Here We Go!!

I just received an e-mail from NIH concerning the implementation of new peer review practices in the aftermath of the Enhancing Peer Review navel-gazing effort. Noteworthy implementation plans are excerpted inside the crack.

Does Size Matter?

The annual meeting of a scientific society is a fixture in many scientific disciplines. The scientific society itself is mechanism to draw together subfields which focus on topics as general as immunology, neuroscience or physiology and as narrow as drug abuse, pain or Parkinson’s Disease. I’m sure many non-bio -ologies have similar arrays of scientific societies. Many of such scientific societies exist in large part to organize annual meetings for their membership and other interested scientists. The meeting affords a regular opportunity for scientists who work in geographically disparate locations to discuss their areas of scientific interest with a group of peers who share those interests. A typical meeting might last about 5 days and consist of a series of presentations from scientists on their latest work.

SfN 2006 Poster SessionThe question for the day was raised when a discussion on a prior post veered into the question of meeting size. Commenter Mike_F observed:

I think this issue of meeting size deserves a separate thread. Personally I subscribe to the notion that that if you don’t go to SFN you miss 100% of the meeting, while if you do go you miss 99.99%… . I would much rather invest the time and energy in an EMBO workshop or Gordon Conference in my field, where attendance is “only” ~100-150, but that invariably includes most of the movers and shakers of the field.

What is the ideal size for the scientific meeting?