As conferences go, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) annual meeting is a pretty big deal. Anyone who’s anyone in human genetics is there, and if you want to be someone you better be there, too. And it’s big — this year’s meeting saw more than 6,000 attendees spread throughout a gigantic convention center that spanned four square blocks in the heart of Washington, D.C. Academics, publishers, clinicians, policy wonks, and industry reps staked out their territory among an endless sea of posters, eye-popping demo booths, and cavernous session halls. The international meeting for bioinformatics that I’ve gone to the past seemed quaint by comparison.
At bioinformatics conferences, the common theme is computational methods, applied to a wide variety of topics. At a conference like ASHG, the common theme is human genetics, probed and interpreted with a variety of methods. But even the topic is breathtakingly broad. Sessions covered complex disease, non-coding RNAs, methylation, ethical/social/legal/education issues surrounding genomic research and genetic testing, mouse models, high-throughput sequencing, population and evolutionary genetics, pharmacogenetics, cilia, computational methods, and Mendelian disorders, to name just a few.
I made my first visit to ASHG this year as part of a small contingent from 23andMe*, a direct-to-consumer genomics company. Although I missed a good portion of the conference due to my schedule, some of my colleagues took notes on sessions that I missed, and ample coverage of many of the sessions could be had by following the Twitter hashtag #ashg2010. The following summaries and reflections represent a composite of tweets, other people’s notes, and my personal notes and impressions.
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March 30, 2010 8 Comments
At the risk of beating the issue to death, I offer yet another post on the question, “why don’t scientists comment on scientific articles?” Previous reflections stood within the larger context of scientific impact and article-level metrics, and I’ve also attempted some superficial analysis of commenting behavior at PLoS, BMJ, and BMC. More recently (and this is why the topic is on my mind again), a room full of bright minds at the PLoS Forum (including Cameron Neylon and Jon Eisen) scratched their heads over it and came up with pretty much the same conclusion as everyone else who’s ever thought about the problem — the costs simply outweigh the benefits.
The costs, in principle, are minimal. You might need to register for an account at the journal website and be logged on, but then all that’s needed is little more than what most of us already do multiple times a day with our email — type into a box and click “submit”. (In practice, there may be nonsensical, hidden costs that make you wonder what the folks at those journals were smoking.) So the perception that the cost-benefit equation doesn’t work speaks more to the lack of benefit than anything else.
Photo by jamesclay on flickr
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