Publishing

Cord conflicts at the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine

Cord-blood-autism, Cryo Cell

The journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine has a long track record of publishing great work. I also have a lot of respect for the editors there and I’ve published there myself. But a few recent events have sparked concerns including over possible undisclosed conflicts of interest in some papers there about cord blood for autism. …

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Text mining hottest 50 papers reveals hottest 2016 stem cell trends

Top-stem-cell-pub-word-cloud

What are the hottest stem cell trends in the field today? Depends who you ask, right? One impartial way to look at stem cell trends is through the lens of publication citations and the focuses of top stem cell papers. In that perhaps somewhat skewed, but interesting approach, the words used in the titles of the …

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The Lake Wobegon Effect in Science: Where Every Paper is Above Average

Lake-Wobegon

Garrison Keillor’s NPR show A Prairie Home Companion would sometimes report from a small fictional town call Lake Wobegon. Frankly, I found that show really boring, but I always chuckled when I heard this line: “Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and …

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How Do You View Post-Publication Peer Review? Take Our Polls

Post-publication (post-pub) peer review is one of the hottest topics in science today. Post-pub review means review of the scientific literature after papers come out. Post-pub review can take place on websites dedicated to it such as F1000 or PubPeer as well as on various blogs and even via comments on PubMed. In our first poll, please …

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Hottest Science Articles of 2014 in a Word Cloud

Top-science-articles-word-cloud

Altmetrics a relatively new way of ranking scientific articles based on metrics that include social media impact. The company Altmetric came out with their Top 100 articles for 2014, which is a fun list to check out.  A quicker way to get the gestalt of them collectively is from a word cloud (above) made from the title …

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Interview with Nature on their editorial process in wake of STAP

Nature

I asked Nature a half dozen questions about their editorial process. While they declined to answer any direct questions about the STAP cell paper situation, I thank them for answering these questions via a Nature spokesperson. The end result is an intriguing glimpse inside the editorial/review process at Nature. 1. Does Nature have any kind …

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What do you make of the human cloning paper mistakes? Take our poll

When a high-profile paper ends up having mistakes, it can be a big deal and cause a lot of problems for the authors and the field. Recently, a sexy Cell paper on ES cell cloning from the lab of Shoukhrat Mitalipov was published and soon a number of mistakes were identified. How does that impact …

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Proposal for Academic Physician Fellowship Training Program in Stem Cell-based Cellular and Regenerative Medicine

One of the problems in the stem cell field is that so few doctors have adequate training in stem cells (biology, transplantation, regulatory issues, GMP, ethics, patient rights, etc) and yet they are treating loads of patients in a for-profit setting. This not puts patients at great risk, but also the physicians themselves are putting …

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