Pre-Class Activity, Week 2 - Science Communication

This pre-class activity will help you think about communicating science. This is a theme we will be exploring throughout the course in different ways.
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    Imagine you just completed your experiment, you've written it up (Abstract, intro, methods, results, discussion)! What now? How are you going to communicate your work?

    To help you think outside the box a little bit and give you a little context for the ways science is being communicated, check out these links: Twitter in science https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0435 *** Read the abstract and the intro (pages 1 - 4) of this publication Blogs in science http://wcx.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/06/19/0741088313493610.abstract - this link is failing... The PDF is now posted to Canvas, under files. Sorry it's kind of a run-around to get to! *** Read the abstract and skim the rest (think about how we can apply this info to our class blog) After having read those pieces, please imagine what is important to YOU, in terms of communicating your science work?
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    How are you going to disseminate your research to these audiences? In other words, what venues will reach these audiences?

     
     
     
     
     
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    A traditional venue for communicating science is the peer-reviewed journal.

    Hint: a journal is a fancy way to say magazine, think Vogue, the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated. Science has lots of journals. Many of them are peer-reviewed, which means that someone vets the articles and signs off that the research is done well and the topic is cool enough to meet the journals standards. If your peers say that your research is good - than it must be? Peer-review is kinda like the Yelp of science... Let's think more about that. You might think that Peer Review is a fail-proof process that weeds out the crappy articles from good ones... however, this isn't the case and some journals have better articles than others, even with peer review. I.e. Not all peer-reviewed scientific journals are created equal (think the New York Times vs US Weekly). For an interesting perspective on Peer Review, check out these links: ***This is article about predatory journals - a concept beyond the scope of this exercise - but I think it opens the "can of worms" associated with Peer-Review in a really interesting way. Read the abstract, keep going if you are interested! http://portside.org/2013-10-06/whos-afraid-peer-review ***This is a great letter addressing some of the faults/problems/issues in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review Article. Please read! http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1168.2
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    We are going to do some library/literature research in this class. I like to think about science publications from the author's perspective before we talk about finding articles.