Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing. Our latest post features Mario Malički, a former visiting scholar and ongoing collaborator at 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 Rukhsana Ahmed, an Associate Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing. In this week’s post, PhD student and writer Alice Fleerackers shares her thoughts on managing the ScholCommLab blog, learning through collaboration, and letting commitments go.  Q#1 What are you working on at the lab?  The TLDR version? I communicate research and I research communication.

The aim of this post is to look at revisions of bioRxiv preprints. I’m interested how long preprint versions exist on bioRxiv. In other words: how long do revisions to preprints take? The data from bioRxiv is a complex dataset with many caveats as I’ll explain further down, but some interesting details do emerge. Consider this a sketch of the dataset rather than an in-depth analysis. I’ll walk you through the code.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, different countries are experiencing various restrictions including lockdowns. Some of these restrictions alter our ability to do science: by hindering lab access or taking time away from researchers for homeschooling. So, what impact has the pandemic had on scientific output? One way to look at this – for biology – is to look at newly deposited papers on bioRxiv.

Press release originally published by Simon Fraser University on January 6, 2021 A new SFU-led study finds that almost half of media stories in early 2020 featuring COVID-19 ‘preprint’ research—research that has not yet been peer-reviewed—accurately framed the studies as being preprints or unverified research.

[In this pandemic, researchers have responded by publishing results rapidly, often through preprints.]{style=“background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”} [In fact, up to half of the publications in Europe PMC on COVID-19 are preprints rather than peer-reviewed journal articles.

So quantixed occasionally gets correspondence from other researchers asking for advice. A recent email came from someone who had been “scooped”. What should they do? Before we get into this topic we have to define what we mean by being scooped. You were working on something that someone else was also working on – maybe you knew about this or not and vice versa – but they got their work out before you did.

Back in 2014, I posted an analysis of the time my lab takes to publish our work. This post is very popular. Probably because it looks at the total time it takes us to publish our work. It was time for an update. Here is the latest version.

I am now running a new module for masters students, MD997. The aim is to introduce the class to a range of advanced research methods and to get them to think about how to formulate their own research question(s). The module is built around a paper which is allocated in the first session. I had to come up with a list of methods-type papers, which I am posting below. There are 16 students and I picked 23 papers.