Toward collaborator selection and determination of data ownership and publication authorship in research collaborations

This study examined factors that might affect researchers' willingness to collaborate with a specific researcher and the priorities given to those factors. In addition, it investigated how researchers determined the ownership of collaborative project data and how they determined the order of authorship on collaborative publications in condensed matter physics. In general, researchers rated their intrinsic motivations the highest, such as the quality of ideas a potential collaborator might have and their satisfaction with a past collaboration, followed by their extrinsic motivations, such as the complementary knowledge, skills, or resources the collaborator could provide. In addition, researchers who had a greater number of collaborative projects and researchers who had served as a project PI or co-PI valued the deep-level, personality-related characteristics of a collaborator higher than did those who had not. Younger researchers were more risk averse and more concerned with a collaborator's reputation and the possible cost of a collaboration decision. Additionally, younger researchers indicated more often than older researchers that they did not know whether their project teams followed any rules or norms or engaged in negotiation to determine the order of authorship on collaborative publications.     

Why There's No Cause to Randomize

The evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is widelyregarded as supplying the ‘gold standard’ in medicine—wemay sometimes have to settle for other forms of evidence, butthis is always epistemically second-best. But how well justifiedis the epistemic claim about the superiority of RCTs? This paperadds to my earlier (predominantly negative) analyses of theclaims produced in favour of the idea that randomization playsa uniquely privileged epistemic role, by closely inspectingthree related arguments from leading contributors to the burgeoningfield of probabilistic causality—Papineau, Cartwrightand Pearl. It concludes that none of these further argumentssupplies any practical reason for thinking of randomizationas having unique epistemic power.

1 Introduction

2 Why theissue is of great practical importance—the ECMOcase

3Papineau on the ‘virtues of randomization’

4 Cartwrighton causality and the ‘ideal’ randomizedexperiment

5 Pearl on randomization, nets and causes

6 Conclusion

     

Two Cheers for Naturalised Philosophy of Science or: Why Naturalised Philosophy of Science is Not the Cat's Whiskers

Science &; Education -     

Validating Peer Review in Criminal Justice Evaluation Research: Evidence from CrimeSolutions.gov

Peer review is the bedrock of the scientific enterprise, yet it enjoys scant validation. The federal government’s CrimeSolutions.gov initiative provides a unique opportunity to address this limitation. As part of the initiative, trained experts evaluate criminal justice evaluation research on several of the same criteria editors use to make publication decisions. Data from a sample of articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index journals were obtained from the CrimeSolutions.gov database, then used to model publication quality, operationalized as the product of the journal’s five-year impact factor and article citations per year (an article-level measure). The model explained only five percent of the variation in publication quality, raising several questions about the validity of peer review in criminal justice evaluation research.     

Detecting health fraud in the field of learning disabilities

Quackery is currently a widespread problem that pervades all aspects of healthcare, including the treatment of learning disorders. A discussion of the nature of modern health fraud in special education is presented. The psychopathology of health fraud, the standards by which pseudoscience and health quackery are defined, and the complexities of learning disorders are discussed. A Therapy Rating Scale to determine if an alternative therapy is reasonable is presented. Several popular therapies are used as examples.     

Building a reflective community: development through collaboration between a higher education institution and one school over 10 years[1]

This article reports university/school partnership in research and development over a decade of unprecedented change in England. The programme of work evolved through three distinct phases in response to formative evaluations of each stage and changing circumstances. This could be conceived as action research on three levels: the classroom, the school and the partnership. The success of the collaboration is evaluated by reference to Anderson & Herr's (1999) five validity criteria for practitioner research: outcome validity, process validity, democratic validity, catalytic validity and dialogic validity     

Children's knowledge of the earth's shape and its gravitational field

Abstract

One hundred and eight children aged between seven and 11 took part in a cross‐sectional study of the development of their concepts of the Earth and the direction of its gravitational field. A new form of ‘Earth drawing classification’ (EDC) was found to be drawn by 36% of the sample, together with the five classifications established in earlier work. This new EDC is conceptually contradictory and appears to be a critical development stage. It is the result of the pupils’ attempts to reconcile scientific information with their own common‐sense knowledge base. The educational implications of this are discussed. The relationship between the developmental sequence of their Earth drawings and the quality of their human figure drawing was also investigated. It was established that restricted drawing ability does not explain their non‐scientific early EDCs.