MARKETS MECHANISMS AREN'T WORKING FOR BIODIVERSITY

backfiring market based mechanisms for biodiversity

Erratums and Irresponsibiity

electronic publishing has sadly made editing documents harder than ever.

proposition re: corrections, withdrawn papers etc.

link to new doi... OBVIOUS STATEMENT at the location of the original publication stating that there was a response, erratum, withdrawal.

selection of appropriate reviewers

How useful are systematic reviews for conservation?

really great for med, you could say they revolutionised the field

see www.badscience.com

funnel plots

being promoted as the next big thing for the collation of conservation evidence

I would argue that the way that conservation content is arranged it is difficult, if not impossible to acheive the same sort of results...

All medicine in medline and scopus. (See Alex and Goldacre re: whether accuracy of this statement)

No such thing for conservation

Also... The abstracts and titles problem - you wouldn't see a med paper called "Too hip to recover" would you?!!

Also... the grey literature problem.

If you thought that was bad grey literature is tedious to cite (if i had a wish it would be that there was a citation link embedded within the pdf), usually doesn't come with keywords and sometimes isn't available outside the organisation that generated it.

Titles, Abstracts and Conservation

So... this might seem a bit of a tedious rant, but bear with me, because i think it's really important.

This is a title taken at random from the latest issue of animal conservation (the first TOC i could find in my inbox):

Can we separate the sinners from the scapegoats?

I have no particular gripe with the author so i will not mention them here, or the paper itself, which is as it turns out is an interesting commentary on the feature paper of the issue. However, there is absolutely no way you can tell that from the title. I am sure that many if not al of you find it tedious when you have to open an article simply to determine its theme, let alone whether it is specifically relevant or of interest to you and your research or the topic you are searching for at the time. Even worse is when you still cannot be sure after having read the abstract.

This has two major problems:

1. It wastes busy peoples time and energy (or they simply skip things where the subject is not immediately obvious)

2. It is difficult to find said articles when reviewing the literature.

The second of these problems can be partially addressed by using appropriate keywords etc. However, having recently been part of a systematic review (link to syst rev), I have come to realise that this is a non-trivial issue.

So... if you are writing, consider this a plea: No catchy titles unless you have a useful subtitle and if you are a journal, remember how the people using your product think and behave and put your foot down on uninformative titles.