On Sat, 07 Mar 2015 11:23:58 -0800, Miguel Roig wrote:
Mike, it would not surprise me if what you describe will soon
become a trend in science publishing representing a step
beyond the now familiar 'online ahead-of-print' approach.
I hope not but it certainly is one way to generate "interest"
in an article before it comes out.
Another strange thing publishers are doing is adding a
"published online" date for old articles. That is, an article
may have been published in a journal during the 1980s
but wasn't converted into an electronic format and available
on the publishers website until, say, 2006. This appears
to confuse some of the software that tracks publications
and their citations (e.g., scholar.google.com). I am
co-author on a paper that was originally published in
the late 1990s but made available online in the middle
of 2000s and it shows up as two publications in some
searches. This makes no sense to me.
Be that as it may, and given that some types of press
releases are known contain plenty of spin (and so do some
journal articles themselves!),
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001308,
one can only hope that the news article is in the APS
website is based on a review of the actual
soon-to-be-published-on-line-ahead-of-print paper and
not based on a press release or some other news media
summary of that work.
Thanks for the link to the above article. I guess that "celebrity
culture" is making greater inroads into scientific publications.
It's always been there but I think to a small degree. It seems
to be growing. One wonders which group of researchers will
be the equivalent of the Kardashians. ;-)
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
P.S. I hope your EPA presentation went well.
______________________________________
From: Mike Palij [m...@nyu.edu]
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2015 9:56 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Cc: Michael Palij
Subject: [tips] Are You Past Your Peak or Strange Publication Practices
Did you know that certain types of cognitive skills APPEAR
to peak at certain ages? For example, it once was believed
the knowledge of vocabulary peaked in the late 40s but newer
data suggests it peaks in the late 60s or early 70s -- though
it is unclear how this is affected by the rate of introduction
of neologisms (i.e., new words) into common usage as well
as reading patterns, media exposure, social interactions,
and a bunch of other variables.
I was vaguely aware of such things (I'm working on figuring
out whether there are critical period for certain cognitive
abilities or merely sensitive periods) but I became aware
of this because I read a news article from the MIT news office
on research conducted by two MIT'ers. You can read it here:
https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/brain-peaks-at-different-ages-0306
But, hey, the research described is supposed to be published
in the Association for Psychological Sciences' (APS) journal
"Psychological Science" and I thought "Hey, I'm a member of
APS, why don't I go over to the APS website and get a copy
of the article!?!" So I go over to the APS website, go to the
section for Psychological Science and do a search for one of
the authors (Joshua Hartshorne). And this is what I found:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/cognitive-skills-peak-at-different-ages-across-adulthood.html
This is basically a news article based on the MIT news article
(there's a link at the bottom of the page that connects to the
MIT page for additional info). A sidebar box to the APS article
says:
For a copy of the research article and access to other Psychological
Science research findings, please contact:
And I got to wondering: wait a minute, I'm already on the APS
website, the articles imply that the research is published in
Psychological Science, so where is it? If it isn't available to
APS member yet, why was it made available to the media?
If you search for "Joshua Hartshorne" and "Laura Gemine" in
news.google.com you'll find a growing number of mass media
websites reporting on this research (they all could be relying
on the MIT press release instead of the original article).
This raises the question of why one would want to release research
to the popular media before the official release of the research
article? How is one to evaluate how accurate the reporting is in
the popular media account if one does not have the original
research article? Is this shameless self-promotion or the
well intentioned desire to make readily available important
research results? But if it is the latter, why isn't a pre-publication
version of the article made available (I can't find any link to it
on either the MIT or APS sites; I did not bother to go to Hartshorne's
website to see if it is there -- it also does not seem to show up
on scholar.google.com).
So, what is going on?
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