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Call for a fairer approach to authorship in publishing biomedical research.
In this Perspective article, we call for a fairer approach to authorship practice in collaborative biomedical research to promote equity and inclusiveness. Current practice does not adequately recognise all contributors involved in different stages of the work and may exacerbate preexisting inequalities. Here, we discuss some key features of contemporary collaborative research practice that complicate authorship decisions. These include the project size, complexity of multidisciplinary team involvement and researchers having varying degrees of expertise and experience. We conclude by making some suggestions to address these concerns.
Online Courses Provide Robust Learning Gains and Improve Learner Confidence in the Foundational Biomedical Sciences
The early stages of medical school involve education in a number of foundational biomedical sciences including genetics, immunology, and physiology. However, students entering medical school may have widely varying levels of background in these areas due to differences in the availability and quality of prior education on these topics. Even students who have recently taken formal courses in these subjects may not feel confident in their level of preparation, leading to anxiety for early-stage medical students. These differences can make it difficult for instructors to create meaningful learning experiences that are appropriate for all students. Additionally, actual or perceived differences in preparation may lead fewer students from diverse backgrounds to apply to medical school. Therefore, creating an efficient and scalable way to increase students’ knowledge and confidence in these topics addresses an important need for many medical schools. We recorded pre- and post-course quiz scores for 9790 individuals who completed HMX online courses, developed in accordance with evidence-based learning practices and covering the fundamentals of biochemistry, genetics, immunology, pharmacology, and physiology. Each question was accompanied by a Likert scale question to assess the learner’s confidence in their answer. Learners’ median post-course quiz performance and self-assessed confidence significantly increased relative to pre-course quiz performance for each course. Improvements were consistent across US-based medical schools, non-US medical schools, and course runs open to the public. This indicates that online courses created using evidence-based learning practices can lead to significant increases in knowledge and confidence for many learners, helping prepare them for further medical education.
Resistance is futile? Resolving radical disagreements about medical treatment between patients and doctors
Thursday, 12 June 2025, 6pm to 7pm
Artificial intelligence for modelling infectious disease epidemics.
Infectious disease threats to individual and public health are numerous, varied and frequently unexpected. Artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies, which are already supporting human decision making in economics, medicine and social science, have the potential to transform the scope and power of infectious disease epidemiology. Here we consider the application to infectious disease modelling of AI systems that combine machine learning, computational statistics, information retrieval and data science. We first outline how recent advances in AI can accelerate breakthroughs in answering key epidemiological questions and we discuss specific AI methods that can be applied to routinely collected infectious disease surveillance data. Second, we elaborate on the social context of AI for infectious disease epidemiology, including issues such as explainability, safety, accountability and ethics. Finally, we summarize some limitations of AI applications in this field and provide recommendations for how infectious disease epidemiology can harness most effectively current and future developments in AI.
Who Counts? Ghanaian Academic Publishing and Global Science
Since the 1990s, global academic publishing has been transformed by digitisation, consolidation and the rise of the internet. The data produced by commercially owned citation indexes increasingly defines legitimate academic knowledge. Publication in prestigious ‘high impact’ journals can be traded for academic promotion, tenure and job-security. African researchers and publishers labour in the shadows of a global knowledge system dominated by ‘Northern’ journals and by global publishing conglomerates. This book goes beyond the numbers. It tells the story of how the Ghanaian academy is being transformed by this bibliometric economy. It offers a rich account of the voices and perspectives of Ghanaian academics and African journal publishers. How, where and when are Ghana’s researchers disseminating their work, and what do these experiences reveal about an unequal global science system? Is there pressure to publish in ‘reputable’ international journals, what role do supervisors, collaborators and mentors play, and how do academics manage in conditions of scarcity? Putting the insights of more than 40 Ghanaian academics into dialogue with journal editors and publishers from across the continent, the book highlights creative responses, along with the emergence of new regional research ecosystems. This is an important Africa-centred analysis of Anglophone academic publishing on the continent and its relationship to global science.
Revelation or confirmation?
Fakes have become a matter of concern across global health. Commissioning inquiry into presumed fake practices in global health requires both a pre-existing sense of what would constitute real provision and a suspicion that it is not being offered. In this Position Piece, we analyse the research methods being used to identify and reveal other—presumed—fakes in global health provision. We put forward the concept of the ‘second-order fake’—the fake that is used to reveal a fake—to draw attention to the methodological politics at stake in the use of the fake. By reviewing historical cases of the creation of methods of deception, we analyse the assumptions they bring into global health from other disciplines. We foreground the promises of revelation that are embedded in probes that rely on fakes to uncover fakes. We suggest that despite the growing prevalence of methods which themselves deploy fakes to find fakes, these techniques bring us no closer to understanding the lived ambiguities of everyday practices of fakery.