The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on the scientific enterprise, including scholarly publication and peer-review practices. Several studies have assessed these impacts, showing among others that medical journals have strongly accelerated their review processes for COVID-19-related content. This has raised questions and…

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and their federal overseers protect human subjects, but this vital work is often dysfunctional despite their conscientious efforts. A cardinal, but unrecognized, explanation is that IRBs are performing a specific function -- the management of risk -- using a flawed theoretical and practical approach. At the time…

There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and "hyper-competition." Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research.…

When making personally relevant decisions (e.g. on health-related issues), laypersons have to deal increasingly with science-based knowledge claims that are frequently not only inconsistent if not contradictory but also beyond their own everyday understanding. Nevertheless, they need to reason about these issues. The present interview study…

This issue presents six papers that provide both a historical perspective on and state-of-the-art knowledge about the study of clinical reasoning in medicine. A retrospective is followed by reviews of four approaches to clinical reasoning and an empirical study of current work in the field. (SLD)

Discusses the controversy surrounding amniocentesis (used to detect and abort mongoloid fetuses) as an example of the ethical and social assessments that must be made with new scientific and medical developments. (JR)