2020/12/10

Guide-only word counts - the start of a (perfectly reasonable) trend?

Journals have long specified strict word counts for submitted papers. Indeed, some online submission systems count the words in a submitted paper, and automatically reject those which exceed the limit, even if only by one word. Authors are fully aware of these limits, and often take painstaking efforts to meet...

2020/11/11

Text recycling - the view of the editor of a major Japanese journal

Regarding our previous post on iThenticate’s similarity index, we got some feedback from a senior Japanese researcher. She has been the editor of the major Japanese journal in her field, and has published a lot of papers. So she understands the self-plagiarism problem as both journal editor and author. She...

2020/10/10

HEAVIEST OBJECTS IN THE UNIVERSE

2020/10/01

Unifying data on protein abundance

Scientific research is about investigating a new question or idea, either by primary research or collating and analyzing secondary data. A big obstacle for the latter is that studies from different groups often use different methods or units to study and report similar outcomes, which can make it difficult to...

2020/08/27

Diary of a submission withdrawal request

Here is one author’s recent experience with a paper she submitted to a journal. The journal, which we will call JOXX, is published by one of the Top 2 science publishing companies. DMC edited the paper in April 2018, and the author (MI) submitted it soon thereafter. In March 2019...

2020/08/04

About the Obon holiday

DMC will close from Aug 13th (Thu) to Aug 16th (Sun) for the Obon holiday. For urgent requests during this time, please email us at [email protected] with ‘URGENT’ included in the subject line'. Please note that we are unable to support translation requests during the holiday.

2020/07/16

Self-plagiarism and the problems of the Similarity Index

DMC is often asked to paraphrase a paper’s text when questions of plagiarism and self-plagiarism arise. But the manner in which plagiarism is currently identified is simplistic - based on the identification of similarity among text - and rife with problems. One common service is iThenticate. Most authors will know...

2019/04/25

About Golden week holiday

We will close from Apr 27 (Sat) to May 6th (Mon) as same as national calendar. But if you have an urgent request, please send an email to [email protected] with the subject tile including ‘URGENT’. About translation request, unfortunately we can not deal with during the holiday.

2018/11/07

The retina, a window to the heart

Retinal fundus images – photographs of the back of the eye – have traditionally been used to monitor the progression of eye diseases. Increasing research, however, suggests that the network of blood vessels visible in fundus images may be useful for evaluating and even clinically diagnosing other complications such as...

2018/10/16

The speed of light - just how does it feel?

Let’s be honest - you’ve always wanted to know what the speed of light really meant. Oh, 8 minutes 19 seconds to Earth - you knew that - but how would it feel? If you were a photon emitted by the sun, how fast would your trip feel as you...