How to Be a Better Scientist

Beatrice Mintz

This study explores through a naturalistic inquiry the tensions between a science professor’s two enacted identities. More specifically, this study looks at how a biology professor’s identity-in-practice shifts and evolves over time through collaborations with a science education professor. These shifts were marked by an emphasis on teaching, rather than solely a focus on science. Data were collected through formal interviews and notes taken during planning sessions that took place between the biology professor and the science educator. Findings reveal that although the biology professor is able to reconcile both his science and teacher identity, structural elements of his workplace do not encourage him to enact his teacher identity. Recommendations for college science teaching are discussed.

It is an exciting time for transesophageal echocardiography with a number of recent advancements in technology and software. Understanding their benefits and limitations depends on a sound basic understanding of ultrasound principles, particularly as many advancements are optimized for transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) in spontaneously breathing patients. This creates a dilemma for perioperative clinicians because the desire to embrace newer technologies is high but may not be valid for perioperative transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). While there are a number of books on TEE ranging from short pocket notes to extensive atlases, this book excels through a number of features: (1) its clear, concise writing style makes it easy to read for beginners, but also offers new information for more experienced echocardiographers; (2) its incorporation of novel technologies and expert opinion to more established, evidence-based techniques; and (3) its synthesis of book and eBook. Furthermore, it is well organized and can easily be read by individual chapters or by sections. This book is useful for beginners as well as for more advanced echocardiographers and echocardiography partners (eg, surgeons and intensivists), particularly for those who are active in the perioperative setting. This well-thought-out and revised fourth edition contains contributions from world-renowned clinicians in the field, whose experience is evident throughout the text by combining readily available information with personal tips and literature recommendations. This makes the book a pleasure to read and a highly useful teaching aid and reference work. The book is organized into 5 useful sections. The first section discusses the essentials of 2-dimensional (2D) imaging, including sufficient information on 2D image formation and information on a comprehensive TEE examination. The section on left ventricular systolic performance is an excellent review of established and novel methods of quantification, and the chapter on the diagnosis of myocardial ischemia provides a good resume, balancing theoretical concepts with practical advice. The second section discusses the essentials of Doppler echo, highlighting the differences of Doppler to 2D, limitations in TEE, and quantitative measurements. The third section focuses on bread-and-butter valvular disease explaining anatomy and pathophysiology. In a straightforward fashion, it reviews day-to-day issues from a pragmatic point of view. The main focus is on left-sided pathology, but the chapter on right-sided pathology, while rather condensed, is of high quality. The fourth section, our personal favorite, is a collection of clinical challenges, some of which may be less well known, ranging from echo for revascularization, aortic surgery, guiding interventions, anatomic anomalies, and congenital heart disease in the adult. The section on critical care echocardiography nicely rounds out the chapter. The final section offers a concise summary of 3-dimensional (3D) echo and illustrates artifacts and optimization tricks for the clinician. Additionally, the 6 appendices include information on echo views, cardiac dimensions, hemodynamic calculations, prosthetic valves, grading of valvular disease, and answers to multiple-choice questions (MCQs). While the sections are well organized, individual chapters may easily be read as stand-alone references. The chapters are by and large well referenced. All sections are divided into reasonable chunks with many high-quality figures and videos that are available online. Additionally, MCQs at the end of each section enable the reader to test and solidify knowledge. Reading the book, it is evident that this is an excellent fourth edition. Nonetheless, a potential fifth edition may include the following changes: (1) a section or subsection on assist devices; (2) a comparison/caveat of what technologies have been validated in TEE rather than solely using TTE; (3) an appendix or checklist along the lines of “what to tell the surgeon” before and after surgery; and (4) a section on what to expect or an outlook for the future. Furthermore, a brief justification of answers to MCQs (currently only available in some chapters) would be beneficial as would online case reports with images/clips of common complications. Both would offer less-experienced clinicians’ insight into typical complications. Finally, we particularly enjoyed comments based on personal preference and experience rather than solely relying on hard evidence, which is often lacking for perioperative TEE. As a book written by world-renowned experts in the field, further elaboration along these lines would offer additional added value. Overall, this book is very appealing and offers a great deal of information both online and offline. Although not a pocket guide, it has a reasonable size and is a great comprehensive asset to beginners as well as a useful reference guide to more experienced echocardiographers. Michael Vandenheuvel, MDDepartment of Anesthesia and Perioperative MedicineUniversity Hospital GhentGhent, BelgiumEckhard Mauermann, MD, MScDepartment of AnesthesiologyUniversity Hospital BaselBasel, SwitzerlandDepartment of Anesthesia and Perioperative MedicineUniversity Hospital GhentGhent, Belgium[email protected]

"Convenient Untruths": An Unanticipated Opportunity for Science and the Public.

Satisfying Aspects of Serving as Chair, Part 1: Concrete Benefits

The acquisition and use of military power are perhaps the most studied subjects in the field of international relations, mainly because they have been common occurrences throughout history. It is surprising, then, that the concepts of militarism and militarization are not sufficiently well defined to command a consensus among scholars as to their meaning, let alone their causes and consequences. And as other chapters in this volume clearly document, militarism and militarization are concepts that are relevant to social relations in realms other than formal inter-state relations, which has made conceptual clarity that much more difficult to achieve. But my focus in this chapter is indeed inter-state relations, with special attention to the impact of the global arms trade on the militarization of developing states and on those states’ use of military force – behaviour that may, in some cases, derive from state policies fairly described as outgrowths of militarism.

Naomi Oreskes: understanding the denial of science

It’s About Time! Three Researchers Win Nobel for Circadian Clock Discoveries

The peer review process has been fundamental to scientific publishing since the mid-twentieth century because it helps to ensure scientific rigor and integrity. However, as fewer scientists seem willing to undertake manuscript review and the number of papers submitted keeps climbing, the peer-review process has become increasingly fraught. In recent years, a “reviewer crisis” has emerged seemingly owing to reviewer fatigue, inequitable workloads, and relentless critics on social media platforms that castigate large publishing houses for exploiting unpaid labor. This study investigates trends in reviewer engagement at the journal Biological Invasions using editorial data from 2003 to 2024. We examined trends in reviewer acceptance and decline rates, differences by career stage, and global variation in review completion rates. Our results show that reviewer acceptance rates have dropped steadily over the past two decades, converging with increasing decline rates. Early-career researchers had the highest acceptance and lowest decline rates, while senior scholars were least likely to accept review invitations. Geographic analysis revealed uneven reviewer follow-through across countries, with some lower-income nations outperforming high-income countries. These findings highlight the need for structural reform in the peer review process. Potential solutions include targeted incentives, expanded reviewer training, equitable invitation practices, compensation, and formal recognition of reviewer contributions. Without such measures, the current system—reliant on altruism and strained by increasing publication volume—risks becoming unsustainable. Our analysis provides empirical insight into the dynamics of reviewer participation and suggests steps to support a more sustainable peer review ecosystem.

The Upside of Down: Disaster and the Imagination 50 Years On

Previous articleNext article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHarold J. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University and was previously Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. Recipient of the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society and the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, he is author of five books and coeditor of six others, together with well over sixty articles. His primary research interests are in the emergence of the new medicines and sciences of early modern Europe; global knowledge exchanges; the coproduction of science and commerce; and processes of translation.William Deringer is Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research excavates the history of economic and political knowledge practices. His first book, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), reconstructs how numerical calculation became an authoritative mode of public reasoning in Anglophone political culture. His new project, Discounting: A History of the Economic Future (in One Calculation), traces “present value” calculations from their early modern beginnings to contemporary debates about climate change.Julia Fein is a historian of Modern Russia, specializing in the intersecting histories of science and empire. She spent two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University, where she was affiliated with the “Networks of Exchange” seminar at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. She has also taught modern European history at Macalester College.Courtney Fullilove is Associate Professor of History, Environmental Studies, and Science in Society at Wesleyan University. She is the author of The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (Chicago, 2017) and of articles on claims to natural and cultural heritage. She is currently writing a history of international biodiversity preservation.Arunabh Ghosh is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Harvard University. A historian of modern China, his interests include social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, and transnational history. His book, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early PRC, 1949–1959, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, BJHS-Themes, and the PRC History Review. He is currently working on two new projects: a history of Chinese dam building in the twentieth century and a history of China-India scientific networks, ca. 1900–1960.Martin Giraudeau is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Sciences Po, in Paris, and a researcher in the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He has published articles on the history of business plans, the invention of entrepreneurship, and the roles of accounting in organizations and society. He recently coedited, with Frédéric Graber, a volume on the modern history of projects: Les Projets: Une histoire politique (16e–21e siècles) (Paris, 2018).Eugenia Lean is Associate Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007). Her forthcoming book, Manufacturing China’s Vernacular Industrialism: Nativist Tinkerer and Toothpowder Magnate, Chen Diexian (1879–1940), employs the figure of Chen Diexian, a professional editor, science enthusiast, and pharmaceutical industrialist, to examine the practices of nativist tinkering, innovative adaptation, and knowledge work in the building of early twentieth-century Chinese industry. Her latest research examines China’s involvement in shaping modern global regimes of intellectual property from the early twentieth to twenty-first centuries.Victoria Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ohio University, where she teaches and writes about modern science and technology. She is currently writing a book about Japanese society’s engagement with microbes in science, industry, and environmental management. She has published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (ed. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland), and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.Paul Lucier is a historian of science, business, and the environment. He is the author of Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore, 2008) and is currently finishing a book on the geology of gold, silver, and copper mining in the American West. The goal of his research is to understand whether and how science-driven capitalism can be ethical, innovative, intellectually creative, and environmentally responsible.Sarah Milov is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Smoke and Ashes: From Corporatism to Neoliberalism in Tobacco’s Twentieth Century, is forthcoming. Her recent research focuses on whistle-blowing, particularly the relationship among gender, credibility, and bureaucracy.Emily Pawley is Assistant Professor of History at Dickinson College, where she teaches environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the history of science. Her research focuses on cultivated landscapes as sources of knowledge; recent publications examine analytic tables and the invention of nutritional value, cattle portraiture and markets in blood, and varietal description and counterfeit fruit. Her book project, the Balance-Sheet of Nature: Agriculture and Speculative Science in the Antebellum North, examines the kinds of speculative and futuristic knowledge that emerged to make sense of the rapidly commercializing landscape of post–Erie Canal New York and is under advance contract at the University of Chicago Press. She is also interested in the transatlantic history of moon farming.Lukas Rieppel is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, where he teaches courses on the history of science and the history of capitalism. His forthcoming book, Assembling the Dinosaur, uses the history of paleontology as a means to examine how the ideals, norms, and practices of modern capitalism shaped the way scientific knowledge was made, certified, and distributed during North America’s Long Gilded Age. In addition, Rieppel has written several essays about the material culture of the earth sciences, the history of museums, the valuation of fossils, and the authentication of specimens.David Singerman is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia. His work has appeared in Radical History Review, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Journal of British Studies. He has also written on the sugar industry for the New York Times and on U.S.-Canada trade wars for The Atlantic.Hallam Stevens is Associate Professor of History and Biology and the Head of History at the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is the author of Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (Chicago, 2013), Biotechnology and Society: An Introduction (Chicago, 2016), and the coeditor of Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome (Durham, N.C., 2015).Lee Vinsel is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, where he teaches and writes about government and technology. He is a cofounder of The Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary research network that studies maintenance, repair, and mundane work with things. His forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins University Press examines the history of automobile regulation in the United States from 1893 to today’s dreams of a driverless future. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Osiris Volume 33, Number 12018Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories Published for the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700195 © 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

We ask 3 questions that bear on the ability of aquatic scientists to influence public perceptions and public policy related to important environmental issues: 1) Why should scientists become better communicators? 2) What can we do to promote effective communication? 3) How can scientific societies help scientists meet this communication challenge? Shareholders in the environment include watershed groups, environmental interest groups, water-quality agencies, the general public, and the scientific community. These shareholders often are not professional scientists, but they influence the formation of natural resource policies. Individual aquatic scientists should be able to explain their science to other shareholders in a way that disabuses misconceptions of scientific principles, fosters informed dialogue concerning actions that affect aquatic ecosystems, and prevents poor decisions that can result from inaccurate information or short-sightedness. Scientific societies can effectively communicate the concerns of individual scientists by: 1) articulating the links between basic research and ecological principles to applied science, thereby building the foundation of science needed to support informed decision-making; 2) translating and disseminating results of scientific research to nonscientists to minimize inaccuracies, thereby fostering scientific literacy; and 3) taking proactive positions that promote infusion of sound science into policy debates on pressing environmental issues, especially those that bear on freshwater ecosystems.

Teachers act as “mediators” in the teaching-learning process, and they try to develop expertise and skills with new methodologies, where cordel literature which has an alternative language and strong popular appeal is used to promote effective teaching. This paper aims to describe the process of construction and dramatization in the cordel genre as an educational tool. Between the 2010 and 2012 years, professors of Microbiologya discipline of the course in Biological Sciences at Universidade Estadual do Ceara, Brazil, and their assistants have challenged students to work themes using the cordel form. To do this work, the students were divided into groups, which picked different themes at random. The creations were prepared adapting technical concepts to rhymes and poetic metres of popular language, helping to bring Pasteur science closer to popular expressions. We conclude that the use of cordel literature in the teaching of microbiology connects the creativity with the inexpensive costs and the popular tradition, providing playful and contextualized learning, thus becoming viable and interesting pedagogical alternative for science and biology professors.

The emergence of e-books with the characteristics of easy access and reading any time anywhere is a subject of debate in academia. Topics include the use of e-books in libraries, their use in support teaching, new possibilities for reading activities, potential uses for library archives, and the motivation and intention of e-book users. Students at Guilin University of Technology participated in a survey. Of the 300 copies of the questionnaire distributed, 263 valid copies were returned, a retrieval rate of 88%. The research results show that (1) Usability and reading need are the key factors in e-book usage. Usability refers to convenient keyword searches, portability, and any time reading. E-books are considered to make searching and reading large amounts of data easier. (2) E-books are not restricted to time and space so that the overall reading quantity is increasing. Readers become accustomed to reading e-books, and the quality of their digital reading is gradually enhanced. (3) Students should complete e-book use courses offered by libraries to enhance their familiarity with e-books and their use of e-book software, thereby enhancing postgraduate student readers' e-book information literacy. The results of the research prompt suggestions to enhance the promotion of reading and e-book information to encourage student readers' e-book reading intention.

I like nothing so much as a good philosophical discussion. For one thing, it just feels so delightfully scientific to be bandying about high minded terms like "epistemology," "ontology," "realism," "relativism," and "paradigm" with great abandon. For another thing, it is simply essential in my view of the world of science to which I enjoy belonging that one should be fully engaged in the ethical and normative underpinnings of scientific practice. That, to me, operationally characterizes philosophy of science. Our scientific philosophies facilitate the debating, codifying, and explicating of our "agreed-to rules of the road" for doing our work. They are our scientific code of conduct, so to speak. In my way of thinking, the rules of the road are important for all good researchers to understand and share if we are to hew faithfully to our paradigms and do good normal science research. The problem for me is that I see the emerging debate over whether our field is a science or not through two distinct lenses, and I'm getting some parallax out of it. I've earned two doctorates at two different stages of my career; one in marketing when I was much younger, and one more recently in information systems. That does not make me any smarter than the average bear, and it could certainly be argued that it's a sure sign of not being smarter, since one could say I had to do it twice to get it right. Yet, it has afforded me a very unique perspective on the emerging ontological debate about our discipline because, quite literally, I Have Been There Before! I've studied the Philosophy of Science two fulsome times in my career, and I've gotten some interesting perspectives each time as each was in the midst of an existential debate over status, and both of these experience bear upon my agenda-setting here, as an editor. While learning my scientific craft as a first-time doctoral student in marketing, I reveled in the debate that much of academic marketing was enmeshed in during the 80s on whether marketing was a science or a technology and if a science, how best to be practiced. We future scientists all read Kuhn (1970) in our philosophy of science seminar, as well as Dubin (1978) and a flock of excellent philosophical essays collected in a tome edited by the redoubtable Jagdish Sheth (Sheth & Garrett, 1986) - a philosophy of science volume that many in marketing and elsewhere still use, aged though it might be. We marketers also saw a collection of philosophical essays by thought leaders of the field under such titles as "Marketing, Scientific Progress, and the Scientific Method" (Anderson, 1983), "On Making Marketing Science more Scientific" (Arndt, 1985), "Paradigms Lost" (Deshpande, 1983), and "Metatheory and Metamethodology in Marketing" (Leong, 1985). The debate in marketing continued well past that point and has extended into recent years (e.g., Brown, 1996; Easton, 2002), indicating that the debate we have now in information systems has years yet to go. It is not a simple question we deal with, and the answers take time and fulsome consideration.