News

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.