Publishing
mikethemadbiologist | July 4, 2008I'm approaching the tail end of grant writing season, and I've had to update my CV, put it in NIH format, and so on. It occurred to me while doing this is that there is very little professional incentive to write book chapters, since most (although not all) are not peer-reviewed, and consequently aren't viewed as publications by many funding agencies. So why write them?
Sometimes I've written a book chapter because it allows me to grind an ax that desperately needs grinding; other times, I've done so because it allows me to develop an argument or an agenda that can then be cited later (you…
mikethemadbiologist | June 19, 2008ScienceBlogling Bora, in discussing the new release of journal impact factors--an estimation of how widely read journal articles are--writes:
One day, hopefully very soon, this will not be news. What I mean by it is that there soon will be better metrics - ways to evaluate individual articles and individual people in way that is transparent and useful and, hopefully, helps treat the "CNS Disease".
There is a better metric than the impact factor: the eigenfactor.
voltagegate | January 15, 2008This is the kind of crap I get in my email:
I blog about ecology therefore I'm one of the morons that watches this sensationalized garbage and considers it a "teaching tool".
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: Open Lab 2007, blog books
You might remember that one of my essays from 2006 was included in the book, Open Lab 2006. I was lucky because the editor of the book submitted my essay for me, and the judges seemed to like it enough to include it in the final book. Yea, me. Well, this year, I am on my own, except for your suggestions and support, so I would appreciate it if you would submit an essay I've written to this year's edition of Open Lab. They have 450 submissions so far, and out of those, they will select only 50 -- one per blog -- to be in the final book. GAH! That means that my…
revere | December 7, 2007This post is about something I've wanted to write about for a while, but never found the time. That's still true, but I've just spent five days as a natural environment for a norovirus or something similar. The good news is I lost 5 pounds. But the bad news -- and there was a lot of it -- is that as I recover I am desperately trying to catch up on too many urgent things that didn't get done. Still, this story is something I want to write about, so I'll do it more briefly now and come back at some later point for more analysis. What's bothering me? Press embargoes:
The World Health…
voltagegate | September 15, 2007Another kind comment from a student reader on one of the older biomes posts:
Thanks for posting this! It really helped me get some info for MY "Tropical Dry Forest Biome" project for biology class. I couldn't find any info at the library or on any other sites! So I thank goodness this was here....
You're welcome Haley! Keep up the blogging (and the blogging).
So why haven't I written any basics posts in a while? Well, to be honest, much of my time and energy in the past few months has been focused on getting a job in my field. I've recently had to pick up a few shifts doing catering locally…
revere | August 30, 2007I don't suppose I can sue somebody for negligence resulting in impairment of my mental health. But if I could, I would surely go after the assholes at the PRISM coalition, an alleged grassroots group (such front groups for industry are often called astroturf groups) whose task in life is to lock up tax payer financed research under copyright laws they and their cronies wrote for their own benefit. And THEY ARE MAKING ME CRAZY! So there was at least some therapeutic benefit to the discovery of my SciBling Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily that these hypocrites were violating copyright on their…
mikethemadbiologist | August 29, 2007A while ago, I posted about eigenFACTOR, a bioinformatics tool that can be used to calculate the relative impact of scientific journals. Well, the eigenFACTORials have developed a whole buncha new stuff you can do with the program:
Maps of science. How different fields of science cite each other. And make sure you check out the groovy interactive map.
More data. eigenFACTOR now incorporates data from 1994-2005. There's also some really cool time series stuff you can do (here's the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society).
You can also search by publisher. Here's Demon…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2007...at least when it comes to road signs. The NY Times magazine has a fascinating article about how changing the font of road signs helps drivers see them, particularly late at night. The font that will be used is call "Clearview":
The improved font is on the right (these are real signs). From here.
Looks clearer to me. It's interesting.
If only there were a Mac font...
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2007In the back of a book I just finished, I noticed this odd paragraph on its own page:
This book was set in Electra, a typeface designed for Linotype by W.A. Dwiggins, the renowned type designer (1880-1956). Electra is a fluid typeface, avoiding the contrasts of thick and thin strokes that are prevalent in most modern typefaces.
So I checked a couple of other books on my shelves and found:
The text of this book was set in Electra, a typeface designed by by W.A. Dwiggins (1880-1956). This face cannot be classified as either modern or old style. It is not based on any historical model, nor…
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2007By way of Brad DeLong, I came across a post by Tyler Cowen that discusses 'fast track' article review:
-sounds like grants to mehttp://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/academic-journa.htmlhttp://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/07/economic-i…
More insidious, in my view, is the gradual morphing of the referees from evaluators to anonymous co-authors. Referees request increasingly extensive revisions. Usually these represent improvements, but the process takes a lot of time and effort, and the end result is often worse owing to its committee-design. Authors, knowing referees…
revere | July 6, 2007If you live in the US pay taxes and some of those taxes go to support important basic research into the causes of disease. Most of that research is disbursed through an elaborate peer-reviewed granting system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The point of doing that research is to tell the world scientific community what you have found. "Normal" scientific progress is incremental, building on the work of other scientists. Paying for that research has been shown to be a good investment that has paid for itself many times over. But if you've paid for it once in taxes, why should you…
revere | June 25, 2007It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server?
A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…
voltagegate | May 10, 2007The final issue of The Bottom Line came out yesterday, the last one with my name under "editor in chief" on the tombstone.
This past weekend, I got a phone call from Jared, one of our own choose-your-adventure style serial fiction writers (Q.U.E.S.T. - don't ask me what it stands for...) at TBL. I have made a couple of appearances in their story so far, and he was wondering how I should meet my end: Should they rush in to save me from pain and death or should I meet my end at the hands of their nemesis as they rush in to save me?
"Oh, I would much rather die in the last issue," I said.
"…
revere | April 26, 2007This isn't just about solidarity with one of my SciBlings, Shelley at Retrospectacle, although I am glad and proud to stand with her on this. It's about a matter of principle. I still have steam coming out of my ears. Here's the story.
A couple of days ago Shelley posted about antioxidants in fruit drinks. She knew about it because the publishers of the journal, the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the execrable publicrats John Wiley & Sons, broadcast press releases that said adding alcohol to fruits makes them healthier by boosting natural antioxidant action. Not…
mikethemadbiologist | April 25, 2007Hopefully, by now, the anti-Wiley blogswarm is getting geared up. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, ScienceBlogling Shelley over at Retrospectacle was threatened with a lawsuit by Wiley Interscience for reproducing part of a figure and a table (and why would they want to do that? She has such groovy taste in cars). Shelley has the best argument why it's wrong for Wiley to do this:
But it leads me to ask the question: What really constitutes fair use? This is taxpayer-supported research, which should be available for all. If a blog properly gives credit, isn't…
revere | April 25, 2007Yesterday a new medical journal was launched, Open Medicine. It's the product of Drs. John Hoey and Anne Marie Todkill, former editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, who were fired last year in a conflict over editorial independence. Their publisher, the Canadian Medical Association, tried to exert editorial direction and the editors resisted. It was, as they say, un scandale.
The editors have risen, souls and reputations intact. Moreover, OM will be joining the growing ranks of Open Access journals with open review policies:
Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It…
revere | April 2, 2007I like the British medical journal, The Lancet. I like it a lot. I read it, subscribed to it and I've published there. More than once. So I sympathize with their terrible dilemma:
Physicians from around the world urged the publisher of The Lancet medical journal to cut its links to weapons sales, calling on the editors to find another publisher if Reed Elsevier refused to stop hosting arms fairs.
The doctors made their appeal in the latest edition of The Lancet, released Friday.
Editors at The Lancet responded by backing the doctors, calling the situation "bizarre and untenable." They wrote…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2007In scientific publishing, one of the important things is what is known as the "impact factor" which is the the average number of citations a journal receives over a 2 year period. The impact factor is often used by librarians and researchers to determine which journals to purchase and where to publish. There are some problems with the impact factor, however.
The basic problem is that the impact factor does not consider the importance of the citing article. In other words, the cited paper is far more likely to be looked up by a reader if it is cited in five high profile journal articles (or…
emjohnson | November 1, 2005Reprinted from Wildlife Conservation Magazine
"Behind Enemy Lines"
November/December 2005
By Eric Michael Johnson
December 2002 -- After four days traveling upriver in a dugout canoe, Belgian primatologist Jef Dupain became the first researcher in five years to return to the war-torn Lomako Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). As he surveyed the overgrown field station that had once been his home, a boy soldier wielding an AK-47 stepped into view from a concealing tangle of vines. Fortunately the boy was only one of the rebel fighters who had escorted Dupain…