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The Science Journals That Will Publish Anything

26 Jan 2024

When Dr. Anna O. Szust emailed all of these academic journals to join their editorial boards, she did not anticipate that so many of them would approve her application within hours. In fact, she...

What a Journal Impact Factor Is and Isn’t

5 Jan 2024

You may have heard of the impact factor. It is a number given to an academic journal (think Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine) which is often erroneously used a proxy for how good the...

The Smell of Books

18 Feb 2021

Video of Dr Joe Schwarcz on the smell of old and new books

E-Readers are More like Paper than You Think

13 Feb 2018

Our days are dominated by screens: the morning news, ads on the metro, work documents at the office, the dozens of texts we send a day, and to top it off, a good TV show in the evening. But for a...

Why Do Old Books Smell So Good?

13 May 2017

E-readers might be convenient, but they’ll never have that comforting old book smell. It turns out that the smell of old books is due to the organic materials in books (like cellulose from wood...

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