In our digital era, scientists are certainly sharing and reusing open data. Yet it remains unclear how widespread data reuse and citation practices are within academic disciplines, and why scientists cite—or do not cite—data in their research work.

Doctors are moving out of their clinics and taking over the digital world. Many physicians are engaging in digital media, sharing their expertise and opinions on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. But little is known on how doctors are mediating health research on social media. Noha Atef, a postdoctoral fellow at the ScholCommLab, led a series of qualitative studies on doctors who create video blogs (or vlogs) on YouTube.

In the slow, unpredictable world of journal publication, preprints—unreviewed published papers—offer a mechanism for rapidly communicating health research with the scholarly community. Historically, media coverage of preprints was discouraged in journalism, due to potential concerns about reporting flawed, biased, or provisional research.

Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing. This week’s post highlights Marc-André Simard, a doctoral student in Information Science at the University of Montreal and member of the ScholCommLab. In this post, he shares his thoughts on work in the lab, the global use of open access literature, and stepping out of his comfort zones.

By Olivia Aguiar and Alice Fleerackers During the pandemic, more research was shared openly, more preprints were posted, and we saw an explosion in the public communication of science, particularly in mainstream media. In the long-term, these changes have the potential to foster more open, diverse, and inclusive approaches to research and bolster our capacity to face present and future societal challenges.

This September, the 26th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2022) was held in Granada, Spain and the ScholCommLab left its mark at the first in-person edition of the conference since the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Alice Fleerackers (Simon Fraser University) and Lauren A Maggio (Uniformed Services University of the Health Science) A story on gender inequity in scientific research industries. A deep dive into the daily rhythms of the immune system. A look at vaccine effectiveness for COVID-19 variants.

Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing. Today we’re highlighting Heather Woods, a part-time professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, researcher and podcaster in Social Emotional Learning, and member of the ScholCommLab.

Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing. Today’s post features Natascha Chtena, a postdoctoral fellow and research coordinator for the Value of Openness, Inclusion, Communication, and Engagement for Science in a Post-Pandemic World (VOICES) project at the ScholCommLab.

Scholarly metrics are widely applied to assess research quality and impact despite their known limitations. One of the most popular scholarly metrics is the h-index—which is defined as the “ h number of papers with at least h number of citations.” This means that if a researcher has an h-index of 12, they have published 12 papers with at least 12 citations each.