My Own Private IshkabibbleSocial Media Trends in Medical History

Menopause International, 2007

Scientific and technical knowledge of the world grows through individual processes of speculation, making and documenting knowledge claims, the social processes of circulating and testing them, and the cyclic iteration of these processes to incrementally build on what is already known. Formal publication of claims in journals has been critical to circulating and critiquing new knowledge claims. Editorial peer review supposedly justifies the costs of the publishing activities surrounding it. Yet publishing costs, largely paid by libraries, have become unsustainable. Also, the costs discourage many from publishing and limit access of others to what is published. Today’s editorial peer review results from the exponential growth and specialization of the sciences in the second half of the 20th Century, but offers little genuine epistemic value. It may actually thwart the advancement of innovative and revolutionary research. Following Popperian evolutionary epistemology, we consider the social and epistemological dynamics of editorial peer review. We also note that that the ever increasing sophistication of digital technologies extending our cognitive capacities provides a pathway to very substantially reduce the cost of publishing whilst at the same time increasing the transparency and value of genuine peer review. Keywords: Organization Theory, Karl Popper, Evolutionary Epistemology, Internet Technology, Publishing

1997

2010

2014

As the world looks to the promise of biomedical science against the backdrop of fi scal austerity, policymakers are ever more prone to look to quantitative outcome measures to steward resources and assess programs. Such review is necessary but certainly not suffi cient given the complexity of the tasks ahead. We will need more than the quantitative language of outcome measures to talk about values and not numbers, patient care and not effi ciency, and the balance between access and quality. Although policymakers have enveloped themselves in jargon that purports to answer such questions, the language of the clinic and health policy is often ill equipped to deal with these themes.

Education & Self Development, 2019

Disease Models & Mechanisms, 2009

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2013

As the world looks to the promise of biomedical science against the backdrop of fi scal austerity, policymakers are ever more prone to look to quantitative outcome measures to steward resources and assess programs. Such review is necessary but certainly not suffi cient given the complexity of the tasks ahead. We will need more than the quantitative language of outcome measures to talk about values and not numbers, patient care and not effi ciency, and the balance between access and quality. Although policymakers have enveloped themselves in jargon that purports to answer such questions, the language of the clinic and health policy is often ill equipped to deal with these themes.

This study examines news interviews with scientific experts for the stories they occasion so as to present their research to media audiences. Interactions between scientists and hosts are examined in a corpus of interviews with scientific experts broadcasted live on Israeli television with the " small stories " approach that looks at storytelling as talk-in-interaction that is tailored to participants' agendas. Popularization is typically studied as a form of translation or diffusion of scientific knowledge adapted from academic sources for popular consumption. Popularization studies have examined how academic knowledge is disseminated and contextualized in different formats and genres and the role of professional or amateur mediators in making science public. While previous studies have looked into popularization narratives as packaged for popular consumption, this article looks at their occasioning in relation to the agendas of researchers and journalists. Experts are found to structure many accounts as tellings of ongoing events or hypothetical scenarios and reference their research, practices, or the entities they study. These stories are shown to support a positive presentation of the findings communicated while distancing the experts from exaggerated or future-oriented claims that their hosts are understood to be drawing.

Cultural Studies of Science Education

Scientific training often begins with learning content knowledge and techniques. As a student progresses, they are required to communicate the results of their experiments with their instructors in a manner that other scientists would understand. This style of communication is stressed throughout their entire training. But what happens when the need arises to communicate with interested nonscientific audiences? Scientific discourse has typically been considered what philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin termed an "authoritative discourse,"-a discourse that "binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally," whose hegemony is traditionally a priori, unquestioned. However, within the public realm, that authority is in crisis. There is an unsettling rise of anti-scientific counter-discourses such as the anti-vaccine movement, the growing Flat Earth movement, climate change denialism, and a host of other "movements" grounded in either pseudo-science or an outright dismissal of scientific authority. In response to this crisis, scientists and educators have called for more attention to improving scientific literacy among the general public. By examining the generic conventions of scientific discourse using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, we hope to point out some of the barriers causing the current crisis in scientific authority.

Science, Technology & Human …, 1990

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2010

The allocation of resources for research is increasingly based on so-called 'bibliometrics'. Scientists are now deemed to be successful on the sole condition that their work be abundantly cited. This world-wide trend appears to enjoy support not only by granting agencies (whose task is obviously simplified by extensive recourse to bibliometrics), but also by the scientists themselves (who seem to enjoy their status of celebrities). This trend appears to be fraught with dangers, particularly in the area of social sciences, where bibliometrics are less developed, and where monographs (which are not taken into account in citation indexes) are often more important than articles published in journals. We argue in favour of a return to the values of 'real science', in analogy to the much-promised return to a 'real economy'. While economists may strive towards a more objective evaluation of the prospects of a company, a market, or an industrial sector, we scientists can only base our appraisal on a responsible practice of peer review. Since we fear that decision-takers of granting agencies such as the FNRS, CTI, EPFL, ETHZ, ANR, CNRS, NIH, NSF, DOE, [1] etc. will be too busy to read our humble paper in Chimia, we appeal to scientists of all countries and disciplines to unite against the tyranny of bibliometrics.