Author: Liz Allen

2017 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing – Call for Nominations in Criminology

Liz Allen Awards

Annual Reviews is pleased to sponsor the 2017 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for Scientific Reviewing, presented in criminology.

The award was established in 1977 through a gift from Annual Reviews together with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to recognize the importance of reviews to the scientific method. Annual Reviews currently sponsors the award in its entirety.

The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing recognizes authors whose publications have reviewed important subjects of research, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the course of scientific thought. Since its establishment, the award has been presented to 38 recipients, two who have gone on to win a National Medal of Science in the Biological Sciences and two who proceeded to win a Nobel Prize.

This year’s selection committee defines “reviews” broadly to include not only formal review articles but any publication that synthesizes and critiques existing research, offering useful new perspectives on a field. The award will honor the cumulative effect of the candidate’s writings, which may be embodied in multiple publications. To nominate a review author in the field of Criminology, you must submit your application by Monday, October 3, 2016.

Annual Reviews was founded as a nonprofit organization to synthesize the ever-increasing volume of scientific research and data in a growing number of disciplines. Since the publication of the first Annual Review of Biochemistry in 1932 to our newest journal the Annual Review of Criminology in 2018, Annual Reviews has brought to its readers the best in comprehensive scientific review literature.

The NAS is a private, nonprofit society of distinguished scholars. Established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community.

Our Microbial Partners

Liz Allen Journal News, News , , , , ,

Congratulations to Ed Yong on his new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, in which he explores the microbes that live and multiply all over humans and other animals, helping us thrive and shaping our behavior.

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While our view of microbes is still heavily skewed by the germ theory of disease, which paints them solely as pathogens, recent research has shown that an estimated 50% of the cells we carry around are microbial in nature, and only a fraction of these actually make us ill.

In fact, each animal is an ecosystem and our individual microbiomes play an essential role in keeping us healthy. They help us evolve, break down nutrients from the food we eat so we can better assimilate them, teach our immune system how to defend us from disease, and favor brain development, among other things. Scientists even found that germ-free mice exhibited autism-like behavior, and that probiotic therapies can have positive effects on depression and anxiety.

Yong cited seven of our articles in his book, all of which you can access for free for the next 30 days

The Influence of Milk Oligosaccharides on Microbiota of Infants: Opportunities for Formulas, Annual Review of Food Science and Technology
Biofilms and Marine Invertebrate Larvae: What Bacteria Produce That Larvae Use to Choose Settlement Sites, Annual Review of Marine Science
The Microbiome in Infectious Disease and Inflammation, Annual Review of Immunology
Ecological Physiology of Diet and Digestive Systems, Annual Review of Physiology
Vaginal Microbiome: Rethinking Health and Disease, Annual Review of Microbiology
Human Milk Glycans Protect Infants Against Enteric Pathogens, Annual Review of Nutrition
The Human Gut Microbiome: Ecology and Recent Evolutionary Change, Annual Review of Microbiology

For more, listen to Yong discussing his book with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross on August 18, 2016.

Annual Reviews at the SSP Annual Meeting – Vancouver bound!

Liz Allen Conferences & Events

SSP38thAM_SmallImageThe Annual Reviews team is heading to Vancouver next week to continue our participation in the Annual SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) meeting which has previously been held right on our doorstep in San Francisco (we’re based in Palo Alto). We’re looking forward to flying out of the fog and exploring a new city!

For those of you who don’t know us, Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher of highly cited reviews that synthesize the research literature in a clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

Here’s a brief rundown of who will be there and the panels where you can find them:

Also in attendance, Marquita Druker (Marketing Specialist), Anna Fleming (Institutional Marketing Specialist) and Andrea Burtness (Project Coordinator, IT).

We look forward to meeting you there.

Leader and Leadership Development

Liz Allen News

We now know that leaders are mostly made, not born.

As organizations worldwide put a growing emphasis on finding, developing, and keeping leaders, leadership development has drawn from decades of research to become a discrete scholarly field of organizational psychology.

Establishing a framework for this field can help individuals and organizations create and expand their capabilities for effective leadership.

In their article “Leadership Development: An Outcome-Oriented Review Based on Time and Levels of Analyses,” David Day and Lisa Dragoni outline this framework and review the current knowledge to set up a theoretical foundation for future research.

“Leader development” implies a focus on individual leaders to identify short-term indicators that the work will bring about positive long-term outcomes. In this first video, Dr. Day, of the University of Western Australia, tells us more:

Once these indicators are established, Dr. Day goes on to explain that effectiveness of leadership should not be the goal of research and intervention. Instead, the goal should be to expand and enhance a leader’s capacity to be effective:

Beyond the individual, there are things organizations can do to foster leadership. In this video, Dr. Dragoni discusses the conditions that support leadership development. These include interpersonal comfort among team members, their expertise, and a shared mindset:

Lastly, Dr. Dragoni presents new avenues of research for leadership development. She insists that it is important to be very clear about the definition of the terms in order to advance this science.

Read the article in the 2015 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, with our compliments. 

The secret is out – calling all science writers!

Liz Allen Announcements, Conferences & Events, Journalists

Annual Reviews logo.

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher of highly cited reviews that synthesize the research literature in a clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

Journalists, bloggers and writers tell us that we’re a “go-to resource” when it comes to researching the background on a story or on days when they have to deliver a piece and inspiration is thin on the ground!

Reading our reviews is like “being transported into the laboratory of the leading scientists in the area, who explain what’s going on in the field”. They come away with a richer understanding than they could gain in any other way.

Image credit: marcmo, Flickr, CC BY NC-ND
Image credit: marcmo, Flickr, CC BY NC-ND

To access this highly cited content that spans 47 disciplines within the Biomedical, Life, Physical, and Social Sciences including Economics all you have to do is email your writing credentials to marketing@annualreviews.org. It’s that simple.

If you use Annual Reviews content, please credit the Author/s and the name of the journal. You are welcome to link directly to our article and if you do so, let us know beforehand (email address as above) and we will provide your readers with complimentary access.

Annual Reviews is a treasured writers resource because every article:

  • Synthesizes the most significant research contributions on the most critical topics
  • Provides a thorough and balanced understanding of a subject from invited experts
  • Helps situate research within current understanding of a topic, including what is well supported and what is controversial.
  • Explores the interface between fields as most progress takes place at the confluence of two or more fields. We enable researchers to reach across disciplinary boundaries.
  • Provides historical context and sweeping panoramas of where research fields originated, where they stand now, and where they should go.
  • Poses compelling questions for the future.
  • Outlines practical applications and the broad general significance of research to the wider public.
  • Stands as a testament to human ingenuity in terms of our understanding of nature, the universe, and the human condition.

WCSJAnnual Reviews is also a proud early sponsor of the World Conference of Science Journalists taking place in San Francisco in 2017. We look forward to providing you with Free WiFi for a day and meeting you all there! To find out more about the event you can sign up for the conference newsletter.

Congrats Sergio Verdú – winner of the 2016 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing

Liz Allen Awards, News

Annual Reviews is a non-profit publisher of highly-cited reviews that synthesize the research literature in clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for Scientific Reviewing was established in 1977 through a gift from Annual Reviews together with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science, in honor of our founder J. Murray Luck – we are proud to currently sponsor it entirely.

This prestigious award – two recipients have gone on to win the National Medal of Science and another two the Nobel Prize – has been presented annually since 1979 to recognize authors, whose reviews have synthesized extensive and difficult material, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the course of scientific thought. The field rotates among biological, physical, and social sciences.

The NAS dome depicts an early 20th Century view of Science. Photo credit: Dan W Bailey.

We’re delighted that Sergio Verdú, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, will receive the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing on May 1st 2016 at their stunning building in Washington D.C., presented this year in computer science. Our President and Editor-In-Chief, Richard Gallagher (current) and Samuel Gubins (former) will attend the ceremony. 

Sergio won “For consistent and distinguished contributions of review material in information theory, and for a leading role in developing high-quality review journals covering broad areas of the information sciences”. He is a leader in information theory, has contributed numerous books, monographs, book chapters, and review papers, many of which have become essential reading for those working in information and communication theory.

This award serves to highlight the value that review articles add to the research community. Reading one is like being transported into the laboratory of the leading scientists in the area, who explain what’s going on in the field. Readers come away with a richer understanding than they could gain in any other way and this is why Annual Reviews is a treasured resource.

Note: The 2017 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing will be for contributions in the field of Criminology. Nominations must be submitted online no later than 11:59 pm EDT on Monday, October 3, 2016, so register today and share your pick.

Congrats Barbara Cannon and Jan Nedergaard – winners of the APS 2016 Annual Reviews Award for Scientific Reviewing

Liz Allen Awards, News

Annual Reviews is a non-profit publisher of highly-cited review articles that synthesize the research literature in clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

APSEvery year, the American Physiological Society (APS) manages the Annual Reviews Award for Scientific Reviewing which is given for excellence in providing systematic, periodic examinations of scholarly advances, and provoking discussion that will lead to new research activity. The award recognizes an APS member who has written scientific reviews and has helped provide an enhanced understanding of the area of physiology reviewed.

Receiving the Annual Reviews Award for Scientific Reviewing
Receiving the Annual Reviews Award for Scientific Reviewing

This year two successful candidates, Barbara Cannon and Jan Nedergaard, shared the award which includes a contribution to travel to the annual Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego from April 2-6th where they received their recognition plaque.

Sunrise in Stockholm, image credit: Chas B, Flickr, CC BY
Sunrise in Stockholm, image credit: Chas B, Flickr, CC BY

Barbara and Jan are both professors in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at The Wenner-Gren Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. They won their award for a series of insightful reviews over the years, not least the fundamental overview in Physiological Reviews on brown adipose tissue 2004. Their review 2007 in American Journal of Physiology (Endocrinology and Metabolism) collected data, overlooked by the metabolic community, that unexpectedly demonstrated that even adult humans possess active brown adipose tissue, a paper that opened for today’s broad interest in this tissue and pointed to the possibility that it can counteract the development of obesity and can ameliorate the metabolic syndrome, if kept active in adults.

This Annual Reviews award serves to highlight the value that review articles add to the research community. Reading one is like being transported into the laboratory of the leading scientists in the area, who explain what’s going on in the field. Readers come away with a richer understanding than they could gain in any other way and this is why Annual Reviews is a treasured resource.

Boosting the reach and impact of Annual Reviews articles – KUDOS for authors

Liz Allen Authors, News, Partnerships

Every once in a while, a digital research communication tool that serves a real need and is both well designed and easy-to-use comes along. This doesn’t happen every day!

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Recently, Annual Reviews introduced its authors to KUDOS, a tool that makes it simple for them to claim, explain and share their research. The service won a prestigious “Innovation in Publishing Award” in 2015 from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

We chose this service because although a lot of energy is directed towards writing and preparing the review, somewhat less is spent on arguably the most important part of the publishing cycle, namely sharing this knowledge with others thereby increasing its reach and impact.

As one author amusingly describes it: “Invitations to write an Annual Review article typically elicit some mix of thrill, dread, pleasure, indecision, burden, intimidation, and challenge—not unlike commencing one’s PhD or undertaking a skydive.” Durham W. 1999. Preface. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 28

Authors write reviews as a service to those in their discipline and society as a whole. Annual Reviews provides them with a concierge publishing experience. Our skilled editors are hands-on in terms of copyediting, layout and figure editing (see before and after below), resulting in compelling articles that are clearly presented for an expert and broad audience.

beforeandafter

To ensure visibility for these high-quality reviews, we invite our authors to register with KUDOS (which takes about 30 seconds) and share their work with the world. A helpful and short video about this free service can be found here. They can then claim their review/s and are prompted to:

  • Write a pithy headline
  • State what the article is about
  • Explain why it is important
  • Add, any additional perspectives that they wish to share

Within about 15 minutes or so, Authors have created an introduction about their article (which also links to the review itself) and they can then seamlessly share it on social media from the same page. The results (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) can be viewed and there’s even a link to the ISI citation count for that article.

And the best part? Although not everyone is an Annual Reviews author, anyone can sign up for KUDOS, the service is completely free to end-users.

Housing and Poverty in the U.S.

Liz Allen News

Matthew Desmond, of Harvard University, was interviewed by The New York Times on his new book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Dr. Desmond co-wrote “Housing, Poverty, and the Law” with Monica Bell for the 2015 Annual Review of Law and Social Science. In this article, they examine the present state of the research on housing and housing policies, and call for further investigation of the private rental market, where the vast majority of poor families live, and its role in perpetuating poverty.

IScreen Shot 2016-02-25 at 12.59.23.pngn the book, Dr. Desmond recounts his embedded field work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during which he observed tenants in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, as well as their landlords.

An associate professor of social sciences at Harvard, Dr. Desmond has studied poverty from an angle that has been overlooked in recent years. While factors like jobs, the mass incarceration of black males, and parenting have drawn more attention, he says the issue of housing is  central to the creation of poverty.

As U.S. house prices soared and income and public assistance stagnated in the past two decades, Dr. Desmond says that those who can least afford to spend 70 to 80 percent of their income in rent are now the ones most likely to do it. This, he adds, is the “difference between stable and grinding poverty.” Legal and informal evictions, which used to be rare, are now happening by the millions each year. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” Dr. Desmond writes in his book. “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

Dr. Desmond’s book will be published on March 1st. Powell’s. Amazon.

Group Affect

Video Liz Allen News, Research

We always think of emotions as an internal feelings. Research, however, shows that emotions are contagious, and can spread quickly amongst co-workers.

Studies have even demonstrated that shared positive and negative emotions influence productivity. So how does emotional contagion help maintain group cohesiveness in a professional environment, and how can leaders cultivate positive affect for better results?

Sigal Barsade and Andrew Knight discuss their work in their article on group affect and its accompanying animated video:

Group Affect from Annual Reviews on Vimeo.

Find it all in the 2015 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.