The scope and nature of biological and environmental research are evolving in response to environ... more The scope and nature of biological and environmental research are evolving in response to environmental challenges such as global climate change, invasive species and emergent diseases. In particular, scientific studies are increasingly focusing on long-term, broad-scale, and complex questions that require massive amounts of diverse data collected by remote sensing platforms and embedded environmental sensor networks; collaborative, interdisciplinary science teams;
The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a s... more The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a scientist or colleague who has not been involved with your project, will they be able to make sense of it? Will they be able to use it effectively and properly? This primer describes a few fundamental data management practices that will enable you to develop a data management plan, as well as how to effectively create, organize, manage, describe, preserve and share data.
The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a s... more The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a scientist or colleague who has not been involved with your project, will they be able to make sense of it? Will they be able to use it effectively and properly? This primer describes a few fundamental data management practices that will enable you to develop a data management plan, as well as how to effectively create, organize, manage, describe, preserve and share data.
Metrics of success or impact in academia may do more harm than good. To explore the value of cita... more Metrics of success or impact in academia may do more harm than good. To explore the value of citations, the reported efficacy of treatments in ecology and evolution from close to 1,500 publications was examined. If citation behavior is rationale, i.e. studies that successfully applied a treatment and detected greater biological effects are cited more frequently, then we predict that larger effect sizes increases study relative citation rates. This prediction was not supported. Citations are likely thus a poor proxy for the quantitative merit of a given treatment in ecology and evolutionary biology-unlike evidence-based medicine wherein the success of a drug or treatment on human health is one of the critical attributes. Impact factor of the journal is a broader metric, as one would expect, but it also unrelated to the mean effect sizes for the respective populations of publications. The interpretation by the authors of the treatment effects within each study differed depending on whether the hypothesis was supported or rejected. Significantly larger effect sizes were associated with rejection of a hypothesis. This suggests that only the most rigorous studies reporting negative results are published or that authors set a higher burden of proof in rejecting a hypothesis. The former is likely true to a major extent since only 29 % of the studies rejected the hypotheses tested. These findings indicate that the use of citations to identify important papers in this specific discipline-at least in terms of designing a new experiment or contrasting treatments-is of limited value.
The scope and nature of biological and environmental research are evolving in response to environ... more The scope and nature of biological and environmental research are evolving in response to environmental challenges such as global climate change, invasive species and emergent diseases. In particular, scientific studies are increasingly focusing on long-term, broad-scale, and complex questions that require massive amounts of diverse data collected by remote sensing platforms and embedded environmental sensor networks; collaborative, interdisciplinary science teams;
The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a s... more The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a scientist or colleague who has not been involved with your project, will they be able to make sense of it? Will they be able to use it effectively and properly? This primer describes a few fundamental data management practices that will enable you to develop a data management plan, as well as how to effectively create, organize, manage, describe, preserve and share data.
The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a s... more The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a scientist or colleague who has not been involved with your project, will they be able to make sense of it? Will they be able to use it effectively and properly? This primer describes a few fundamental data management practices that will enable you to develop a data management plan, as well as how to effectively create, organize, manage, describe, preserve and share data.
Metrics of success or impact in academia may do more harm than good. To explore the value of cita... more Metrics of success or impact in academia may do more harm than good. To explore the value of citations, the reported efficacy of treatments in ecology and evolution from close to 1,500 publications was examined. If citation behavior is rationale, i.e. studies that successfully applied a treatment and detected greater biological effects are cited more frequently, then we predict that larger effect sizes increases study relative citation rates. This prediction was not supported. Citations are likely thus a poor proxy for the quantitative merit of a given treatment in ecology and evolutionary biology-unlike evidence-based medicine wherein the success of a drug or treatment on human health is one of the critical attributes. Impact factor of the journal is a broader metric, as one would expect, but it also unrelated to the mean effect sizes for the respective populations of publications. The interpretation by the authors of the treatment effects within each study differed depending on whether the hypothesis was supported or rejected. Significantly larger effect sizes were associated with rejection of a hypothesis. This suggests that only the most rigorous studies reporting negative results are published or that authors set a higher burden of proof in rejecting a hypothesis. The former is likely true to a major extent since only 29 % of the studies rejected the hypotheses tested. These findings indicate that the use of citations to identify important papers in this specific discipline-at least in terms of designing a new experiment or contrasting treatments-is of limited value.
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Papers by Amber Budden