Impact Factor: Overrated and Misused?

The misused impact factor.

RESEARCH PAPERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE PUBLISHED IN THOUSANDS OF SCIENCE journals every year. The quality of these papers clearly has to be evaluated, not only to determine their accuracy and contribution to fields of research, but also to help make informed decisions about rewarding scientists with funding and appointments to research positions. One measure often used to determine the qua...

Lipaemia: an overrated interference?

Reagent method sheets for analysis of common serum analytes often highlight the possibility of interference from lipaemia but the information given is often brief and may not be instrument-specific. Thus study assesses the degree of interference from lipaemia in a range of common serum analytes on the Bayer Opera (with a serum blank) using a commercial polymer, LipoClear, as a lipid-clearing ag...

Ratings are Overrated!

Are ratings of any use in human–computer interaction and user studies at large? If ratings are of limited use, is there a better alternative for quantitative subjective assessment? Beyond the intrinsic shortcomings of human reporting, there are a number of supplementary limitations and fundamental methodological flaws associated with rating-based questionnaires – i.e., questionnaires that ask p...

P-Values: Misunderstood and Misused

P-values are widely used in both the social and natural sciences to quantify the statistical significance of observed results. The recent surge of big data research has made the p-value an evenmore popular tool to test the significance of a study. However, substantial literature has been produced critiquing how p-values are used and understood. In this paper we review this recent critical liter...

Is the brain overrated?