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      How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network

      research-article
      BMJ : British Medical Journal
      BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.

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          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Objective To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it.

          Design A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that β amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis. Social network theory and graph theory were used to analyse this network.

          Main outcome measures Citation bias, amplification, and invention, and their effects on determining authority.

          Results The network contained 242 papers and 675 citations addressing the belief, with 220 553 citation paths supporting it. Unfounded authority was established by citation bias against papers that refuted or weakened the belief; amplification, the marked expansion of the belief system by papers presenting no data addressing it; and forms of invention such as the conversion of hypothesis into fact through citation alone. Extension of this network into text within grants funded by the National Institutes of Health and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed the same phenomena present and sometimes used to justify requests for funding.

          Conclusion Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of social communication. Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims. Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted methods of social citation.

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          Most cited references335

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          Rapid planetesimal formation in turbulent circumstellar discs

          The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969). How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale planetesimals is a major unsolved problem (Dominik et al. 2007): boulders stick together poorly (Benz 2000), and spiral into the protostar in a few hundred orbits due to a head wind from the slower rotating gas (Weidenschilling 1977). Gravitational collapse of the solid component has been suggested to overcome this barrier (Safronov 1969, Goldreich & Ward 1973, Youdin & Shu 2002). Even low levels of turbulence, however, inhibit sedimentation of solids to a sufficiently dense midplane layer (Weidenschilling & Cuzzi 1993, Dominik et al. 2007), but turbulence must be present to explain observed gas accretion in protostellar discs (Hartmann 1998). Here we report the discovery of efficient gravitational collapse of boulders in locally overdense regions in the midplane. The boulders concentrate initially in transient high pressures in the turbulent gas (Johansen, Klahr, & Henning 2006), and these concentrations are augmented a further order of magnitude by a streaming instability (Youdin & Goodman 2005, Johansen, Henning, & Klahr 2006, Johansen & Youdin 2007) driven by the relative flow of gas and solids. We find that gravitationally bound clusters form with masses comparable to dwarf planets and containing a distribution of boulder sizes. Gravitational collapse happens much faster than radial drift, offering a possible path to planetesimal formation in accreting circumstellar discs.
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            Assortative Mixing in Networks

            M. Newman (2002)
            A network is said to show assortative mixing if the nodes in the network that have many connections tend to be connected to other nodes with many connections. Here we measure mixing patterns in a variety of networks and find that social networks are mostly assortatively mixed, but that technological and biological networks tend to be disassortative. We propose a model of an assortatively mixed network, which we study both analytically and numerically. Within this model we find that networks percolate more easily if they are assortative and that they are also more robust to vertex removal.
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              The unfolded protein response: a stress signaling pathway critical for health and disease.

              The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is an intracellular organelle consisting of a membranous labyrinth network that extends throughout the cytoplasm of the cell and is contiguous with the nuclear envelope. In all eukaryotic cells, the ER is the site where folding and assembly occurs for proteins destined to the extracellular space, plasma membrane, and the exo/endocytic compartments. The ER is exquisitely sensitive to alterations in homeostasis, and provides stringent quality control systems to ensure that only correctly folded proteins transit to the Golgi and unfolded or misfolded proteins are retained and ultimately degraded. A number of biochemical and physiologic stimuli, such as perturbation in calcium homeostasis or redox status, elevated secretory protein synthesis, expression of misfolded proteins, sugar/glucose deprivation, altered glycosylation, and overloading of cholesterol can disrupt ER homeostasis, impose stress to the ER, and subsequently lead to accumulation of unfolded or misfolded proteins in the ER lumen. The ER has evolved highly specific signaling pathways called the unfolded protein response (UPR) to cope with the accumulation of unfolded or misfolded proteins. Recent discoveries of the mechanisms of ER stress signaling have led to major new insights into the diverse cellular and physiologic processes that are regulated by the UPR. This review summarizes the complex regulation of UPR signaling and its relevance to human physiology and disease.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: associate professor of neurology
                Journal
                BMJ
                bmj
                BMJ : British Medical Journal
                BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
                0959-8138
                1468-5833
                2009
                2009
                20 July 2009
                : 339
                : b2680
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Children’s Hospital Informatics Program and Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115, USA
                Author notes
                Correspondence to: S A Greenberg sagreenberg@ 123456partners.org
                Article
                gres611285
                10.1136/bmj.b2680
                2714656
                19622839
                2c3705f6-ce7b-4f0c-8bdd-598fd34e6a0a
                © Greenberg 2009

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 17 March 2009
                Categories
                Research
                Muscle disease
                Neuromuscular disease
                Musculoskeletal syndromes
                Internet
                Sociology

                Medicine
                Medicine

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