Category Archives: Research and Academia

The largest technological and social experiment of our time

Posted on by
Reply

Over the past few weeks a lot of us have become, willingly or forced, the participants in the largest unplanned international experiment of our time. Some might even say that this particular experiment contains multiple sub-experiments that will feed the researchers across a very wide spectrum for years to come. It is also the largest (in scale)  telecommuting experiment ever attempted, again across multiple industries as well as social , educational and health-related activities.

Continue reading →

Online MRI Teaching Ressources

Posted on by
Reply

Top educator and COMP gold medal winner Prof. Jerry Battista from Western Ontario has decided to make available materials that he is using in his classes.

Find below his message and the links to three incredibly well-done videos.

Continue reading →

Analysis of publication impact in predatory-journal – Nature

Posted on by
Reply

In case you’ve missed this one, an interesting analysis was recently published in Nature on citations of manuscripts published in predatory journal. If you contrast with a previous post of mine (here), when considering all journals about 24% of publications get 10 or more citations. This falls dramatically for predatory journal. More importantly no paper get over 32 citations in those journals while 1.8% of all published manuscripts get over 100 citations in general.

 

Source: Predatory-journal papers have little scientific impact

Étudiant et auteur: pourquoi, quand et comment!

Posted on by
Reply

A rare post in French on a conference I gave last year on the status of author taken by students, mainly in the context of sciences and engineering (my field) but pointers given are quite general.

Le titre de cet article est celui d’une présentation que j’ai donnée l’an dernier dans le cadre de la Semaine sur la conduite responsable en recherche 2019 organisée par l’Université Laval.

Cette présentation vient d’être mis en ligne et est disponible ici: https://youtu.be/7MEplFlwW30!

 

 

 

Warning, may contain…a PhD

Posted on by
2

[This post was originally published over 6 years ago. It is still extremely relevant!]

Recently saw a comment by a student about not being advised before hand that doing a PhD had many difficulties and challenges. However, my first reaction reading that text was to start laughing. Of course, all that was said was true. But the first thing that came to my mind was the famous warning when you ask for a sundae with nuts at a McDonald : you received (at least in North America) the nuts in a small, sealed separate bag (think allergies); this bag has a warning that reads (seriously): may contain nuts!

Doh!

Continue reading →

Systematically reject requests to review: a shameful behaviour?

Posted on by
Reply

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions – and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
– Bill Vaughan

Every time you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, you mobilize anywhere from 3 to 5 persons who will work absolutely for free on your manuscript. Minimally, you will have two reviewers and an associate editor, all who will take the time to read and critics your work. On the top of that, the editor will also spend times on it. If needed, a third reviewer will also be requested. 

Continue reading →