BIH Lecture "Is the scientific literature better today than it was 10 years ago?" by Anita Bandrowski

Part of the Lecture Series "Frontiers in Translational Medicine - Scientific and Structural Challenges" on key questions of translation in medicine. The lecture is moderated by Prof. Ulrich Dirnagl (Founding Director BIH QUEST Center | BIH Chair | Research Group Leader).

BIH Lecture (in English)

In this lecture, Dr. Anita Bandrowski will explore the types of metrics that can be gathered about the scientific literature, why the metrics exist and how people use them. After a broad look at multiple metrics, two main topics will be explored:

1. Research resource identifiers (RRIDs), persistent unique identifiers for key biological reagents | The talk will discuss why and how to use these identifiers to tell others exactly what materials, model organisms or software and tools you used to complete your research.

2. The research transparency index (RTI): The talk will examine the elements of the RTI and explain why we think that putting a number on a manuscript is useful.

About the Speaker

Dr. Anita Bandrowski trained as a bench neurophysiologist, working to elucidate physiological mechanisms of learning and epilepsy. However, soon after postdoc, Dr. Bandrowski began to work in data, starting with the annotation of the human genome for Celera Inc. then moved to neuroinformatics with the award of the Neuroscience Information Framework by the NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience. The goal of this project was to create a comprehensive list of databases for neuroscience and to federate search across as many of these databases as possible. The framework grew to the most comprehensive search system for neuroscience data on the web. This broad overview of the data landscape highlighted the need to align and structure data and dearth of reagent information, especially how reagents and tools are cited in the scientific literature.

To address reagent underreporting issues, Dr. Bandrowski is a founder and serves as the lead for the Research Resource Identification, RRID, Initiative, a group dedicated to transforming scholarly communication, which has recently become a non-profit organization. RRIDs are unique identifiers for Key Biological Resources, aggregated by our group from community databases and requested from authors in participating journals.

Dr. Bandrowski also is a cofounder and CEO of SciCrunch, a company that works with publishers.
She is currently BIH Visiting Fellow of the Stiftung Charité.

Registration

The Lecture will be held online via GoToMeeting. Registration has expired.