Related papers: An objective criterion for evaluating new physical…
We develop a theory for describing composite objects in physics. These can be static objects, such as tables, or things that happen in spacetime (such as a region of spacetime with fields on it regarded as being composed of smaller such…
The selection process of proposals is a crucial component of scientific progress and innovations. Limited resources must be allocated in the most effective way to maximise advancements and the production of new knowledge, especially as it…
The editorial handling of papers in scientific journals as a human activity process is considered. Using recently proposed approaches of human dynamics theory we examine the probability distributions of random variables reflecting the…
The structure of collaboration is known to be of great importance for the success of scientific endeavors. In particular, various types of social capital employed in co-authored work and projects bridging disciplinary boundaries have…
The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…
Success in academia hinges on publishing in top tier journals. This requires innovative results. And this requires clear and convincing presentation of said results. Presentation can make the difference of one tier in journal level. A lot…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
How well integrated are more theoretically and application oriented works in Physics currently? This interesting question, which has several relevant implications, has been approached mostly in a more subjective way. Recent concepts and…
Personal connections between creators and evaluators of scientific works are ubiquitous, and the possibility of bias ever-present. Although connections have been shown to bias prospective judgments of (uncertain) future performance, it is…
Scientific writing builds upon already published papers. Manual identification of publications to read, cite or consider as related papers relies on a researcher's ability to identify fitting keywords or initial papers from which a…
Automatically grading the diverse range of question types in high school physics problem is a challenge that requires automated grading techniques from different fields. We report the findings of a Systematic Literature Review of potential…
Since the publication of Robert K. Merton's theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or countries.…
We propose a new and rather stringent criterion for testing the goodness of fit between a theory and experiment. It is motivated by the paradox that the criterion on \chi^2 for testing a theory is much weaker than the criterion for finding…
Analysis of credibility is a reverse-Bayes technique that has been proposed by Matthews (2001) to overcome some of the shortcomings of significance tests. A significant result is deemed credible if current knowledge about the effect size is…
There has been a lively debate in many fields, including statistics and related applied fields such as psychology and biomedical research, on possible reforms of the scholarly publishing system. Currently, referees contribute so much to…
Experimental program review in our field may benefit from a more quantitative framework within which to quantitatively discuss the scientific merit of a proposed program of research, and to assess the scientific merit of a particular…
In the absence of empirical confirmation, scientists may judge a theory's chances of being viable based on a wide range of arguments. The paper argues that such arguments can differ substantially with regard to their structural similarly to…
Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
Objective probability in quantum mechanics is often thought to involve a stochastic process whereby an actual future is selected from a range of possibilities. Everett's seminal idea is that all possible definite futures on the pointer…
A possibility and peculiarities of registration of new fundamental forces in open quantum systems are discussed. As a possible example, variations of decay rates of radioactive elements reported in scientific literature are considered in…