Science Policy and Evaluation

Header Image: Polar bear leaping from iceberg. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. (CC BY 4.0)

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Interactive data visualisations, created via d3.js, which facilitate an exploration of disease burden

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There is a powerful African- born diaspora in North America and its members have much to offer their home continent. How should this relationship be crafted?

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Africa is a developing continent but there's ample opportunity for careers in science that can contribute to science advancement as well as uplifting the socio-economic status of the continent.

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Thomson Reuters' 2010 report on scientific output of Africa as indexed by WoS. Only goes as far as publication counts and collaboration clusters.

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Breakdown of deaths in Africa as of 2012, summarised in an infographic.

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In the future, studies might focus more specifically on the kind of research published in SSA, such as clinical versus epidemiological; the nature of the readership of SSA publications; and the ways priorities are set by SSA journal editorial boards. Finally Sub-Saharan African universities and research institutions might contemplate altering their practice of giving academic credit exclusively for publications in high-profile international journals and might consider giving equal weight to publishing in national journals that have been indexed in international, credible databases such as MEDLINE.

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Great summary of state of scientific research in Africa, with plenty of references.

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However, from a broader perspective, major gaps remain. In the absence of national funding for research, it is impossible to develop postdoctoral research tracks and sustainable research groups. I call upon African countries to wake up and realize the value of investing in research and development.

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Researchers are often cast as hapless victims in the scholarly communication system. Cameron Neylon argues their largely rational actions to demonstrate productivity are a choice and are also all part of the game they helped to create. Everyone is playing the game, publishers, researchers and funders, but that doesn’t mean that all the players have the same freedom to change it. It is only the research community itself that can change the rules. If institutional leaders chose to change the game, the world would shift tomorrow.

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Creators of computer programs that underpin experiments don’t always get their due — so the website Depsy is trying to track the impact of research code.

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VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on co-citation, bibliographic coupling, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature. - See more at: http://ift.tt/1nqxzf6

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Blog post summarising findings of recently published paper on PhD career tracking.

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We are excited to announce the launch of the Europe PMC author profile pages! Based on your ORCID record, they provide a graphical overview of your publications in Europe PMC and your citation rate over time.