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Everyday science

Everyday science

Girls shut-out of design and technology, hyphens deter paper citations, moonlight over Normandy on D-Day

07 Jun 2019 Hamish Johnston

The mail in Spalding must be very slow because this week a parent in the English market town received a letter from the 1970s. She was told that her nine-year-old daughter and her classmates were doing a special morning of classes. The girls will be doing cooking and drama, while the boys will be doing design and technology.

Only this letter was not from the 1970s, it was written yesterday.

You can see the letter and the reaction on Twitter above. A bit of context: the children are in primary school and are visiting two secondary schools. Spalding High is an all-girls school while Spalding Grammar is an all-boys school. That is still no excuse for gender stereotyping in terms of what the children are doing.

Does adding a simple hyphen in a research-paper’s title affect how many citations it receives? Researchers at the universities of Hong Kong and Wollongong, claim that it does, regardless of the quality of the article. They found the mean number of citations for a physics paper with no hyphen is 110, but that figure drops to around 80 for papers that contain four hyphens. Intriguingly, paper titles with five or more hyphens, however, do slightly better, garnering just over 90 citations, on average.

“Our results question the common belief that citation counts are a reliable measure of the contributions and significance of papers,” says T H Tse from Hong Kong. “In fact, they can be distorted simply by the presence of hyphens in article titles, which has no bearing on the quality of research.”

Did the D-Day troops who landed on Normandy beaches 75 years ago rely on a late-rising Moon to surprise their foes? That has been a claim for many years, but now astronomers and historians have teamed-up to debunk it. You can read more in this Cosmos article: “Moonlight and stealth: how an author’s error created a myth about a WWII invasion”.

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