Brian posted tag clouds for two of his recent papers. Having no shame, Lab Lemming followed suit. Since I have even less shame, I’m just going to jump on while the bandwagon is rolling.

So here’s the tag cloud for Davies et al., 2008, currently in review with EPSL:

That’s not too bad. It passes the suckup test at least – none of the authors, or the authors’ PhD advisors, were referenced often enough to appear in the list. However, it fails the squabbling faction test – our archrival colleague Adriano Mazzini, who’s done lots of work on the same system and come to different conclusions, makes the tag list. I’d have to go back and count to see how many of the references are places where we build on his work and the work of his collaborators, and how many are places where we disagree with their conclusions. We were careful not to issue any mentitas. Note also the inconsistent use of “Fig.” and “Figure” – oops.

Now let’s try Brumm et al. 2008, currently in review with the Journal of Marine and Petroleum Geology:

Brutally fails the suckup test, the self-citation test, the squabble test, and the heavily cites a recent review instead of the original papers test! It’s a good thing I have less than no shame. (Note to reviewers: These citations are all perfectly appropriate.)

Okay, last but not least: Brumm et al. in prep, which I will submit just as soon as I have stopped being distracted by the various things on my to-do list that actually have hard deadlines attached:

The number of tags my final paper shares with the first two might explain why I haven’t finished writing up my thesis yet. I’m stuck on the part where I have to describe how “et al.”, “significant”, and “km” constitute the unifying themes of a single, coherent intellectual endeavor.