Feature Articles

eLife Feature Articles allow authors to discuss research culture, science policy and funding, careers in science and a variety of other topics related to science and research.

Latest articles

    1. Epidemiology and Global Health

    Science Forum: The new paradox of women’s health research

    Ursula Debarnot, Alexandre Fouré
    Women’s health research will advance when methodological rigor is matched to the question being asked, so that stronger standards improve evidence without inadvertently making studies involving women harder to conduct.
    1. Computational and Systems Biology

    AI in Science: The 42 problem in AI-assisted research

    Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani
    Large language models excel at producing answers, but an answer severed from its question and context may lack meaning.
  1. Research Culture: From East to West – an early-career researcher’s voyage across continents

    Samuel C Eziuzor
    International early-career researchers navigating doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowships face compounding structural precarity at every stage but also accumulate a distinctive professional toolkit that institutions on both sides are poorly equipped to recognise or support.
    1. Cell Biology
    2. Computational and Systems Biology

    Philosophy of Biology: The power of theory in the life sciences

    Jacob L Fine, Finn Creeggan ... Adam MR Groh
    Theory can help address cell and molecular biology’s major challenges, particularly those arising from large omics datasets.
  2. Point of View: Scientific writing is not a murder mystery

    Charlotte A Dodson
    What murder mysteries can tell us about how not to write a scientific article.
  3. Point of View: Science under threat around the world

    Humberto J Debat
    Politicians have reduced public funding for science and dismantled scientific institutions for ideological reasons in Argentina and the United States; how should the scientific community respond to such crises?
    1. Genetics and Genomics
    2. Medicine

    Point of View: Teaching early-career researchers how to respond to peer reviewers

    Eric Kalkhoven, Manon Kluijtmans
    Responding to reports from peer reviewers is a crucial part of scientific publishing, but early-career researchers are rarely taught about this process.
  4. Point of View: An easy way to improve lab meetings

    Cara Glynn, Tiago Monteiro
    Sharing positive and negative experiences at lab meetings can make a career in science a little less hard, a little more pleasant, and a little more human.
    1. Developmental Biology
    2. Genetics and Genomics

    Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Four women whose pioneering contributions to science have been largely overlooked

    Lisa M Thomann, Julie Batut
    Ethel Browne Harvey, Hilde Pröscholdt Mangold, Ida Henrietta Hyde and Marthe Gautier all made important contributions to developmental biology, but their names are largely absent from histories of science.
  5. Research Culture: Going beyond compliance to build on the Researcher Development Concordat

    Robert AR Drake, Laura A Gray ... Joan Chang
    An agreement between universities, research institutes and funders to support the career development of researchers in the UK has led to improvements in research culture since 2019, but there is still more to do.