Browse our Feature Articles

Journals and other scientific organizations produce a diverse variety of plain-language summaries.

After summarizing over 2,400 articles in plain language, the eLife Features team shares what it has learnt about writing and editing for a broad audience.

More could be done to make research papers readily understandable by the public.

A description of evolution that is based on birth-death processes, and in which fitness is at most a derived quantity, is advocated.

The first results from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology suggest that there is scope for improving reproducibility in pre-clinical cancer research.

Analysis of experiments on bacteria suggests that the dependence of cell size on growth rate is not an adaptation but a causal consequence of a regulatory mechanism that controls DNA replication.

Publication bias, in which positive results are preferentially reported by authors and published by journals, can restrict the visibility of evidence against false claims and allow such claims to be canonized inappropriately as facts.

We identify key strengths and limitations in use of viral genotyping and phenotyping to estimate pandemic risk from influenza A viruses, focusing on 3 traits, hemagglutinin binding specificity, hemagglutinin pH of activation, and polymerase complex efficiency.

The National Institutes of Health needs to make radical changes to ensure that biomedical research continues to thrive in the United States.

A systems-level analysis of the biomedical workforce in the US shows that current strategies to enhance faculty diversity are unlikely to have a significant impact, and that there is a need to increase the number of PhDs from underrepresented minority backgrounds who move on to postdoctoral positions.