Forensic DNA evidence often contains mixtures of multiple contributors, or is present in low template amounts. The resulting data signals may appear to be relatively...

To gauge the current commitment to scientific research in the United States of America (US), we compared federal research funding (FRF) with the US gross domestic product (GDP)...

Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field....

Background Although peer review is widely considered to be the most credible way of selecting manuscripts and improving the quality of accepted papers in scientific journals,...

Background: Many different simulation frameworks, in different topics, need to treat realistic datasets to initialize and calibrate the system. A precise reproduction of initial...

Background The rise of electronic publishing [1], preprint archives, blogs, and wikis is raising concerns among publishers, editors, and scientists about the present day...

We hypothesized that willingness to financially support conservation depends on one's experience with nature. In order to test this hypothesis, we used a novel time-lagged...

The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences with physical sciences at the top, social sciences at the bottom, and biological sciences in-between is nearly 200 years old. This...

Background Ratings in journal peer review can be affected by sources of bias. The bias variable investigated here was the information on whether authors had suggested a...

[Background] In contrast to Newton's well-known aphorism that he had been able “to see further only by standing on the shoulders of giants,” one attributes to the Spanish...

Background This paper presents the first meta-analysis for the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of journal peer reviews. IRR is defined as the extent to which two or more...

Prediction markets are powerful forecasting tools. They have the potential to aggregate private information, to generate and disseminate a consensus among the market...

Background How can we compute a segregation or diversity index from a three-way or multi-way contingency table, where each variable can take on an arbitrary finite number of...

Does peer review fulfill its declared objective of identifying the best science and the best scientists? In order to answer this question we analyzed the Long-Term Fellowship...

With urban population increasing dramatically worldwide, cities are playing an increasingly critical role in human societies and the sustainability of the planet. An obstacle to...

Medical devices encompass nearly every medical product that does not achieve its intended purpose through chemical action, from the simple (tongue blades) to the complex (MRI...

Background High predictive validity – that is, a strong association between the outcome of peer review (usually, reviewers' ratings) and the scientific quality of a manuscript...

Background The h-index has already been used by major citation databases to evaluate the academic performance of individual scientists. Although effective and simple, the...

We extracted and processed abstract data from the SFN annual meeting abstracts during the period 2001-2006, using techniques and software from natural language processing,...