In the biomedical sciences timeline, 2021 will be marked by two major events: (a) thesecond year of Covid-19 pandemics and its huge impact on our society; (b) theconsolidation of new vaccine technology to deal with emergent infectious agents. For theBrazilian community of researchers in tropical medicine nonetheless, it is also a yearthat will be remembered as the farewell to José Rodrigues Coura (1927-1921), medicaldoctor, professor and researcher in human infectious diseases, director of the InstitutoOswaldo Cruz (IOC), vice president of research at Fiocruz, author of hundreds ofscientific articles, editor and enthusiastic collaborator of the journal Memórias doInstituto Oswaldo Cruz (MIOC). The relevance of José Rodrigues Coura for MIOC can berealised from one particular historical event: from 1977 to 1979 the journal did notpublish a single article! Prof. Coura, soon after starting his job as director of IOC,resumed the publishing operation of MIOC and afforded it the current scope as aninternational journal dedicated to publish research work in human infectious diseases,their agents and vectors.e.g., Trypanosoma cruzi,Leishmania sp., Plasmodium sp. there was no secretto its exact location. What was really unknown to me at that moment was a peculiar traceof Coura’s personality: the fine sense of humor coupled to sarcastic hints about thetasks the researchers of tropical medicine should embrace. In my case, I was starting acollaboration with the research group leaded by Octavio Fernandes, a brilliant youngresearcher in infectious diseases, who had few years earlier gotten a permanent positionin Coura’s lab and was in pursuit of novel DNA based molecular markers to betterdescribe/identify the wide range of T. cruzi andLeishmania sp strains.I was introduced to Prof. Coura in the beginning of year 2000 when I was hired as apost-doctoral research fellow of the now extinct department of Tropical Medicine of theIOC. During our brief conversation Prof. Coura told me: “So, you are the person who willshow us where the DNA hides…!” I immediately thought: “this honorable Professor isjoking! Every sophomore knows that DNA is not hidden!”. As it happens to most of theyoung scientists trained in molecular biology, I was convinced that the moleculartoolbox was powerful enough to solve every problem in biology if we could reduce it toits constituent blocks of nucleic acid and proteins. With respect to DNA of protozoaparasites, Roma locusta causa finita.That was the beginning of an intense “living together” in the Arthur Neiva heritagebuilding, home of the Tropical Medicine department until 2007, and from then on for thethree laboratories that remained after the department extinction. Only one out of theselaboratories was really new, the Laboratory for Molecular Epidemiology of InfectiousDiseases , which was created by Octavio Fernandes as a spin offfrom the Coura´s laboratory, the extant Laboratory of Parasite Diseases. At that time,the environment in the Arthur Neiva building was thriving, inspiring and challenging: alot of young researchers, post-docs, graduate students (M. Sc. and D. Sc. candidates),undergraduates trainees, and Senior researchers were in constant discussions andcollaborations in new projects using molecular biology methods to Chagas disease,leishmaniasis, malaria, toxoplasmosis, onchocercosis, giardiasis, echinocososis,schistosomiasis as well as the research on molecular diversity of vectors such astriatomines, simuliids, mosquitos. Most of these subjects were part of the researchportfolio of the extinct LEMDI in collaboration with Coura’s research group members. Ina space so much crowded it is quite natural for tensions between people to appearfrequently. That is why it was so challenging to work out the collaborations within theresearch groups, despite being a thriving and, to certain extent, creative environment.But at the end of the day all tensions would converge to a single person in thisresearch structure: the leadership and authority of José Rodrigues Coura. Whichever thetrouble, the question, the doubt, the stalemate, the demand, the outcry, the hardchoice, Prof. Coura would settle the matters and propose a solution, an outcome. Ofcourse, his decision would not always be welcome by some of the people involved and yetwhat really did matter was that a decision would be made and everyone would respect it.He was the Senior researcher who had founded the department of Tropical Medicine and itsgraduate program, and nobody else in that place would exhibit the same level ofinfluence and leadership over that bold group of young and middle career researchers. Ina certain way this reminds me of a Latin quote acknowledging the power and relevance ofancient Rome: The journal Memórias do IOC was created by a federal decree in 1907, and published itsfirst issue in April 1909. Currently MIOC celebrates 113 years of publication in thefield of human infectious diseases, an uncommon accomplishment in Brazil, a country ofboth unstable and limited support to science and technology. From 1976 to 1980, Memóriassuffered an interruption in its publication activity, and remained in a “dormant” state.It is not my goal to address here the causes of this interruption, nevertheless Irecognise it as an historical event that deeply changed the pathway (andcharacteristics) of the journal. Once its publishing operation was resumed by Prof.Coura, an entirely new journal was opened to the research community of human infectiousdiseases.e.g., publishing articles only from IOCresearchers) and has become an international journal open to researchers from everylocation of the world. Prof. Coura also established a fixed editorial board, andformally introduced the peer review . The journal would keeppublishing articles in Portuguese until 1989, when the editor Eloi Garcia decided toaccept only articles written in English.According to my personal conversations with Prof. Coura about MIOC, soon after he wasappointed director of IOC in 1979, he found the Memórias completely abandoned, with noissue published since 1977, a pile of manuscripts waiting for reading and firstdecision, issues not sent to print, no resources, no adequate equipment. He then set aspriority job “to bring Memórias do IOC back to publishing life”, restoring its relevancefor the Brazilian Science publishing landscape. That was a true “Redeem Mission”, and itwas skillfully done! After restarting the publishing operation in 1980 MIOC left behindits institutional feature  and Carlos Chagas [the scientist who described the new Americantrypanosomiasis and published in Memórias his monumental work (1909)].Prof. Coura took office in 1979 as director of IOC, and simultaneously to the job ofredeeming the MIOC, he engaged in a series of reforms to strengthen and renew the thenoctogenarian IOC. He built an organisational structure based on new departments, invitedexternal scientists to either lead them or establish new laboratories, and created thesecond graduate program of the Institute. The overall result of these scientific andmanagerial reforms was the consolidation of the IOC as one the most relevant researchorganisation in human infectious diseases of Latin America. Prof. Coura’s organisationalreform lasted for 27 years. After several rounds of collective discussions starting in2005, director Tania Araujo Jorge got favorable vote from most of the researchers forthe extinction of the research departments and formally assembled in 2007 a neworganisation grounded on research laboratories. Prof. Coura vehemently opposed thistransformation. It was very hard for him to watch the remodeling of the structure thathe has carefully built, and to defend his legacy he took extreme and opinionatedpositions. For me, personally, it was also a tense moment because I had been sympatheticto the transformations proposed by the new director.you and your colleagues are making a big mistake. A director who has todeal with more than 70 lab heads will not rule properly and will not make up gooddecisions”. Only time will tell us whether Prof. Coura was right...Though we were in opposite sides of our intramural political dispute, I learnedinvaluable lessons from him during the intense discussions about the new organisation ofthe Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. At the height of these discussions, Prof. Coura told me:“life isshort, art is long”.My last politically driven discussion with Prof. Coura was related to the properutilisation of the heritage building Arthur Neiva, the place of the extinct departmentof tropical medicine and its experimental facilities. Prof. Coura refused the proposalof reallocating the laboratories to another building in order to afford them a betterinfrastructure and transforming the Arthur Neiva building in the ‘Teaching Facility ofthe IOC”. Following a couple of long messages exposing our conflicting views about thissubject, which remained a very controversial topic in our conversations from this timeon, Prof. Coura interrupted the discussion by quoting Hippocrates: “José Rodrigues Coura was a great researcher, a pragmatic reformer, a tenacious leader, astrong-minded person. He left us important scientific contributions described inhundreds of articles (in Memórias do IOC he published 99 articles), a comprehensive bookon human infectious disease, a revitalised and modernised scientific journal (MIOC post1980), a strengthened and renovated scientific organisation (IOC post 1980), a graduateprogram in Tropical Medicine, a program to train laboratory technicians, and dozens ofD. Sc. and M. Sc. trained and nourished by him for research in human infectiousdiseases.He was an example of resolute leadership and willingness to accept the hardestchallenges.Too many accomplishments for a single person in a single life.Ars longa...


We study 6000 author-publication observations to investigate predictors of early career success in six fields of economics. Concentrating on top researchers enables us to control for the effects of ability and effort, and focusing on the start of their careers minimizes distortions from reputation feedback. Our results reveal that the most important predictor for early career success is the ranking of an author’s PhD granting institution, followed by his first placement. Our insights suggest that a counterfactual decrease in the Alma mater of a high ability author, who graduated from a top 10 university, by as little as 10 to 20 ranks, reduces his probability of getting a top 5 publication significantly by 13 percentage points. Lowering the ranking of his Alma mater by another 80 ranks decreases his chances of getting a top publication by a factor of three. Our findings suggest that the economics publication market values Alma mater signals, discounting newcomers graduating from- or working at lower ranked departments. Since current economic research is used by practitioners such as policy makers with the intention to improve livelihoods of people worldwide, it is important to understand the factors which shape the development of intellectual influence in Economics. Dissemination of scientific results via academic journal publications is key to evaluate the importance of ideas. Top economics journals reach large audiences within and outside the area of economics, and are therefore likely to affect policy making and other relevant decision making processes.first ten publications of the current top-100 authors ranked on IDEAS as of August 2014. We focus on the top-100 authors in each field to control for heterogeneous abilities: Based on ex-post productivity levels, these authors are arguably capable enough to produce high quality economic research, whose appearance in economics journals is neither because of the prominence of co-authors nor a random fluke. Minimizing the effect of ability is important because academic ability clearly affects every measure of academic success . We analyze the first ten publications of each author to minimize the effects of the past and most recent publication history on new publication chances, reputation and the current ranking of an author.This paper investigates predictors of publications in economics journals and initial job placements in six fields of research: microeconomics, macroeconomics, econometrics, game theory, labor economics and experimental economics. Within each of those branches we study the determinants for acceptance of the We argue that by focusing on ex-post revealed performance rankings we can mitigate the ability heterogeneity in our analysis and disentangle the effects of ability from other factors contributing to early-career publication success. To obtain additional control variables we screen the underlying 600 resumes of our top authors from the fields mentioned above to gain, among other things, information on the author’s first ten publications, their Alma mater, their years of graduation, their gender and the number of co-authors for each of their papers.  also invQuarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies) by a factor of three. More specifically, consider an author whose probability of having a top 5 publication among equally skilled authors is around 30% and whose Alma mater belonged to the top 10 of all schools worldwide around the time of graduation –which is not uncommon in our sample. If, counterfactually, his Alma mater would have been ranked between 21-30 (100+), his conditional acceptance probability to a top journal would drop significantly to 17% (11.6%), controlling for other factors which may contribute to early career success.The main insight from our around 6000 author-publication observations is that the ranking of the PhD granting institution, for each author, is a strong predictor for early career publications in higher ranked journals across the six fields mentioned above. Given the specific composition of authors in our data, whose ability levels are arguably high enough to assume away inability as a factor in rejection decisions, we observe that an increase in the ranking of an author’s Alma mater by 100 places, can increase his likelihood to publish in one of the top five journals in economics  or the Journal of Political Economy (JPE hereafter) increases significantly by 4-6 percentage points if an author’s Alma mater has been Harvard or the University of Chicago, even after controlling for the ranking of an author’s PhD granting university—which still remains a highly significant predictor. More specifically, a degree from Chicago increases the probability of publishing in the JPE by about 4 percentage points, whereas a degree of Harvard has no significant effect on publishing in the very same journal. However, a Harvard degree increases the probability of publishing in the QJE by about 6 percentage points, whereas a Chicago degree has no effect on publishing in the QJE. These results are consistent with [We further observe that the probability to publish in the ent with  who showWe show that our findings turn out to be very robust against various estimation methods and hold for various subsets of authors. Even after controlling for the current rankings of authors in our regressions, the Alma mater effect remains highly significant across fields. The latter insight further confirms that it is not only skill or innate ability, which predicts early career success in economics. Moreover, our analysis also takes learning considerations into account by controlling for time trends (learning over time), by controlling for accumulated top publications (learning by doing) and by controlling for initial placements (learning from peers). However, even after controlling for these various forms of learning, the ranking of an author’s Alma mater remains a highly significant predictor for early career success in economics.Furthermore, the Alma mater effect extends to more general and finer journal-rankings. Over the six fields mentioned above, the ranking of the PhD granting institution is the strongest –and in most cases the only– predictor for the ranking of journals in which authors publish early in their careers, controlling for individual ability levels.Our observations imply that the academic publication market in economics values the Alma mater signal when it comes to publication decisions, which might not be efficient, even after having a significant history of publications. On additional results regarding the inefficiencies in the academic publication market and favoritism, see –6. IntuiOur data on field-specific publications reveal other interesting systematic patterns. First, top macroeconomists tend to publish significantly better than top researchers from most of the other fields considered in this paper. Second, there are strong cohort effects in various sub-fields of economics, which affect publication success  from sOur particular selection of authors does not come without costs. While the advantage is that it minimizes complications associated with unobservable ability characteristics, the disadvantage is a plausible lack of external validity and generalizability of our findings. While we might not clearly state that our results hold for every homogeneous pool of authors, we find it unlikely that any shortcoming that we find in this limited setting goes away for the general population of authors.We study the first 10 publications of our authors, which frequently fall into the pre-tenure period of the authors, when the stakes for publications are high. There are several reasons why we do not consider all publications. First, late career publications of star scientists could be facilitated by the very same current star status. Second, as authors become more experienced over time, they might simply learn how to frame and write papers to increase acceptance probabilities in specific journals or by specific editors. Finally, these star scientists can become editors themselves later in their careers, “turning the tables” and changing underlying motivations .We focus on the early careers of our top economists to lower the chance that these distortions play a role in the publication success of our authors. To verify that early career publications are not affected by their future stardom, we will show below that the current ranking of authors within the top-100 is indeed uncorrelated with the very early career performance of our authors.all our authors display ex-post high ability levels, there should be little correlation between the ranking of the PhD granting university and the ranking of journals in which they published early in their careers—at least in a pure meritocratic world.Probably one of the most important aspect we control for, by focusing on early career publications, is the reputation concern. Economists standing at the beginning of their careers have very little reputation capital—their affiliations are among the very few observables the relevant decision makers observe. This might be a reason why editors and referees value the affiliation as a signal for ability. However, given that The Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy and The Review of Economic Studies.Since we consider the IDEAS ranking of authors, we also consider the IDEAS ranking of journals, which covers more than one thousand different journals across the fields of economics. The ranking is based on several individual ranking methods, taking the harmonic mean and dropping the best and the worst individual ranking for a journal. We provide details and summary statistics on the rankings of publications for our authors, conditional on field, below. By considering various rankings, taking a harmonic mean and correcting for the worst and best ranking, the IDEAS ranking of journals addresses the issues associated with choosing one ranking over another raised in . Besidescurrent IDEAS journal-ranking indeed reflects the ranking of journals back in the relevant time for our highly able authors, a similar assessment cannot be given for the current IDEAS university-rankings. Thus, we looked for another economics-department ranking, which is based on information from the 1990’s, covers a wide range of schools and is not only based on US institutions. Indeed, we found a carefully designed ranking for economics departments, based on the years 1993-2003, which ranks 321 economics departments worldwide and uses the methodology of [http://econphd.econwiki.com/rank/rallec.htm. Hence, the ranking methodology we use is similar to the one used by [Since we want to establish the effects of rankings of PhD granting schools on early career publication success, we had to find a ranking of universities which reflects the ranks of these institution at around the time at which our authors went through the early stages of their careers. While our impression is that the ology of . The ran used by .Most of the universities we were looking for could be found on this ranking. Details on the methodology associated with compiling this ranking can be found online on the same website mentioned above, or by request from the author. Whenever a PhD granting institution was not present on this ranking, we assigned a rank of 325. We further generated a dummy variable which takes a value of one whenever an author initially placed at a non-university research institution such as the IMF, the World Bank or a Central Bank.After having established our basic methodology, we next screened the online resumes of our authors for additional characteristics such as the the years of their graduation, gender, and other variables. In total, out of 600 potential authors contributing to the six fields under concern, 518 unique authors were identified—some belong to the top-100 authors of more than one discipline. The next section provides a more detailed and descriptive analysis of our data.p-values are 0.048 and 0.018 respectively) by about 5 to 6 years, but not significantly earlier or later than researchers from the other fields at a 10% level. Similarly, since experimental economics is the youngest among the six fields considered, we observe that the median graduation year among experimental economists is significantly higher than the graduation years of economists in other fields (except), ranging from seven  to ten .The first lines in the upper and lower panels of our Table show the average years of graduation of our authors, conditional on field. The range (minimum and maximum) and the standard deviations of the graduation years are illustrated in the lines underneath the average. Testing for differences in the median graduation years, using standard quantile regressions and bootstrapped standard errors across fields of research, reveals that there are no significant differences in graduation years between the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, econometrics and labor economics. We essentially run quantile regressions with the individual graduation years on the left hand side against dummy variables for the six fields of research, considering microeconomics as a benchmark. We used F-tests to compare the differences across fields. We double checked our findings using non-parametric rank sum tests to compare the distributions on a bivariate basis. In every case our initial conclusion based on our simple quantile regressions was confirmed. Our top game theorists graduated significantly later than the micro- and macroeconomists . Similar results are obtained if we consider the median instead of the average rankings and test for differences.Game theorists tend to come from significantly lower ranked PhD granting institutions (5% level) if compared to any of the previous four fields. A similar insight holds for experimental economists but there is no significant difference between the rankings of Almae matres and the rankings of initial placements. On average, our authors initially went down the ladder by 33.65 ranks, if we ignore non-university placements. While there are substantial differences in average initial placement attrition, which ranges from 17.83 (econometrics) to 55.18 (labor economics), ignoring again non-university placements, there are no significant differences across fields at a 10% level. For further analysis of the initial placements about graduate students in economics in general, not focusing on top-researchers, see [Rankings of initial job placements also vary substantially across fields from 64.5 (econometrics) to 114.06 . ers, see –18.Quarterly Journal of Economics) whereas lower numbers –ranging from zero to one– indicate publications in lower ranked journals. We assigned zeros to journals which are not ranked on IDEAS. We emphasize that none of our statistical results in later sections depend on this particular transformation. p−values are 0.04 and 0.012 respectively) and significantly more successful than experimental economists .Next, we describe our data on the rankings of journals in which our top authors published early in their careers. For ease of exposition, we consider the inverse of journal rankings, i.e. a ranking of one corresponds to a publication in the best journal ranked on IDEAS , we observe that the fraction of authors with at least one top 5 publication is the largest in microeconomics, macroeconomics and labor economics. Moreover, these three fields do not generate significant differences in those fractions at a 1% level. Authors in the fields of experimental economics and econometrics generate a smaller fraction of authors with at least one top publication than the aforementioned fields at a 5% level. Experimental economists generate the smallest fraction of authors with at least one top publication, if compared to four out of the five remaining fields. Only if we compare econometrics to experimental economics, we obtain that these two fields do not generate a significant difference in this particular fraction .Looking at the fraction of top-5 publications across fields  to 97% (microeconomics).Next, we turn to our analysis of factors influencing the success of early-career publications and initial job placements in economics within the six fields we consider.Gender; authors’ year of graduation (PhD Year)—subdivided into several intervals to control for non-linear cohort effects; the number of co-authors per paper (Co-authors); sequentiality  to control for experience over time; and the rankings of their Almae matres (PhD Rank). Note that the inverse journal ranking is decreasing in nature, and ranges from zero to one. We chose this transformation for the ease of presenting our results, however our findings can be verified to hold under other transformations.In a first step we estimate a standard random effects model, with standard errors clustered on the author level, to predict the inverse rankings of individual publications. As controls we use authors’ We initially estimate these random effect models for each field separately. We initially tested whether our left hand side variable shows significant autocorrelation using . We do nOur results show that the ranking of an author’s Alma mater is a highly significant predictor (1-5% significance level), for the rankings of journals in which our highly skilled authors publish early in their careers in five out of six fields. An increase in an author’s Alma mater ranking (going from better to worse ranked university) decreases the ranking of an author’s publication. Using this simplest estimation method, our results suggest that the ranking of an author’s Alma mater is not a significant explanatory variable in the field of game theory. Instead, we observe that for game theorists sequentiality matters at a 5% significance level, as well as gender and the number of co-authors. We interpret the significance of the sequentiality variable as an indication of the relative importance of experience in publishing articles, or maybe the importance of having a certain amount of contributions to build up reputation. The few female game theorists in our sample also seem to be slightly more successful than their male colleagues, although the latter result is only significant at a 10% level. Co-authorship also matters to explain the ranking of early career publications among game theorists.Sequentiality, in addition to the ranking of an author’s Alma mater, also matters for econometricians (5% level) and also contributes to early career success of microeconomists. Another interesting feature is that for labor economists, later graduation years matter. The earlier a labor economist graduated, the lower ranked are his publications.Initial Placement, to control for the ranking of the university an was author initially placed. The results are shown in Next, we add to our previous regressions the variable Almae matres is now significant for all the six fields, having the expected negative sign. This suggests that game theorists potentially publish a significant number of papers outside economics, in the fields such as Operations Research or Mathematics, which might simply not be ranked on IDEAS, thereby obtaining a value of zero in our (inverse) rankings. Either way, the variable PhD Rank is now significant at a 5% level for all the six fields we consider.Next, we address the issue that our transformed ranking measure is limited from above and below. We again test the relationship between the same variables as above, with the difference that we are now using panel Tobit estimators. The results are shown in Controlling for discontinuities on the boundaries of our endogenous variable via our Tobit estimator reveals that sequentiality matters now, at a 5%-10% significance level, in four out of the six fields, and has a positive coefficient. Put differently, the rankings of publications tend to improve over time, except for macroeconomists and experimentalists. Furthermore, we observe that the number of co-authors correlates significantly (5% level) and positively with the ranking of journals in which game theorists publish.We again control for initial placements in a separate step. The results are shown in Next, we run random effects regressions using all our observations across fields, considering only unique author-observations, and adding the field dummy as a control variable. This left us with 5180 observations. To add the field fixed effects, whenever an author was among the top-100 in more than one field, we randomly assigned the author to one of the fields he contributed to. In a separate step we also dropped the authors who contributed to more than one field an re-ran our regressions. We also used panel Tobit estimators and re-ran our random effects regressions, acknowledging our findings from above. However, none of these changes our results qualitatively.PhD Year) and an author’s gender play no role in explaining the ranking of an author’s publications. Sequentiality (Trend) has a positive impact, suggesting that the ranking of publications of authors increase over time during the early career. We also control for the ranking of an author’s initial placement, which is also significant and has the same sign as the ranking of the PhD granting institution. Hence, the better the initial placement, the better the early career publications. Interestingly, even after controlling for initial placements, the ranking of the PhD granting institution remains significant, although loses magnitude. The two variables correlate, using a Spearman rank-correlation, significantly and positively. Overall the correlation is below 0.6 and ranges from 0.5-0.68, conditional on field. We also control for the underlying fields, using microeconomics as a benchmark, via field dummies. The results confirm our field-specific analysis from above that macroeconomists remain the most successful early-career economists. We also add interaction terms into our regressions, interacting Trend and PhD Rank (Interaction 1) as well as Trend and Placement (Interaction 2). The interaction terms check whether the initial Alma mater and placement effects vanish as the careers of our authors progress. The results suggest that the initial effects are fairly sticky, since both coefficients are insignificant. Lastly, we also add the variable Duration to our regressions, which measures the years between the first and the last of the ten publications of our authors. Duration might therefore be a proxy for early career life-cycle productivity [uctivity , or anotall journals ranked on IDEAS. Moreover, as the ranking of the journal increases, the effect of the ranking of the PhD granting university becomes significantly stronger. Hence, the Alma mater effect becomes increasingly important towards better ranked journals. We depict the quantile regression coefficient associated with an author’s Alma mater in We also estimate the same combined model from above, over all fields, using panel-quantile regression method  the less significant is this particular variable. This cannot be done with a random effects model, since we use the current ranking as a panel-identifier. Thus, we run OLS regressions with sequentiality dummies on the right hand side (our time-panel variable) and controlled for the current IDEAS ranking.In summary, our results suggest that early career success among highly skilled researchers is strongly driven by the ranking of his or her Alma mater. Our robustness checks suggest that this effect is not an artifact of the estimation method or due to the clustering of certain observations into specific bins of the underlying distributions. Our results point towards the possible existence of gender effects, which may affect early career success heterogeneously, conditional on field. The number of co-authors does not seem to have a substantial and systematic effect on early career success among highly skilled authors. That being said, it might well have an effect on less able authors.Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy or the Review of Economic Studies and is zero otherwise. In this subsection we explore predictors of publications in one of the top 5 journals in economics. We construct a dummy variable which takes the value of one if a paper was published either in the Almae matres; Standard deviation: 0.02), 23% , 17.4% , 15% , 13.5%  and 10.2%  respectively. Nevertheless, an interesting insight is that graduates from top 10 Almae matres have a comparative advantage to publish in a top 5 journal of almost 13 percentage points over the colleagues who graduated from universities in the range of 21 to 30. We also extend our probit models, allowing for changes in the coefficients associated with the rankings of PhD granting institutions using cubic splines. Our previous results barely change with an estimated probability that a paper ends up in a top 5 journal being 30% , a mild role in microeconomics (10% significance) and no role in game theory and econometrics.Our results in nth − 1 publication affects the probability that the nth publication also ends up in a top 5 outlet. Within the set of the first 10 publications, we observe that this variable is neither significant from an aggregate nor a field perspective and has no effects on the signs or significances of our other variables. Hence, again for the sake of brevity, we omit reporting these separate probit regressions.We also observe mild cohort-effects when we look at predictors for top publications. Indeed, without controlling for field specific differences, publishing in very prestigious outlets has become significantly more difficult over time. This seems particularly true for microeconomists. We also extended our controls by accumulated top 5 publications for each author to see whether the sum of top 5 publications until the We also looked into the Markov transition probabilities of getting a top 5 publication at some point in our author’s careers, conditional on having and not having a most recent top 5 publication. Our results indicate that the probability of getting a top 5 publication right after a non-top 5 publication is about 18%. This transition probability increases in our author pool to about 33%, if the most recent publication of an author was another top 5 publication. There is very little and no significant difference with respect to this effect across fields.QJE (JPE), which take values of one if a paper was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE hereafter) or the Journal of Political Economy (JPE hereafter). The former journal is edited by Oxford University Press on behalf of the economics department of Harvard, the latter is edited by Chicago University Press. We observe that out of the 158 QJE publications in our data-set, 38 were written by Harvard graduates, 44 by MIT graduates and only 6 by graduates of the University of Chicago. Hence about 52% of the papers, published in the QJE, were written by graduates from the greater “Boston area”, whereas less than 4% were written by Chicago graduates. Our data also reveal that out of 168 JPE publications, 19 (27) were written by Harvard (MIT) graduates, whereas 19 were written by Chicago graduates. For the other top 5 journals we have the following patterns: American Economic Review: Out of 299, 43 (77) by Harvard (MIT) and 13 by Chicago graduates (40% and 4%), Econometrica: Out of 379, 13 (45) by Harvard (MIT) and 2 by Chicago graduates (15% and 0.5%), Review of Economic Studies: Out of 189, 12 (37) by Harvard (MIT) and 8 by Chicago graduates (26% and 4%).Next, we construct a dummy variables, Almae matres. We run random effects regressions, to check for the partial effects of these variables on the QJE/JPE dummies in two separate regressions. The aggregate and field-specific results for QJE publications are shown in To test whether we observe “ZIP code” or “in-house-favoritism” effects, we construct a dummy variable which takes a value of one if a paper was published in the QJE (QJE dummy) and another dummy variable if a paper was published in the JPE (JPE dummy). Next, we construct dummies for Harvard, MIT and Chicago Almae matres still matters for publishing in the QJE (column (1)) and that the rankings of initial placements do not matter significantly. Graduating from Harvard or the MIT does indeed affect the success of publishing in the QJE, whereas graduating from Chicago does not seem to have a statistically significant effect –after controlling for the ranking of Almae matres. We observe field specific differences. Harvard graduates, working on labor- or experimental economics, seem to have a particular advantage over their peers, whereas MIT graduates seem to have an additional advantage in macroeconomics and econometrics to publish in the QJE. Using panel probit regressions, we are able to quantify the relative advantage of Harvard and MIT graduates via marginal effects. We omit the presentation of these regressions for the sake of brevity since the results from the random effects models do not change qualitatively. The results indicate that the relative advantage of Harvard (MIT) graduates amounts to 5 (4) percentage points, which is significant at a 1% (5%) level.First, we observe that the ranking of Almae matres matters only at a 10% significance level and that graduating from Harvard or the MIT has no statistically significant effect on publishing in the JPE. However, graduating from Chicago affects publication chances at the JPE significantly at a 5% level. The field specific regressions reveal that the aggregate effect seems to be generated by micro- and labor-economics. We again compute the marginal effects of a Chicago degree to publish in the JPE, using panel probit regressions. The marginal effect amounts to a significant increase of 3.7 percentage points in acceptance probability. We also observe strong cohort effects, suggesting that it has become increasingly difficult to publish in the JPE over time. We also added to both sets of regressions (QJE and JPE) dummy variables for the remaining top 10 institutions around the time of graduation of most of our authors (ordered based on ranking): Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, Northwestern, U Penn, Yale and NYU. For our JPE regressions only Chicago remains a significant predictor and no other dummy becomes significant. For our QJE regressions, Harvard and MIT remain significant and only (if anything) the Princeton dummy becomes significant at a 10% level. No other school dummy becomes significant at a 10% significance level. We also rerun the same regressions with Econometrica, American Economic Review (AER) and Review of Economic Studies (ReStud) dummies on the left hand side. In our Econometrica regressions only the Princeton and Stanford dummies are significant. In our ReStud regressions we observe that only the Princeton and MIT dummies are significant at a 5% level. In our AER regressions 5 out of the 10 Alma mater dummies are significant at a 5% level . In other words, there is no systematic pattern suggesting that it is always the same set of schools that has an advantage over all other schools across all top 5 journals. E.g.: Within this set of 10 schools the top 3 universities, which generated the largest number of graduates who received Nobel prizes, were Harvard followed by Chicago and MIT. This additional robustness check makes the evidence on QJE- and JPE-publications more striking since both journals can be assigned easily to specific economics departments. Moreover, graduates from these departments seem to be held in high regard by the corresponding editors.Almae matres affect initial placements significantly, conditional on field, among authors who all turned out to be highly skilled. Indeed, if the placement market worked efficiently and only considered skill, innate ability and maybe effort, there should be no significant correlation between the initial placements of our authors and the rankings of their Alma mater.Our data also enables us to look into predictors of initial placements and whether First, we run simple quantile regressions using the rankings of initial placements as endogenous variable, controlling for fields via dummy variables. The results are shown in the first column of Almae matres. We observe that the field-specific placement differences either decrease quite substantially or are not significant anymore. Only in the case of labor economics we observe an emerging field-specific difference, after controlling for the ranking of an author’s PhD granting institution.As expected, we observe that experimental economists place worst, followed by game theorists. Among our authors, the placements in other fields do not differ significantly. Column 3 extends our set of covariates, including also the ranking of Almae matres for our authors.Our results indicate that the coefficient associated with the ranking of an author’s Alma mater is not significantly different from one, suggesting that an increase in the ranking of a PhD granting institution by one translates into an equally sized impact on initial placement success. This is surprising, given that all our authors turned out to be extremely skilled and influenced their relative fields significantly from an ex-post perspective. Almae matres and in column 5 we focus only on university placements. We observe that the prestige of Almae matres for university placements among highly skilled researchers is most important and strongest in the fields of labor economics, macroeconomics and econometrics. An F-test suggests that it is significantly less important in game theory (5% significance) and experimental economics (1% significance). None of the other covariates seem to influence the initial job placement success of our authors. We also used OLS regressions and find essentially the same results, looking at conditional averages instead of conditional medians.In column 4 we interact the field dummies with the rankings of Almae matres have a substantial influence on the success of initial job placements. However, one might argue that –in contrast to the findings on publications– this result is slightly less “troubling”. After all, universities employ researchers not only based on academic skill but also based on other abilities  which might correlate with being at certain prestigious Almae matres. The same argument does not hold, in our opinion, when it comes to scientific publications, which supposedly contribute to a greater good and should therefore not depend on anything else but skill, ability and quality. While our results do not necessarily suggest that authors from higher ranked Almae matres face an advantage, they reveal that lower ranked newcomers are relatively discounted simply based on the ranking of their PhD granting universities.In summary, we observe that the rankings of We estimate the effects of affiliations on a researcher’s chances to publish his work in economics journals early in his career. Since the ability of a researcher is not publicly known at the time of graduation, any information about the researcher’s ability might be useful information for editors and referees. In this section, we discuss potential explanations of the significance of the Alma mater effect we observe.The quality of original research is inherently hard to measure or quantify—the value comes from novelty, which is visible only in the long run. Therefore, editors and other decision makers infer ability from everything they can observe. In our regressions, we had no explicit control to proxy ability, and the natural reaction to our estimates is to notice that our results could be driven by this unobservable: more able authors are likely to be more able in their youth, and therefore are more likely to be admitted to higher-ranked PhD programs. While this argument is plausible, we observe that the Alma mater effect remains significant for the 10th paper submitted, even controlling for past publication history and the placement information. Also, the authors we’ve chosen for our sample are the best researchers in their fields, and their abilities are likely to be high enough to not be an issue for publication. Moreover, the current ranking of these researchers is not a significant variable in our regressions or has no effect on the significance of the Alma mater effect, further underlining that the effect of an increase in ability in our very skilled author pool is not high.Even ignoring the informative content of affiliation, having it statistically significant does not necessarily imply any inefficiency. After all, studying in a highly-ranked PhD program can teach soft skills, such as paper formatting or science-vocabulary, that are not available to graduates of less ranked schools. While this is a plausible explanation, it remains unclear why the benefit of these soft skills is so persistent that it remains to be informative after the 5th publication. Moreover, our interaction terms in our pooled regressions suggest that the Alma mater effect does not seem to vanish over time, within the set of first ten publications. Same can be said about the nurturing effects of getting placed at highly-ranked places: if there was a strong nurturing effect, it should not be that much weaker than the Alma mater effect, since most publications come out after the placement.chef d’œuvre in their Alma mater’s journal when one, arguably, would be accepted to any other journal. However, it might also be evidence on editorial favoritism, which has been documented before [within economic departments is higher than across economic departments. [There is some benefit of having a personal connection to editors: graduates of Harvard University and of University of Chicago have a significantly higher chance of getting a top-5 publication if it is either in the QJE or JPE, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. This might be a voluntary decision of the graduates to publish their d before –6 or on d before : Editorsd before , suggestrtments.  argue thrtments. .Even the most impartial cannot ignore their subconscious. If an advisor of a graduate is an editor of a journal where the said graduate has submitted a paper to, the advisor’s duties dictate to teach the graduate what to do to maximize the probabilities of acceptance, and the editor’s duties dictate to share the information about the brilliance of the advisee with other decision makers. It would be interesting to control for whether the advisor of the researcher in our dataset is the editor of the journal where the paper ended up. Not having this control can lead to the significance of the Alma mater variable because better rated PhD programs tend to have more editors among their faculty . HoweverClosely intertwined with a few of the previous explanations is the story about co-authors: arguably, co-authors appear from the author’s neighborhood, which includes both the graduating program and the first placement. Arguably, at better ranked departments, one should expect co-authors of higher ability. Except for experimental economics, the average number of co-authors is 0.6 in our dataset, which translates to 50% of solo papers . Moreover, keeping only solo papers in the dataset retains the Alma mater effect.Almae matres has a substantial and significant effect on the early publication success of economists, even after controlling for ex-post revealed ability levels. Among highly proficient researchers, economists from lower ranked Almae matres tend to be discounted significantly across all fields, suggesting a potential inefficiency in the dissemination process of scientific thought. The Alma mater effect is large in size: if a top-10 graduate has a 30% chance of publishing in a top-5 journal, graduating instead from a top-30 institution lowers his chances to 17%, and lowering his Alma mater ranking further to 100+ lowers his chances to 10%. This sizable effect is surprising since all of our top authors influenced their respective fields along various dimensions in the long run. Our results further suggest that “in-house” journals favor “in-house” graduates in addition to overall Alma mater effects. Furthermore, the quantity of co-authors has negligible effects on publication success except, maybe, in the field of game theory. The effect of gender on early career success is ambiguous and tends to be field-specific, but female researchers are very underrepresented in the dataset that we study.The prestige of


Current Medicine with great humility and honor. Current Medicine was launched in the post-COVID-19 era in a world devastated by unprecedented calamities that have destabilized economies and institutions. This pandemic must be rigorously examined by the international community to effectively build solutions that meet the upcoming challenges in a world transformed by this generational event. Current Medicine provides a suitable and relevant scientific platform to develop innovative science and technology for dissemination to a global community of healthcare partners.We write this inaugural editorial for the first issue of Current Medicine (CM), which is the official journal of National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Capital Medical University. Springer Nature, one of the most influential and biggest publishing houses in the area of medicine, is the publisher of CM. Led by an outstanding Editorial Board of international experts including academicians of Chinese Academy of Sciences or Engineering (Prof. Songlin Wang and Prof. Hongbing Shen), well-known Prof. Alfred Yung, Prof. Wenbin Li, and more than 40 prominent experts along with the scientific advisor of the Nobelist (Prof. Edvard I. Moser), this multidisciplinary open-access journal aims to lead the field in disseminating and exchanging significant scientific knowledge and discoveries worldwide. It offers an opportunity for clinicians, researchers, academics and the public to develop research agendas. It strives to be an influential journal with great international reputation by clinicians and researchers.Original clinical research of interest in clinical and basic medicine will be published in CM lays emphasis on scientific advances with new therapies or diagnostic tools, including pre-clinical research on innovative treatment and clinical trials, especially for precision medicine and discussions on clinical guidelines including expert consensus for various specialized diseases. CM publishes studies performed by multi-center groups in various disciplines of medicine, including clinical trials and cohort studies from large patient populations. These include head and neck diseases, basic and clinical research for cancers, neuroscience and clinical neurology, phase I/phase II/phase III clinical trials and studies for new drugs or therapies, as well as reviews oriented to the practicing internist and diagnostic puzzles.CM, an expedited review process is adopted. Articles will be published on the Journal’s web page  immediately upon acceptance and accessed with no charge. To make the work published in CM more widely spread to international scientists, CM adopts the fully OA publishing mode. The Institute will sponsor the Article Processing Charge (APC), so no fee will be levied on the authors of CM for the first three years. Moreover, high-quality peer-review will be appreciated by our journal.To actively promote the dissemination of work published in the CM will support establishing new technologies and empowering medical professionals with high quality research for better care of their patients. CM is fortunate to receive the support from an excellent editorial team with an outstanding research and editorial experience in the field of both medicine and modern medical technology.Human history is shaped by the innovations in medicine essential in treatment of novel diseases. To safeguard the survival of the species, it is necessary to continually cultivate the knowledge and technology supporting therapy and prevention. CM, including the readers, authors, associate editors, editorial board members, reviewers, and publisher’s team with the purpose of fulfilling the mission of CM.All in all, we look forward to working with all those who are or will be involved with the


Experimental Economics called for proposals to be reviewed before collecting data. The aim was to gain experience with this new form of organising the research process that has been gaining popularity in many other disciplines over the past decade.1Recently, there has been a growing concern with the (non-)replicability of scientific findings. Many reasons for the ‘replication crisis’ have been brought forward, including uncorrected multiple-hypotheses testing, ex-post theorising, p-hacking, publication bias, and under-powered studies :Reviewing experimental papers before the data has been collected—or pre-results review, for short—has the advantage of addressing many, if not all, of the above problems. Doing so already in the process is particularly important because detecting biases by meta-analytic tools often will be impossible , Lorenz Goette (1), Charles Noussair (1), and Irenaeus Wolff (9). We involved additional editors to avoid handling papers of former or current co-authors. Finding reviewers was reasonable: slightly more than half of all contacted scholars wrote a report. Also, the reviewers’ overall recommendations seem not to have differed substantially from the reviewers’ recommendations on standard submissions. 37 out of 45 reports (82%) recommended rejecting the proposal. We invited resubmissions in three cases, translating into a rejection rate of 86%, which is the same as the current rejection rate of regular submissions of 86%  chances of publishing a null result or even inconclusive results are just too low. However, coming back to the above argument, if a stringent selection is applied during the pre-results review phase, the published results, positive or negative, will be among the most credible in the journal. And because the profession rightly is moving away from the idea that one study is generally enough to decide a question, even high-powered inconclusive results are important if the question is important enough.Widespread usage of pre-results review would have positive side effects. In particular, it would lead to a better-targeted use of resources. First, eliminating the publication bias would strongly reduce the multiplication of efforts of multiple researchers trying to demonstrate a non-existent relationship. Second, false-positive results would become rarer because power calculations are required in Stage 1, which are also reviewed. Consequently, the number of follow-up studies based on false-positive results would be reduced, too. Third, there would be fewer experiments with flawed designs because referees  would spot bad design choices before the experiments are run. Fourth, acquiring funds may become easier for young researchers if they demonstrate to a funding organisation that the research will be published.Having pointed out the advantages and benefits pre-results review has, we now also discuss potential downsides. In the following, we present the most common reservations we have heard and juxtapose them with our experiences where relevant.Experimental Economics after a rejection).Experimental Economics as a journal, as we would be bearing the costs while another journal would be reaping the benefits. Yet, for science as a whole, the pre-results-review procedure would be beneficial, as it would ensure that the results would be published irrespective of the results. The downside would be that the editors and referees whose time and effort were used to advance science would likely become resentful that they put in hard work as long as they cannot get any credit for it.9The first reservation is that we might receive only low-quality submissions because people might prefer not to submit ‘revolutionary’ ideas. They would like first to conduct the study and decide on the submission target when they can judge the scope of the result. Two things can be said about this first reservation before we look at the data. On the one hand, the up-front costs increase, which should discourage low-quality ideas. On the other hand, for revolutionary ideas, authors may hope to publish the study in a top general-interest journal, which may indeed discourage high-quality submissions. Yet, it is not clear why a discouragement should happen even under the somewhat restrictive terms of the Symposium  is by no means “cheap”.Suppose a journal offering pre-results review were to note at some point in time that a non-negligible share of authors is using pre-results review as a cheap improvement device. In that case, one would, of course, need to think of measures that could be taken to address this problem. A first measure would be to introduce desk rejections, as pointed out above. A second measure could be to introduce submission fees, although a submission fee would probably need to be very high to serve as an effective entry bar. A measure that would solve the problem would be not to provide feedback for rejected papers. However, such a measure contradicts transparency requirements and leads to inefficiencies because reviewers’ thoughts would get lost. After all, the most relevant cost may be time, which might be particularly high for innovative ideas in the air. However, time costs are already present if we do not aim for the extremely short turn-around times that some general-science journals work with.before a positive finding has been published. It guarantees that null results are published before so many attempts are made that a “statistically significant” effect is recorded.A third reservation is that laboratory research does not need pre-results review because one can easily re-run studies. In our view, this is a good argument for why the pre-registration of hypotheses (which is part of the pre-results-review process) may not be as crucial for lab experiments as it is for field experiments. Laboratory experiments, particularly those considered to be important, are naturally replicated in follow-up experiments, and null results in these replications may eventually find their way into the journals . However, the main aim of introducing pre-results review is to address the publication bias reduces the incentives to cheat, particularly in reporting incomplete data sets or tweaking the data (see above).A fourth reservation is that scholars might try to cheat. The concern was that scholars might run an experiment, obtain a null result, and submit the paper results-free as a proposal. The proposal gets accepted based on the research question and the design. There are two possibilities: if the submitting scholars report the old data, that runs under fraud. This is something we cannot prevent . If, however, the scholars re-run the experiment (which they have to do anyways in case reviewers suggest any changes to the design), then new evidence concerning this research question is generated.A fifth reservation is the problem of an increased seniority bias. Again, there are several answers. If pre-results submissions were handled under a double-blind protocol, then any seniority bias should be reduced or prevented. Without a double-blind review, it is an empirical question. Of course, we do not have sufficient data to assess the seniority bias statistically. Nevertheless, two out of three Revise-and-Resubmit decisions went to author teams containing scholars ranking in the top 10% of the Repec Ranking . At the same time, there were only seven such scholars among the 27 submitting authors. In this light, it might be reasonable to switch back to a double-blind review. This is much easier with pre-results-review submission because nobody will publicly post their research proposals before submission. In contrast, authors are often identifiable in standard submissions because working papers are available online.A sixth reservation is the risk that authors provide low-quality work at the second stage of the process, in the data collection or the data analysis. Generally, the paper should have high quality because quality is ensured in the first submission stage, and the second submission stage ensures that authors will perform well on the promised analyses. Also, authors are likely to provide high-quality work because their reputation is still at stake. As pointed out above, the evidence from other fields gathered by Soderberg et al.  suggestsA seventh reservation is how to roll out pre-results review on a larger scale. This Symposium provides the first evidence of how it works for the journal—what kind of submissions we can expect and how the refereeing process works. As our discussion above shows, we did not encounter major problems and received good quality. However, implementing pre-results review on a larger scale could affect these outcomes. For example, authors, reviewers, and editors involved in the Symposium may have been particularly motivated. There are also specific issues that would arise. First, implementing pre-results review as a standing option would require another editor on the editorial board. It is less evident whether more reviewers will be needed. On the one hand, the number of initial submissions would increase to a certain degree (our experience suggests an estimate of roughly 30 submissions per year). On the other hand, fewer revisions will be the standard in the second stage because most parts of the second-stage submission have already been reviewed .11It would definitively be necessary to extend the editorial system to add additional default texts and to take into account the additional states . A larger roll-out also requires—in particular at the beginning—more instructions for editors and referees to explain the specific features of the new reviewing process.The most prevalent concern, however, is what the above quote already hinted at: that the journal might end up publishing ‘too many uninteresting results’. But then, again, shouldn’t it be more important to us to get the true answer to an important question, examined through a well-suited design, than to read about ‘interesting results’ that have a far higher probability of being false positives? We need to know ‘uninteresting results’ if they are answers to important questions. And pre-results review is the best way to ensure that.Experimental Economics, we see two reasons to consider it risky to roll it out at the current stage. First, more experience is needed to know how the process scales up. Second, pre-results review is still uncommon in economics, and so Experimental Economics might lose in-principle-accepted papers to top journals.Overall, we are convinced that pre-results review is an option that solves many problems concerning the replication crisis. This Symposium also shows that it is feasible in principle. For


This special issue of Bioinformatics serves as the proceedings of the 30th annual conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), which took place on July 10–14, 2022, in Madison, WI, USA. ISMB is the leading international forum for presenting new research results, disseminating methods and techniques and facilitating discussions among leading researchers, practitioners and students in the field. In addition, ISMB is the flagship conference of the International Society for Computational Biology. Due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the ISMB 2022 meeting was run as a hybrid conference, with online participants from all around the world complementing the on-site participants.The papers published in this volume were selected from 243 submitted full-length papers featuring original research. The submitted papers were thoroughly reviewed with each paper receiving 4.08 reviews on average. For the review purpose, the submitted manuscripts were assigned to one of the 11 scientific areas according to the authors’ preference and research topic, allowing for minor adjustments to avoid conflicts of interest. In addition to selecting one of the 11 areas, the authors could also designate a particular Community of Special Interest COSI;  that wouThe reviewing of the submissions was overseen by the Senior Program Committee (SPC), which included the Proceedings Chairs  and Area Chairs . The definition of conflict was defined as broadly as possible—including collaborators (present and past few years), same institution , family relations, advisees/advisors, as well as any personal conflicts that could cause the appearance of a conflict of interest, or that could genuinely interfere with objective reviewing. Finally, as Proceedings Chairs, we refrained from submitting papers to the conference.Among the 243 submissions, 48 were accepted for presentation at ISMB 2022 and publication in the proceedings, conditioned on revisions properly addressing the comments of the reviewers. In a few cases, the authors had to be reminded to release their source code alongside their manuscript. This year, all 48 conditionally accepted papers were revised and subsequently judged to have properly addressed the concerns of the reviewers and were accepted for the conference proceedings, resulting in a 19.8% acceptance rate overall. The acceptance rates for individual areas are shown in We are deeply grateful to the Area Chairs, the 304 members of the Program Committee and the 270 sub-reviewers for their outstanding efforts in conducting thorough and timely reviews. Their contribution is at the core of the scientific quality of the conference. We also thank Steven Leard, Diane Kovats and Seth Munholland for their support, guidance and handling logistical questions and all the other members of the ISMB Steering Committee for their expert advice and supervision. We also thank the team at Oxford University Press for producing this special proceedings volume.We also thank all the authors for submitting their work. These proceedings would not be possible without the scientific ingenuity of the contributors of all the papers. We recognize that, despite our best efforts, the selection process is necessarily imperfect, and some outstanding work will have been missed. Nonetheless, we hope that all authors received helpful feedback on their work. Finally, we want to thank all the keynote speakers, presenters, and all conference participants.Thank you all for making this meeting possible and the entire ISMB community to continue to thrive.No new data were generated or analysed in support of this research.This work was supported by the James McDonnell Foundation to S.R.; Swiss National Science Foundation grants (205085 and 186397 to C.D.).Conflict of Interest: none declared.


Background: Obesity is sweeping across the developed world. Yet, the publicremains largely confused when it comes to the nature of dietary habits which would serveto counteract this trend. Aim: I highlight the responsibility that thescientific community bears when it comes to the confusion, and explain the kind of actionsthat are needed if the public trust in science is to be maintained. Methods:Starting from an example of a recently published and prominently featured article in aleading journal, I analyse various common methodological aspects of dietetics research andthe consequent claims, contextualizing this within the broader environment which includesthe scientific publishing process and the mainstream media. Results:Methodological inadequacies, erroneous claims, and misleading interpretations of findingsare often found in dietetics research, highlighting the deficiencies of the system whichfails to uphold the fundamental principles of scientific inquiry. Conclusion:It is imperative that individual scientists speak out and challenge poor science,unsatisfactory publishing processes, and bombastic and misleading communication ofresearch. Obesity presents a major problem throughout the developed world. This is no new phenomenon– obesity has been on a sharp rise for at least a few decades . The con and which has been widely reported on in the mainstream media. In particular, Isummarize my disappointment and concern with the quality the aforementioned work and thus,by extension, with the reviewing process which has allowed a whole series of flawedconclusions and erroneous claims to be published. For the sake of brevity, on the technicalside, I restrict my attention to a few most glaring issues which serve to illustrate myfirst point. Following on, I then turn my attention to the aforementioned manuscripthandling process and discuss how its mismanagement facilitates the spread of misguidedinformation and prevents the essential self-correcting aspect of science from takingplace.In the present article I would like to highlight some of the issues which are only all toocommon in dietetics research and its communication to the media and, ultimately, the keydistal target group, that is the general public. I begin with a representative example,namely the work of In this section I would like to bring to attention to the kinds of methodological flawsand dubious interpretations of findings that are worryingly often found in dieteticsresearch, using a prominently publicized work of Results section stating that:extra [my emphasis] calories added by chocolate, they didnot gain significant body weight when eating ad libitum within eachcondition. Of interest, females reduced waist circumference when having chocolate inthe morning.despite these The authors’ discussion of results paints a rather misleading picture from the verystart, the second sentence in the adlibitum energy intake by 16%.as compared to the non-chocolate condition …spontaneously reduced their giving the impression that the participants actually increased their caloric intake. Yet,shortly thereafter we learn that this was not the case and that morning chocolate consumption:In other words, the finding is that a small increase in net energy intake over a shortperiod of time did not effect a significant weight gain – a finding which is hardlysurprising, and certainly not as intriguing as suggested by the authors’ claim that“despite…extra calories…they did not gain significant body weight”. Many of the authors’other findings, once stripped of obfuscating language and technical jargon, reduce tosimilarly trivial observations.de facto unblinded. Had the authorsattempted to analyse the results using an approach designed for such trials (The intake of a rather high amount of chocolate (100 g) concentrated in a narrow (1h) timing window in the morning could help to burn body fat and to decrease glucoselevels in postmenopausal women.The authors then turn their attention to the observed caloric compensation and speculatefirstly that the compensation may be due to “specific components of chocolate, such asepicatechin”, then adding the possibility of a contributory effect of the “macronutrientcomposition of milk chocolate”. Yet, their trial offers no means of providing evidence insupport of either hypothesis, owing to the lack of appropriate control conditions. Tosupport the former hypothesis, there should have been a period during which instead ofchocolate, an energy, macronutrient, timing, appeal, and expected “healthiness” perceptionmatched meal was consumed; to support the latter, an energy, timing, appeal, and expected“healthiness” perception, but not macronutrient, matched meal. The control condition, ofno chocolate intake, is woefully inadequate, with the authors failing to control fornumerous confounding factors. Moreover, probably the most straightforward explanation ofthe observed effect, is not even considered: namely, that the compensation may be due to aconscious effort caused by the participants’ awareness of the unusual dietary practicethat they were asked to observe at the onset of the day and the unfavourable “healthiness’associations with chocolate . The trial was by design h trials , they wois at best grossly misleading and rather irresponsible. It can hardly be surprising that,reporting on the study, The Boston Herald lead with “Eating milk chocolate may help burnfat”, The Harvard Gazette with “Eat the chocolate, lose the weight?”, The Sun with “EatingCHOCOLATE for breakfast can supercharge your weight loss, scientists discover”, The IndiaTimes with “Eating Milk Chocolate After Waking Up Could Help With Weight Loss”, The Mirrorwith “Eating chocolate for breakfast can help you lose weight, scientists say”, etc.two weeks of observation. Thereis little to surprise in the fact that the authors’ claims were readily picked up by whatlooks like an endless stream of media outlets . I cannot help but be reminded of Zeno, who rejected the possibility of motion onthe basis of thought experiments ; and let us rememberwhat only all too often appears to get forgotten, that it is the editors with whom theultimate decision on the publication of an article rests, with the reviewers’ role beingpurely advisory .International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends publication ofthese letters in journals together with their answers. The International Committee ofMedical Journal Editors has declared that all biomedical journals should have such asection because the absence of one ‘denies readers the possibility of responding toarticles in the same journal that published the original work.’Yet, in principle, the error checking and correcting process does not end with thepublication of an article – the system, as envisaged, is more robust than that. Inparticular, I am referring to the importance of follow-up commentary and, importantly,criticisms of published research in the form of letters to the editor – which , namely:Matters of debate are best handled as letters to the editor,…I would superadd two more quotes from ICMJE’s recommendations…they should be prominently labelled, appear on an electronic or numbered print pagethat is included in an electronic or a print Table of Contents to ensure properindexing, and include in their heading the title of the original article.and, regarding expressions of concern:Letters to the editor serve two main purposes; post-publication peer review andsharing experiences with fellow readers. Both are equally important in maintainingjournals’ high standards. Indexing needs to be improved otherwise valuable commentdoes not endure while the original manuscript’s message lives on.Similar points, again stressing the importance of post-publication review and discussionare made by is a policy, considering the original response I receivedand seeing that to the best of knowledge no such policy is stated anywhere on thejournal’s web site) stands in stark opposition to ICMJE’s guidance, leaving The FASEBJournal, and thus also any problematic, questionable, or misleading content published init, out of reach of direct scrutiny and criticism which would be archivedand permanently associated with the original article. In a single move, The FASEB Journalhas removed, to use the very title of the paper by Hence, it should be a matter of serious concern for the entire community what transpiredwhen I tried to express my concerns, summarized in the previous section, to The FASEBJournal. Following my unsuccessful attempts at finding out how to submit a letter to theeditor, I contacted the journal’s administrative office who informed me that I can send itto them, and that they would then forward it to the Editor in Chief. After doing so a fewdays later, I promptly received a response from the Managing Editor who informed me thatthe journal does not publish letters to the editor after all. Clearly, this policy (in somuch that it Dietetics research is only all too often riddled with methodological inadequacies,erroneous claims, and misleading interpretations of findings, uncorrected by a systemwhich fails to uphold some of the basic principles of scientific inquiry. Standing idly bywhile a preventable wrongdoing takes place does not make one an innocent bystander, but acomplicit party. Hence, it is the duty of individual scientists to speak out and challengepoor science, unsatisfactory publishing processes, and bombastic and misleadingcommunication of research.


Our proposed model includes a plea for the publication of all submitted grant applications; open sharing of review reports, argumentations for funding decisions and project evaluation reports; and the disclosure of reviewers' and decision committee members' identities. In line with previous calls for transparency and the available evidence about these measures' effectiveness, we argue that open applications could lead to more diverse collaboration, recognition of research ideas, fairer procedures for grant allocation, more research on funding practices and increased trust in the funding allocation process.Transparency is increasingly becoming the new norm and modus operandi of the global research enterprise. In this mini-review, we summarize ongoing initiatives to increase transparency in science and funding in particular. Based on this, we make a plea for the next step in funders' compliance with the principles of Open Science, suggesting the adoption of  Conseopen applications. Subsequently, we embed this proposal in the academic literature by summarizing ongoing discussions and efforts with the aim to increase transparency in academic funding. Our proposed next step entails transparency about all grant applications—publishing both funded and unfunded applications—the assessment of their relevance and quality, and the decision and monitoring process. In this review, we take stock of earlier initiatives and discuss the arguments in favour of and against their implementation and extension.In this mini-review, we make a plea for the next step in funders' compliance with the principles of Open Science, suggesting the adoption of . 2A more open system of grant application should address multiple aspects. Firstly, it should encompass open sharing of applications—both funded and unfunded ones—either directly after the submission deadline, after grant decisions were made or at some later stage. Secondly, it should include open sharing of review reports and of the argumentation that led to the funding decision, potentially later followed by monitoring and evaluation reports of funded projects. Thirdly, we suggest the open sharing of reviewers' and decision committee members' identities.While the evidence on the effects of the last aspect, the sharing of identities, is still inconclusive ,7, we arThe second suggestion, open sharing of review reports, decision argumentations, and later monitoring and evaluation reports, will provide opportunities for learning and can ultimately support the development and improvement of future proposals by the same applicant or others. The level of transparency will ideally not only make funding decisions more understandable and more acceptable, but also enable a check whether the procedures specified in the call for applications were followed and the review process was fair. This improved level of transparency will likely increase trustworthiness of the way proposals are handled and of the grant allocation system in general. In addition, a system of open applications will stimulate and enable research on research funding practices, allowing better understanding of, and ultimately improving, this essential step in the process of knowledge production. In order to facilitate sharing and improve the findability of published proposals and related documents, we advocate funders sharing them on public repositories, rather than their own webpages. Several currently existing repositories already have the infrastructure in place to implement this.Obviously, the open sharing of grant applications can also be achieved independent of funders' support as applicants themselves can provide access to their proposals. Some initiatives to facilitate this have recently emerged, including the Open Grants platform . Neverth. 3Of course, some obvious objections can be, and have been , raised However, we would actually argue the opposite. If applications are published even if they are not funded, this provides a time stamp to the work, settling potential priority conflicts and providing ‘proof' of being first. In addition, having non-funded proposals out in the open increases opportunities for collaboration and usage of project ideas by others or in other contexts—with or without the initiator being involved—thereby adding value to the work put in the grant application. The Dutch Research Council (NWO) argues similarly in their rationale for publishing grant applications in the Open Science Fund . If non-communism and universalism—i.e. any efforts made by science should come to the benefit of the community and only the content of knowledge claims matters, not the one who made them [In addition, we argue that, from a normative perspective, the fear of being ‘scooped' is not a valid reason not to engage in sharing funding applications. Based on the combination of the Mertonian norms of ade them —one shouA second set of commonly voiced objections are those addressing the open sharing of reviewer and decision committee member identities, review reports, and argumentations leading to funding decisions, which could lead reviewers and committee members to being less critical out of fear of repercussions. Especially, junior reviewers may worry about the consequences of being critical about grant applications by influential senior colleagues . While t. 4Our plea for more openness in research funding processes is not new. In 2015, Mietchen  that demet al. [Since these publications, some progress has been made, but given the time span of nearly a decade, one could easily argue that it has been minimal. Our informal survey of the websites of all funders not publishing abstracts of successful applications by the time of data collection by Gurwitz et al.   out of the total of 167 that were evaluated . A similWe understand that funders might be reluctant to change their procedures without clear evidence of the benefits or solid understanding of the implications. Hence, we encourage them to pilot some of the proposed changes described above and evaluate the findings. Needless to say, all such experimentation should be done in the utmost transparent way to allow different organizations to optimally learn from each others' efforts. Such experimentation could study different degrees of openness, exploring in more detail their practical implications, pros and cons of different options of timings, degrees of release of reports, inclusion of author or reviewer identities, or other aspects outlined above. These experiments could evaluate stakeholder experiences, gain insights into potential unintended consequences, and assess levels of uptake and reuse of openly shared material. In addition, it could map collaborative networks and evaluate the extent to which open applications indeed lead to increased or more diverse collaboration.. 5In summary, we believe that research funders' central position in the research ecosystem provides them with unique opportunities to optimize knowledge production. The responsibility for the relevance, quality, transparency and trustworthiness of research rests on the shoulders of researchers, research institutes, scholarly journals and research funders alike, with none of them having absolute power . Especia


It is widely accepted that science is universal by nature. However, to make science universal, access to research findings is imperative. The open access model of publication of academic articles was established and consolidated during the last two decades. However, most of the open access journals apply article-processing charges (APCs), which can cost more than USD 10,000.00. In regions where support for research is scarce, these funds are usually not available. Similar problems occur in countries with weak economies and, consequently, unfavorable currency conversion rates. This situation reveals a barrier to the alleged universality of science and the access to research findings. In this manuscript, the barriers faced by authors and institutions from low-to-middle income regions to cover APCs and make their science freely available are discussed and illustrated with recent numbers. Article processing charges (APCs) correspond to a fee paid by the authors of academic articles, their research funders, or institutions during the publication process.Publish or perish - and payThe process of publicationNot all journals are open access and consequently do not charge APCs. Therefore, the reasons by which authors decide to pay APCs are multiple.The discussion on the currently practiced open access models necessarily includes the so-called Plan S, a set of requirements drafted in 2018 by 11 national funding agencies across Europe collectively called cOAlition S.There are important concerns on the consequences of Plan S implementation. For instance, it was proposed that Plan S is simply promoting a move from a reader-pays to an author-pays system.How much does it cost to make science available?In a recent essay, the problems faced by authors from low-to-medium income regions to publish open access articles were proficiently discussed.Under the currently practiced models, it is important to highlight that the fee structure of Plan S is unrealistic in countries like Brazil. As well discussed by Kowaltowski and Oliveira, APCs in Brazil are not supported by supplementary funds, but by subtraction from grant totals.The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) is a public foundation linked to the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation to support Brazilian research. CNPq launched in 2021 the “Universal” call, its most traditional program for funding research in all areas.,,A median cost of APCs equal to USD 2,600 was recently estimated.Suggestions on how to mitigate the problem are hard to elaborate. Above all, publishing in journals associated to scientific societies has been consistently proposed as an important action,In conclusionTo be inclusive, the APC system must change, and this is urgent. If not, scientists from low-to-medium income regions will not have their science known by the scientific community and the people in general. This situation strikingly contrasts with the widely accepted concept that science is universal by nature,


Journal of Medical Internet Research for providing this opportunity to discuss our paper [We thank Kajal  and the ur paper  with an Journal of Medical Internet Research, have worked together to make this systematic review as valuable as possible during the publication process; we hope the readers will benefit from it in their future studies.Overall, we think our systematic review is not perfect, but we endeavor to bring contributions and values to health care knowledge. We believe our audience can find not only the flaws but also the values of our paper. We, along with the reviewers and editors of the Our specific responses to Kajal  are as fSecond, we think our current search terms are adequate for our review goals. We have tried other search terms related to our research topic, but not many related or qualified articles were found.Third, the risk of biases and heterogeneity were assessed using the MMAT . This tool not only appraises the quality of individual studies given the heterogeneity of the study designs but also accounts for many biases including confounding bias, nonresponse bias, and sampling bias . MeanwhiForth, we admit that developing and presenting a theoretical framework is not a standard method, but it is our unique way of contributing to knowledge in health care. As you can see in our paper, the framework could (1) map and visualize studies systematically, (2) provide a novel theoretical perspective, (3) and imply many future research directions directly. Regarding these 3 benefits, we believe it is necessary to present this framework even though it is not a standard method.We hope our response has alleviated the concerns raised by Kajal .


One of the major objectives of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) is to improve the quality of training in all biological psychiatry sciences and to foster scientific research in order to advance the field of biological psychiatry with an ultimate goal to improve patient care. In addition to disseminating advances in biological psychiatry through its biennial Congress, WFSBP publishes World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, which also serves as an important medium for communicating advances in the field.‘Transformation of scientific discoveries arising from laboratory, clinical, or population studies into clinical applications to reduce incidence, morbidity, and mortality of diseases’. However, translational chasm is a significant issue in mental health where there are significant challenges in translating basic science discoveries into clinical arena and even more importantly translating clinical discoveries to real world clinical practice. Indeed, several organisations including National Institute of Health and National Institute of Mental Health declared that reducing the translational gap should be a key priority , an international peer reviewed journal, has been to contribute to reducing the translational gap in mental health by publishing articles that synthesise new advances in clinical neuroscience research that have immediate implications for real world clinical practice. This objective very much aligns with the vision of the WFSBP and we are delighted to share the news that the WFSBP has recently added this new journal to its portfolio of journals. Given the highly clinically relevant nature of the manuscripts that the DCNS has been publishing, it is not surprising that these articles are highly cited contributing to an impact factor of over 5 for the journal. The DCNS under the auspices of WFSBP will continue to be edited by Professor Florence Thibaut with support from a group of international clinician scientists with expertise in translational neuroscience, thus ensuring the adherence to the original vision of the journal. DCNS will be an open access journal with 4 issues in the first year and will include invited state of the art synthesis of clinically relevant neuroscience articles as well as manuscripts that report on original highly relevant clinical research.True to its vision, this first inaugural issue of the DCNS under the WFSBP, includes articles that address several clinically relevant topics ranging from addressing contemporary topics such as chemical sex to advances in technological tools such as digital phenotyping, blood metabolic profile and graph theory to synthesis of new knowledge on cognitive function in bipolar disorder and gender dysphoria. As well, DCNS will strive to publish research from all parts of the world and the manuscripts included in this first issue reflect that aim. Falsaperla et al.  from CatWe hope that the DCNS will continue to play an important role in bringing highly clinically relevant topics to the clinicians in order to reduce the translational gap in psychiatry.


Human Reproduction Open now has an impact factor, its first since its launch 5 years ago. This is welcome news, which demonstrates that the papers published in this journal are visible to, and are being cited by, our peers. The concept of a metric to inform decisions about prioritizing journals for indexing was first introduced by Eugene Garfield, and, since 1975, the impact factor for a journal has been calculated as the number of citations in a particular year over all citable publications in that journal over the two preceding years. Traditionally used as a measure of the quality of a journal, it comes as no surprise, that from the very start, impact factors have favoured established journals which receive the best academic output and can be very selective about what they publish. It is difficult for new journals to break into this elite league and the impact factor itself has come under attack for failing to fully capture the quality of a journal, its contents or the academics who publish in it. More recently, research funders have begun to challenge the link between impact factor and research quality and initiatives like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) have proposed alternative ways of evaluating the quality of research.HROpen has published protocols, research validating previous findings, recommendations for practice and clinical guidelines.Our new impact factor is a testament to the accessibility and relevance of our articles to the academic community who can cite them, as well as the non-academic community who can grasp the gist of what we publish through our lay summaries. It vindicates our conscious decision around the diversity of our output and unconventional approach towards curating and presenting scientific thought. In addition to showcasing new discoveries, From the start, we were committed to making science accessible to clinicians and patients across the world regardless of their familiarity with jargon or ability to pay. Our open access format has been critical in ensuring that our publications have immediate and widespread impact and are able to facilitate evidence-based decisions in healthcare. Meanwhile, the academic community has witnessed a major shift from the notion of research being an end in itself, to a recognition of the need for societal impact. Plan S, an initiative launched in September 2018 and supported by many funding organizations, mandates that from 2021, all research supported by public or private grants from research councils and other funding bodies, must be published in compliant open access journals or platforms, or made immediately available via open access repositories. Biomedical scientists are mindful of the need to make research freely available as quickly as possible so that their peers can build on the existing body of knowledge to expedite the translational pathway for new discoveries and maximize any potential health benefits.Human Reproduction, Molecular Human Reproduction and Human Reproduction Update as well as Oxford University Press for all the support we have received. Most of all, we are grateful to all the authors who entrusted their work to HROpen, to the editors and reviewers who provided their expertise and knowledge and to our readers who have embraced our values.We are grateful to ESHRE who had the vision to launch an open access online journal, our colleagues in As a new online journal, there have been times when some may have felt we were less visible than our more established peers. This has now changed. Our impact factor of 7.13 provides empirical proof that our articles are being read and cited. Five years into our journey, we could not have asked for more.