Our summaries have become less “quarterly” and more ad hoc – so apologies to those who have been waiting since January for a recent roundup of the topics covered at the Black Hole. Recent efforts from Jonathan have focused on how we can best support and fund translational research so it actually makes the journey from the lab; and I’ve been exploring some of the dark corners of peer review and engaging with new tools on research assessment. We also had a very popular guest post (number 1 in this period!) from Dr. Anna Reid in Germany about the desire to see more male role models in fighting inequality in the sexes in academic science.
For our not-so-regular readers, the top five posts from this period have been:
- Addressing gender inequality in science: Male role models wanted
- A glimpse past the smoke and mirrors at Nature magazine
- New idea for driving scientific debate in your journal club: PREreview
- New approaches to breaking down barriers in academic science
- Preparing your application package for an academic job
Interestingly, one of the top five posts is something Jonathan penned almost three years ago (preparing your application package), suggesting that provision of “career resources” based on our own experiences might be something that we could explore in future – what do readers think about this, would it be useful? Feel free to contact us or comment below.
As always, we are interested in getting your opinions on topics near and dear to your heart – the guest posts resonate with readers because they are often on topics that the writers are incredibly passionate about. Sometimes it’s a personal story that needs to be shared (like Sabrina in the last period) and sometimes it’s just the result of noticing something that really rubs you the wrong way (like Anna’s post this period) – either way, we hope readers will continue to see the Black Hole as a place to share those opinions.
The complete list of the posts from this period are listed below by author:
Dr. Anna Reid:
Jonathan:
- We need to fix tech transfer at universities
- A resourcing model for translational research
- Tackling the biggest gaps in translational research funding
- Really? We’re going to tax students now?
Dave:
- A glimpse past the smoke and mirrors at Nature magazine
- New approaches to breaking down barriers in academic science
- PREreview: Get it done sooner to avoid double review
- New idea for driving scientific debate in your journal club: PREreview
Dave also continued to write for Signals blog and published the following articles:
