Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to assess how to identify potential sources of bias in research and how confident we can be in the conclusions drawn from a particular body of evidence. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Schneider's project, "Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis," will be supported by a five-year, $599,963 grant from the NSF.

A paper by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Informatics PhD students Haoyang Liu and Janina Sarol received the Best System Paper Award at the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). SemEval, which was held on August 5-6, is a series of natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is "to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics."

According to Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider, a silver lining of the pandemic is that it has brought attention to the retraction of scientific publications. Schneider's project, "Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda," has also brought attention to the problem of retracted research, resulting in a recent report with recommendations. The project, which was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, brought together a variety of stakeholders, including funders, editors, peer reviewers, authors, and publishers.

iSchool researchers have co-organized a highly interactive workshop on traceable, transparent, and trustworthy research as part of ProvenanceWeek 2021. The T7 Workshop: Provenance for Transparent Research aims to engage attendees in a focused conversation about how methods for automated provenance capture, storage, query, inference, and visualization can make research more transparent and the trustworthiness of results easier to evaluate, both by other researchers and the public. The free workshop will be held on July 22 from 9:00 a.m.-12:45 p.m. CT.

Peer review is a valuable component in the research process, but it also lengthens the time to publish research. The need to rapidly communicate scientific findings has been especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an increase in the number of publications disseminated via preprint servers. With the lack of traditional peer review, the quality of these publications can be questionable. Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and the Automated Screening Working Group are working to assess COVID-19 preprints for rigor and transparency in their reporting.

Professor and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Director Bertram Ludäscher will be the keynote speaker for a webinar hosted by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) on February 10. The webinar, "Toward Open, Reproducible, and Reusable Research," will present projects, approaches, and practices that advance research sharing for reproducibility and reuse.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received an award from the University of Illinois Research Board for her project, “Identifying Potential Bias in Science Using Citation Network Structures.” According to Schneider, citation bias happens when authors ignore relevant research and present one-sided evidence, which mispresents what is known about a topic. Citation bias benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, but it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry.

When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider is working on reducing the spread of retracted science, receiving a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this research.

Doctoral candidate Jooho Lee successfully defended her dissertation, "Using Grant Applications to Measure the Evolution of Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Research," on September 21.

The use of data science tools in research across campuses has exploded–from engineering and science to the humanities and social sciences. But there is no established data science discipline and no recognized way for various academic fields to develop and integrate accepted data science processes into research. Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has proposed a framework for guiding researchers and curriculum development in data science and for aiding policy and funding decisions. She outlines the approach in the journal Communications of the ACM.

A poster coauthored by Assistant Professor Peter Darch was a finalist for the Best Poster Award at iConference 2020, which was held virtually on March 23-27. The poster's lead author is Live Kvale, a doctoral student at Oslo Metropolitan University co-advised by Darch.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider a $174,981 grant for reducing the spread of retracted research. When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. According to Schneider, a retracted source paper concerning a fraudulent trial of blood pressure medication is still in the top 1% of most cited articles, with 930 citations in the abstract and citation database Scopus.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, "Opportunities for Accelerating Scientific Discovery: Realizing the Potential of Advanced and Automated Workflows," which was held virtually on March 16-17. 

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited talk at the conference on “Meta-research for transforming clinical research,” which will be held on November 25 at the Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris. The conference, organized by the EU-funded Methods in Research on Research (MiRoR) consortium, will bring together experts on meta-research from the U.S. and Europe. MiRoR is an interdisciplinary, joint doctoral training program for future generations of scientists working at the intersection of meta-research and medicine.

iSchool researchers will present their work at the Workshop on Research Objects 2019 (ro2019), which will be held in conjunction with eScience 2019 on September 24-27 in San Diego, California. The Research Objects approach proposes a way to "package, describe, publish, archive, explore, and understand digital research outputs by reusing existing Web standards and formats." Workshop participants will explore recent advances and challenges remaining to increase Research Object uptake among data providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan presented her research at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S 2019), which took place in New Orleans on September 4-7. The Society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). The theme of this year's meeting was "Innovations, Interruptions, and Regenerations."

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will present her medical informatics research at the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2019), which will take place on June 24-27 in Groningen, the Netherlands. The biennial conference attracts scholars on argumentation worldwide from various disciplines. The theme of ECA 2019 is "Reason to Dissent."

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research on reproducibility at the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Conference, "Building Bridges Across the S&T Enterprise," which was held on June 13-14 at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The conference brought together science and technology (S&T) leaders to share best practices and build collaboration across the Federal S&T enterprise.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a committee report examining computational reproducibility and replicability in science, with the goals of improving research rigor and transparency. The congressionally mandated report was authored by an ad hoc committee of national experts, including iSchool Associate Professor Victoria Stodden.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve on the Reproducibility Badging and Definitions Working Group for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). NISO is a U.S. nonprofit association that develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to facilitate the creation, management, and interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and teaching.