BIOL 210 Lecture 10: BIOL 210 Notes Lec 10
10/05/2017
Lecture 10
• Most important authors are last and first one
• Look at affiliations and acknowledgements
• Calculate citing halflife: ARTICLE SPECIFIC, gives you information about a field (i.e.
is it fast or slow)
o Order all the citations chronologically, divide number of citations in half, the
middle one-current year is the citing half life
o halflife=median
o DIFFERENT FROM CITED HALFLIFE→ JOURNAL SPECIFIC
• Possible biases in science
o Publication bias
▪ Turner article: selective publication of antidepressant trials and its
influence on apparent efficacy
• Hard to study: depression is something that waxes and wanes,
labile to placebo effects
• FDA decides what drugs can be marketed
• But goes into medical journal and becomes accessible via
prescription
• Often negative results or questionable ones are not published,
positive results are published
• Many people believe there should be publication of every clinical
trial, because then MDs would actually have all the information
o Confirmation bias
o Funding source bias
o Linguistic and country bias
o Institutional bias
o Authority bias
o Gender bias
▪ Wenneras and Wold: correlational study, nepotism and sexism in peer
review
• Demonstration of direct effect of bias against women in science
• Web of science: 459
• Google scholar: 1345
• This took place in sweden, which is much closer to equal than
many other places
• In the year they looked at the data, more men than women got
postdoc fellowships in medical field in Sweden
• They wanted to look at the process in which they did the selection
of fellows
• Petitioned the court to allow them to look into the swedish medical
research council
• Discovered grants are given on a points system: committee (old
white males) score applicants on a scale
o Transforms objective reality (persons project and CV) into
a subjective scale in our heads
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