieve the results), they are designed to avoid many of the restrictions imposed by the WoS, and they can be easily applied to almost any query. Finally, a description of WoS Query Partitioner, a freely available and online interactive tool that implements those techniques, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the Executive Committee meeting of the Tennessee Academy of Science held on November 19, 2015. Topics discussed include the meeting attendees, which include President-elect Fred Matthews, Treasurer Steve Murphree and Secretary Teresa Fulcher, the presentation of Murphree about the academy's income and expenses from July 1, 2014 to November 19, 2015, and the report by Director Gilbert Pitts on the increase in usage of the academy's website.

The article discusses the highlights of the Executive Committee meeting of the Tennessee Academy of Science held on April 17, 2015. Topics discussed include the meeting attendees, which include President-elect Fred Matthews, Treasurer Steve Murphree and Member-at-Large Tony Johnston, the presentation of Murphree about the academy's income and expenses, and the announcement by Director Gilbert Pitts that information on the academy's website has been updated.

The article presents a lesson that introduces size and scale by having the students cut a strip of paper for several times to find out how many cuts it would take to reach the size of a quark. It cites information background about the quark particles. It features several charts that illustrates various student worksheets, and sample objects whose sizes represent the cut sizes. It also introduces online supporting material that can aid students in learning the concepts of quarks. Moreover, it offers information about the Quarked! website at www.quarked.org which explores concepts in the nature of matter.

The article reviews the web site Today's Science for Tomorrow's Scientists.

The article presents reviews of Web sites that offer thesauri related to experimental science and to information and communication technologies, including the Web site of the Instituto de Estudios Documentales Sobre Ciencia y Tecnología (IEDCYT), which offers the Tesauro SPINES (Sistema de Intercambio de Información sobre Políticas Científicas) at http://thes.cindoc.csic.es/index_SPIN_esp.html; the Web site of the National Research Council Canada, which offers the Canadian Thesaurus of Construction Science and Technology at http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/thesaurus/toc-thesaurus.html; and the Web site of the Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Publicas (CEDEX), which offers the Tesauro de Ingeniería Hidráulica at http://hispagua.cedex.es/documentacion/tesauro/Tes_hidro/tesauro.php?localizacion=Tesauro%20Ingenier%EDa%20Civil.

The article discusses the decline of science journalism and science blogging as its possible replacement. An example is given of how researcher John Timmer began his career writing for the Internet site Ars Technica, eventually becoming the site's science editor, and how traditional journalists are searching sites similar to Ars Technica for story ideas. Also discussed is the history of science journalism from the beginning of its boom in the 1980s and 1990s to its gradual decline in U.S. newspapers, such as “The Boston Globe's" discontinuance of its science section, the outreach of scientists on the Internet as journalists become increasingly dependent on scientific public relations, and criticism regarding science blogs and their scientific accuracy.