"New data from old poop"

Don't you want to learn about changes to our microbiome over time, by examining paleofeces?  You do.  See the commentary by Andrew Curry from earlier this year.

Scientist biography series

Somewhat related to the theme of recent posts (here and here), let's look at a couple of scientific biography series from the two gigantic British academic presses, Cambridge and Oxford.  

Cambridge University Press has a Cambridge Science Biographies series.  At the time of writing, there are ten volumes listed in print on the website.  These are serious biographies running into the hundreds of pages.  There are three devoted to physicists:  Galileo, Newton, and Ampere.  There are three for chemists:  Lavoisier, Humphry Davy, and Justus von Liebig.  There are two for biologists:  Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.  Rounding out the set are Henry More and Mary Somerville.  I've always understood that Somerville was a mathematician, but the table of contents indicated she worked in physical and Earth sciences as well.  Henry More was a name unfamiliar to me.  Apparently he is primarily viewed as a philosopher, but he pursued experimental science as well, and was an influence on Newton.  Since these are substantial biographies, I would imagine no attempt is made to cover all the major figures in science.  Otherwise the choice of Ampere over Einstein would be most curious!

Oxford Portraits in Science are shorter biographies intended for young adult readers.  At the time of writing I see 17 volumes in print.  However, I own copies of the volumes on Faraday and Einstein, and they list additional volumes that may be out of print.  I will  include them here and group them collectively as follows:

Biologists & physiologists:  Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, William Harvey, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Crick & Watson (a single volume covering both).

Chemists: Marie Curie, Linus Pauling.

Physicists & astronomers:  Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Ben Franklin, Faraday, Joseph Henry, Curie, Rutherford, Fermi, Einstein

Inventors and technologists:  Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Babbage, Thomas A. Edison.

Behavioral scientists:  Pavlov, Freud.

Anthropologists:  Margaret Mead.

Paleontologists:  Othniel Charles March & Edward Drinker Cope (a single volume covering both).

In the above accounting, I've included the Curie volume under both physics and chemistry; it could be argued that Rutherford should also be so counted.

Here, we might have a greater expectation than with the Cambridge Science Biographies, that the most important, or at least most interesting, scientists be included.  However, none of the chemists in the Cambridge series appear in the Oxford series.  The selection of biologists/physiologists is an excellent one, but could certainly be expanded further.  Again I will focus mainly on the physicists/astronomers.   The Oxford series has an excellent list - all of them are deserving.  As I've stated before, volumes on Tesla and Feynman would probably sell as well, if only they existed.  The inclusion of Franklin and Henry, American contributors to electromagnetic science, raises the question of why non-Americans in this field have not been included (such as Ampere, Oersted, and above all Maxwell).  Again it seems to me that Niels Bohr might deserve a volume.  

Finally, as a dessert for this discussion, what about Princeton University Press's "The Quotable..." series?  These are books of quotations by various authors.  Three scientists are included:  Darwin, Einstein, and Feynman.  Maybe you might consider Jung as a behavioral scientist.  Others in the series include Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Soren Kierkegaard.  I suppose this is the most subjective of all, since the person in question has to be very "quotable"!

Peer Review

Last week in the online magazine Physics, psychologist Simine Vizire published a call for peer review reform.  Hers is not the first, nor will it be the last.  My personal experience with peer review is mixed and I would support calls for reform.  In discussions with other scientists, I have heard appalling examples of abuse, such as the stealing of authors' work and credit by anonymous reviewers.

All the manuscripts I have submitted for peer review have benefitted from the process.  The published manuscripts are usually improved as a result of the vetting, and in most cases I prefer the published version over the initially submitted draft.  However, in two cases the published version is also shorter or more condensed than I would have preferred, and 19 and 12 years later, respectively, I'm still sore about that.  In one case, the peer review process extended for over a year, in my opinion needlessly, due to a single obstinate reviewer who added absolutely no value to the process.  In another case I eventually published a manuscript in unrefereed form (in a conference proceedings) because the journal rejected it for being "too simple".  (The talk corresponding to that paper won an award at the conference where I presented it!)  I have since pulled the same trick for a second paper, also rejected, though it gets lots of reads where I posted it (academia.edu).  I strongly believe that the taste of referees and editors does not necessarily correspond with that of readers.

As a referee, I also feel that I strongly improved every manuscript I have refereed.  However, I have seen other published research that should have been better vetted.  I have taken to posting critiques of such papers on PubPeer, a website for open, post-publication "peer review".  In my view, tools like PubPeer should be better integrated into the research culture.  Upon reading a paper that you think you may want to use, one of your first instincts should be to look it up in PubPeer.  And scientists should not hesitate to post their criticisms or discussion of published work on PubPeer.

Vazire makes some pertinent points.  We don't understand the performance of peer review because there is essentially no empirical research done on this (with the exception, she says, of medical journals) - a hypocrisy considering scientists pride themselves on being "evidence based".  She calls for giving peer review researchers access to now-confidential materials, the raw material of peer review, so as to better study the process.  (It would be a brave editor who agrees to such sharing!)

Other issues she complains about (status bias and bias due to the gender, institution, or ethnicity of authors) could be addressed by double blind peer review, a process I have participated in myself.  She calls for more diversity in recruiting referees, though the flip side of this is placing additional (unpaid) labor burden on minorities, who already bear an additional burden at their institutions in many cases.  I agree with her that mechanisms to hold editors accountable for their own abuses are nowhere near sufficient.  

I support Vazire's recommendation of disclosure of referee reports and decision letters; but such documents are taken out of context without the corresponding draft versions of manuscripts.  Thus the use of preprint servers and tools like GitHub could be used in conjunction with transparency of peer review.

Vazire also requests specialized review processes; statistical analysis is her example.  In principle this is a sound suggestion, but in practice I frankly believe statisticians might do both harm and good in this role.  Much of the damage to the research enterprise in the first place has been due to the influence of the statistical inferential framework, as I've written about previously.

Peer review is a broken process, but it should be reformed instead of discarded.  Statistical inference too is broken, but we've given statisticians a chance to reform it, to no avail.  Discarding it in most cases would be a step forward.

Scientists and Very Short Introductions

Continuing the parlor game from my last post, let's look at Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series, or VSIs, as well as its predecessor, the Past Masters series.  In contrast to the multi-authored Cambridge Companions, the VSIs are short, pocket-sized introductions to subjects (including famous individuals) by typically a single author.  However, like the Oxford Handbooks, the VSIs have respectable coverage of science topics, something the Cambridge Companions generally lack.  Again, the usual suspects (Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Bertrand Russell) all have volumes dedicated to them - they all did work in mathematics or physics, though that work is not what secured them their places in this series.  (Pascal's was a Past Masters that did not get transferred to the VSIs.)  There are no VSIs for individuals who were primarily mathematicians.

Again, in biology only Darwin has a volume, and I see no chemists represented.  Among physicists, we have Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Michael Faraday, and Niels Bohr.  Strangely there is no VSI for Einstein!  C'mon now!!  By the same token, Cambridge Companions needs to catch up and issue volumes for Copernicus, Faraday, and Bohr.  And any list of great physicists must include James Clerk Maxwell, though I do not know whether his influence on the humanities has been as great as the others mentioned here.  

Turning to economics, there are VSIs for Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, and Lord Keynes, but Hayek is missing.  (As Malthus is missing from the Cambridge Companions.)  Past Masters had a single volume covering Smith, Malthus, and Keynes, but like Pascal's, this one did not get transferred to the VSIs.