December 2008
Letter from the editor
This issue of The Euroscientist sees the start of some theming of articles. We will have two main themes running for the next few issues. One is a theme on the very important issue of young scientists in Europe. They are our future, yet in the present they face many challenges and problems over and above their science itself. For the next four issues, young scientists will be writing about some of these challenges and, hopefully, some of the solutions that might be found. In the first article in this series, Marina Encheva, Nadia Koltcheva and Fanny Koleva tell us about the developments in Bulgaria that are improving the working conditions and national training provision for doctoral candidates. Read more>>
Open Society, Open Science
By Alma SwanWe all have our idea of what is meant by an open society. We think of freedom to act, speak and think as we wish within the law, of a tolerance of others’ views and a state machinery that respects these freedoms of the individual and interferes as little as possible in our lives. We also probably think of open information flows and with them the flow of knowledge within, into and out of that particular society. With respect to science, we would expect an open society to optimise scientific developments both at home and outside the society – for example, by the utilisation of the good communication channels present in an open society, by bridges that span the gap between scientists and politicians, and by the forging of effective ways to transfer the fruits of scientific progress to the population and wider. Yet even in exemplary open societies, science may not work with society to best effect, and society may not create the conditions that science needs to flourish... Read more>>
Scholarly Communication
Requirements for Author Registries
By Thomas SeveriensAuthor identification: The benefit of being able to identify researchers uniquely
By Eberhard R. Hilf, Bernd Kappenberg and Hans E. RoosendaalThe construct of names as it is used today is based on the administration of Napoleon I, established to ease the recruiting of soldiers. Nowadays, networking of Web 2.0 services, of Open Access research output, and traditional publication channels requires unique and persistent author identifiers more appropriate to the networked world. Personal names, which are the current means of identification, are far away from being unique and persistent, even combined with date and place of birth... Read more>> |  To identify the author of a scientific document has long been an aim for
many reasons: researchers studying an article want to find other papers
of the same author, authors want to claim their authorship,
universities want to count the number of papers of an author or to
detect plagiarism and so forth. Usually the author's name is used to
track the authorship, but problems arise by notation... Read more>> |
Bibliometrics – an important tool in research evaluation
By Pauline Mattsson"Show me what you write, I will tell you what kind of researcher you are"
By Marie-Claude Roland
|  Scientific writing reveals and reflects research practices, and the image of research which emerges from scientific papers should worry researchers and citizens, for a number of reasons. Scientific papers buzz with a lot of noise: “it is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding of …”, “it has long been known that …”, “very few studies have been conducted on the effect of …” and so on, creating verbosity and dullness... Read more>> |
Bibliometrics uses mathematical and statistical methods to analyse and
measure the output of scientific publications. Modern bibliometrics has
been largely inspired by Derek de Solla Price and the seminal work was
carried out by him in the middle of the last century. In the book
“Little Science-Big Science” [1], published in 1963, he analysed
research communication and presented a number of quantitative
evaluation techniques. DeSolla Price was the first to examine the
increasing trend of collaborations among chemistry researchers by using
bibliometrics... Issues for young scientists
The system for qualification of PhD Candidates in Bulgaria – Challenges and Perspectives
By Marina Encheva, Nadia Koltcheva and Fanny Koleva Bulgaria has a long tradition in the training of scientists. With the
changes from the end of the 80s amendments in the area of higher
education were triggered. In the middle of 90s a process of
transformation of university education in Bulgaria was started,
aligning it with the directives of the Bologna process. A three stage
system of higher education was introduced – bachelor, master and PhD.
Unfortunately, the reformations of higher education are still in
progress... Read more>>
Valuable forms of activities favourable for EUROSCIENCE
By Vsevolod BorisovThe scope of activities undertaken by Euroscience is reflected in its full name: “European Association for the Promotion of Science and Technology”. There are many different ways of such “promotion”. Traditionally many efforts are made to organize different kinds of discussions and debates as well as a dialogue between scientists and society with a hope of mutual understanding. It is assumed that participants of such discussions are creative enough to put forward valuable ideas and conceptions which might well become a part of the European policy in science and technology... Read more>>
"Your reactions" is a relatively new section of the Euroscientist added to create discussion and reflection on the articles published.
It will comprise one page at the end of every Euroscientist issue and we hope it will be full of your comments, thoughts and reflections.
All comments are also being published on-line at the Euroscience Forum of our web page, in hope that the discussion will to continue there. If the number of articles exceeds one page you will find them there as well. The Forum is only open for members of Euroscience hence if you are not yet a member you are very welcome to join us.
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Note from Euroscience Office:The Euroscience office announes that Euroscience now also exist on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroscience (article created by Mr Peter Van Osta)
The office does also want to encourage everyone to write their reactions to the Euroscientist nr 5 and send to
editor@euroscience.org since we have, unfortunately, not received something written for this issue.
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