The increasing interdisciplinarity of scientific research creates both challenges and opportunities for librarians. The liaison model may be inadequate for supporting campus research that represents multiple disciplines and geographically dispersed departments. The identification of units, researchers, and projects is a first step in planning and…

On the surface, a gathering held for young research faculty last week at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was a clear expression of determination by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help them compete for grants. The agency fears that continued Congressional budget cuts, combined with the growing number of scientists who work later into…

Engaged scholarship, translational science, integrated research, and interventionist research, all involve bringing research into a practical context. These usually require working with communities and institutions, and often involve community based participatory research. The article offers practical guidance for engaged research. The authors…

The rise in the measured prevalence of autism has been accompanied by much new research and research investment internationally. This study sought to establish whether the pattern of current UK autism research funding maps on to the concerns of the autism community. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with autistic adults, family members,…

Nearly 30 years ago, renowned immunologist James E.K. Hildreth, M.D., Ph.D., was compelled to start researching the virus that causes AIDS. He marveled at its enigma and was pressed into action by its ability to cut lives short and devastate communities. The disease set him on a course of medical inquiry that has included biomedical breakthroughs…

Non-medical research involves the same issues of justice, beneficence, and respect for persons that apply to non-medical research. It also may involve risk of harm to participants, and conflicts of interest for researchers. It is therefore not possible to argue that such research should be exempt from ethical review. This paper argues that…

New rules are coming for sanitizing conflicts of interest in research financed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), dispenser of the government's biggest budget for civilian science, some $31 billion this year. The conflicted need not fear. The draft rules, soon to be made final, continue the NIH's longtime practice of trust but don't…

Wall Street bankers currently serve as the national poster children for greed, but they face a strong challenge from some university researchers who have apparently been taking millions of dollars in secret from the medical industry. Recent revelations about those undisclosed payments have universities and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)…

Native English-speaking (NES) English teachers at universities in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts are sometimes asked to edit English manuscripts written by non-native English-speaking (NNES) colleagues in scientific fields. However, professional peers may differ from English teachers in their approach towards editing scientific…

The decoding of the human genome was supposed to have been the dawn of the age of personalized medicine. It turned out, though, that health is affected by a lot more than genes. As scientists were already aware, the environment and life experiences also have a huge impact on disease. Researchers, such as Jeremy K. Nicholson, have worked to make…

In the past few months, animal-rights groups have stepped up their demonstrations against academic researchers who use animals, spawning a new wave of concern among scientists. In February, extremists caused a fire at the home of a researcher from the University of California at Los Angeles, and protesters struck the husband of a scientist from…

Every article sent by an author to a reputed scientific journal undergoes a rigorous editorial evaluation. The editor has the final responsibility of accepting or rejecting manuscripts and thus can confer authority and validity on the author's research and help to disseminate new knowledge. In this task, editors make use of a panel of expert peer…

Increasing demands for accountability and applicability raise the question of how organizational factors affect researchers' performance and career choices. In a study of Dutch medical Ph.D. student's experiences, organizational culture and climate and attitudes towards research quality are related to performance and career choices. Ph.D.s who…

Blogs, wikis, and social-networking sites such as Facebook may get media buzz these days, but for scientists, engineers, and doctors, they are not even on the radar. The most effective tools of the Internet for such people tend to be efforts more narrowly aimed at their needs, such as software that helps geneticists replicate one another's…

The impersonalizing role passive voice plays in scientific discourse is well known. Analysis of the Methods sections of nine medical research articles shows that metonymy is another frequent strategy used to create anonymous authors/agents. Discourse agents were categorized into four semantic domains: familial lay, nonfamilial lay, authorial…