The Scientists at Prayers

Gazing at the skyline for star scientists

Admittedly, despite the plethora of scientometric indices proposed to rank scientists, none of them can fully capture the performance and impact of a scientist, since each index quantifies only one or a few aspects of his/her multifarious performance. Therefore, the task of scientometric ranking can be seen as a multi-dimensional ranking problem, where the different indices comprise the dimensi...

Prayers for Our Protection and Prosperity at Court: Shakers, Children, and the Law

Systematic Reviews: Perhaps “The Answer to Policy Makers’ Prayers”?

Four articles in this issue demonstrate effective adaptation of the methodology of systematic reviews to environmental health science (Johnson et al. 2014; Koustas et al. 2014; Lam et al. 2014; Woodruff and Sutton 2014). Researchers in many countries and disciplines have participated in developing this methodology for more than a century and have used it to synthesize evidence from primary sour...

By the scientists, for the scientists

My association with the JCB began very early in my scientific career. In fact, it predated my understanding that there would even be a scientific career. In the mid-1970s while still an undergraduate, the JCB published my very first paper, a contribution noted perhaps less so for its reporting the characterization of the first known protein in plant cell walls than for a footnote that called at...

PETA continues to claw at Columbia scientists.