Back of the envelope calculations for this post. An old press release for a paper on endocytosis by Tom Kirchhausen contained this fascinating factoid: If this is true it is absolutely staggering. Let’s check it out. A synaptic vesicle is ~40 nm in diameter.
I was talking to a speaker visiting our department recently. While discussing his postdoc work from years ago, he told me about the identification of the sperm factor that causes calcium oscillations in the egg at fertilisation. It was an interesting tale because the group who eventually identified the factor – now widely accepted as PLCzeta – had earlier misidentified the factor, naming it oscillin.
I realised recently that I’ve maintained a consistent iTunes library for ~10 years. For most of that time I’ve been listening exclusively to iTunes, rather than to music in other formats.
A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views.
The transition for scientific journals from print to online has been slow and painful. And it is not yet complete. This week I got an RSS alert to a “new” paper in Oncogene.
An IgorPro tip this week. The default font for plots is Geneva. Most of our figures are assembled using Helvetica for labelling. The default font can be changed in Igor Graph Preferences, but Preferences need to be switched on in order to be implemented. Anyway, I always seem to end up with a mix of Geneva plots and Helevetica plots.
Last week, ALM (article-level metric) data for PLoS journals were uploaded to Figshare with the invitation to do something cool with it. Well, it would be rude not to. Actually, I’m one of the few scientists on the planet that hasn’t published a paper with Public Library of Science (PLoS), so I have no personal agenda here. However, I love what PLoS is doing and what it has achieved to disrupt the scientific publishing system.
What is your h-index on Twitter? This thought crossed my mind yesterday when I saw a tweet that was tagged #academicinsults It occurred to me that a Twitter account is a kind of micro-publishing platform. So what would “publication metrics” look like for Twitter? Twitter makes analytics available, so they can easily be crunched. The main metrics are impressions and engagements per tweet.
A colleague once told me that they only review three papers per year and then refuse any further requests for reviewing. Her reasoning was as follows: I publish one paper a year (on average) This paper incurs three peer reviews Therefore, I owe “the system” three reviews. It’s difficult to fault this logic. However, I think that as a senior scientist with a wealth of experience, the system would benefit greatly from more of her input.
My post on the strange data underlying the new impact factor for eLife was read by many people. Thanks for the interest and for the comments and discussion that followed. I thought I should follow up on some of the issues raised in the post. To recap: eLife received a 2013 Impact Factor despite only publishing 27 papers in the last three months of the census window. Other journals, such as Biology Open did not.
I noticed something strange about the 2013 Impact Factor data for eLife . Before I get onto the problem. I feel I need to point out that I dislike Impact Factors and think that their influence on science is corrosive. I am a DORA signatory and I try to uphold those principles. I admit that, in the past, I used to check the new Impact Factors when they were released, but no longer.
