Forum:The best way to share scientific findings with community

Question

[zizigolu]

Hi,

I think the best way to share scientific findings is publishing in peer review journals but I think the way of sharing findings in science is more complicated than what I think. For example sharing via conferences or git (what I got from biostars). May you help me please to get if I am right that publishing in journals could be considered as a suitable way?

thank you

[GenoMax]

Until one's "progress" is tied to publishing (at least in academics) there is no other way but to find highly rated journals to start the quest of publishing your results (and work your way down the "impact factor chain" until your paper gets published). This also has been an age old question with no good answers. I just discovered an article in NY TImes that is from 1985 discussing alternatives to tenure.

[Devon Ryan]

I think you're missing a "not" in your opening sentence :)

[zizigolu]

Thank you guys. Again, without reading your points of view here, what you mentioned would not come in my mind easily only by googling. For whom are just seeking a career in science as genomax stated publishing in journals is unavoidable. As Devon Ryan mentioned, it is depend, for whom working on a hot topic in medicine or theoretical physics for instance, might be sharing the findings in meetings is more exciting.

[Devon Ryan]

I've moved this to the forum, where it's probably more appropriate.

Answer 1

[Devon Ryan]

Sure, publishing the results in a peer reviewed journal is sort of the de facto method of sharing results. One doesn't have to do that, though it's typically required to further one's career. Typically presenting at conferences is done in parallel to this, for what that's worth.

Other methods would be preprints (think bioRxiv), blog posts, twitter, etc. All of these have their utility and can typically be done in combination with the more traditional methods mentioned above.

Of course, this all assumes that you're really talking about sharing a finalized story with the external community. If you want to share results with collaborators or internally within your group then pretty much none of this applies (except maybe github).

Answer 2

[5heikki]

IMO everyone should upload to bioRxiv prior to submitting to any journal. Here's a recent related story from Science.