{"id":681,"date":"2010-09-16T01:35:15","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T07:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/?p=681"},"modified":"2010-09-16T01:35:15","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T07:35:15","slug":"plos-one-needs-new-subjects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/16\/plos-one-needs-new-subjects\/","title":{"rendered":"PLoS ONE needs new subjects"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like the PLoS journals, including PLoS ONE<\/a>, a lot. But it drives me a little bit crazy that the list of PLoS ONE subjects includes things like Non-Clinical Health, Nutrition, and Science Policy, while perfectly respectable subjects like Psychology, Economics, and Political Science are nowhere to be found (note: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Nutrition, just that there’s also nothing wrong with Psychology).<\/p>\n

I can sort of understand the rationale; PLoS ONE is supposed to be a science<\/em> journal, and I imagine the editors feel that if they opened up the door to the aforementioned categories, some of the submissions they’d start receiving would have tenuous or nonexistent relationships to anything that you could call science<\/em>. But in practice, PLoS ONE already does<\/em> take articles in all of those subjects–and many others. And what then happens, no doubt, is that the editorial board has epic battles over which of the 40-odd existing subjects is going to become the proud beneficiary of a completely unrelated article.<\/p>\n

I imagine it goes down something like this:<\/p>\n

Editor A<\/em>: Look, “Patriarchal principles of pop music in a post-Jacksonian era” is clearly <\/em>an Epidemiology article. It’s going under Public Health and Epidemiology.<\/p>\n

Editor B<\/em>: Don’t be a fool. There isn’t a single word in the paper about health or disease. You’d know that if you’d bothered to read it. It obviously <\/em>belongs under Mental Health.<\/p>\n

Editor A<\/em>: Absolutely not. Infectious Diseases, Pediatrics and Child Health, or Anesthesiology and Pain Management. Pick one. Final offer.<\/p>\n

Editor B<\/em>: No. But I’ll tell you what. Send it back to the authors, ask them to add a section on the influence of barbiturates and opiates on modern composition, and then we’ll stick it under Pharmacology.<\/p>\n

Editor A<\/em>: Deal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lest you think I’m making shit up<\/span> exaggerating, witness exhibit A: a paper published today by Ara\u00c3\u00bajo et al entitled “Tactical Voting in Plurality Elections”<\/a>. To be fair, I don’t know anything about tactics, voting, plurality, or elections, so I can’t tell you if the paper is any good or not. It looks<\/em> interesting, but I don’t understand much more than the abstract.<\/p>\n

What I can<\/em> tell you though with something approaching certainty is that the paper has absolutely nothing to do with Neuroscience–which is one of the categories it’s filed under (the other is Physics, which it also seems to bear no relation to, save for the fact that the authors are physicists). It doesn’t mention the words ‘brain’, ‘neuro-‘, ‘neural’, or ‘neuron’ anywhere in the text, which is pretty much a necessary condition for a neuroscience article in my book. The only conceivable link I can think of is that it’s a paper about voting, and voting is done by people, and people have brains. But that’s not very compelling. Really, it should go under Political Science, or Economics, or Applied Statistics, or even a catch-all category like Social Sciences. Except that none of those exist<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Pretty please, PLoS ONE, can we get a Social Sciences section?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like the PLoS journals, including PLoS ONE, a lot. But it drives me a little bit crazy that the list of PLoS ONE subjects includes things like Non-Clinical Health, Nutrition, and Science Policy, while perfectly respectable subjects like Psychology, Economics, and Political Science are nowhere to be found (note: I’m not saying there’s anything … Continue reading PLoS ONE needs new subjects<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,126],"tags":[429,708,430],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-aZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":683,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions\/683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}