It’s that time of year again when the new Impact Factor values are released. This is such a big deal to a lot of folks that it’s pretty hard to avoid hearing about it. We’re not the sort of folks that object to the use of impact factors in general – we are scientists after all and part of being a scientist is quantifying things.

When last we left our intrepid scientists, they were starting to ponder the changes that might result from the new pre-proposal process. In general, we really like the new system because it helps reviewers focus on the value of big picture thinking and potentially reduces the overall workload of both grant writing and grant reviewing.

Before we start, this post refers to posts already written on this topic. To make sure no one gets lost, please follow the sequence of operations below: Step 1: Do you know about the new pre-proposal process at NSF?

Are you interested in stoichiometry? Energy flow through individuals, communities or ecosystems? Implications of organismal physiology? Do you like macroecology? Field experiments? Lab experiments? Theory? Are you particularly interested in integrating various combinations of the above?

Ethan and I have been watching the emergence of crowdfunding in science with great interest. We meant to blog about it, but our rate of blog idea generation is >> our rate of blog writing.

People find blog posts in different ways. Some visit the website regularly, some subscribe to email updates, and some subscribe using the blog’s feed. Feeds can be a huge time saver for processing the ever increasing amount of information that science generates, by placing much of that information in a single place in a simple, standardized, format.

This is the first of a new category of posts here at Jabberwocky Ecology called Research Summaries. We like the idea of communicating our research more broadly than to the small number of folks who have the time, energy, and interest to read through entire papers. So, for every paper that we publish we will (hopefully) also do a blog post communicating the basic idea in a manner targeted towards a more general audience.

Jeremy Fox over at the Oikos Blog has written an excellent piece explaining why fundamental, basic science, research is worth investing in, even when time and resources are limited. His central points include: Fundamental research is where a lot of our methodological advances come from. Fundamental research provides generally-applicable insights. Current applied research often relies on past fundamental research.

Joan Strassman has a very nice post about why it is sometimes useful to step back from the intricate details of biological systems in order to understand the general processes that are operating. Here’s a little taste of the general message The whole post is definitely worth a read.

I have, for a while, been frustrated and annoyed by the behavior of several of the large for-profit publishers.

Figuring out how to teach well as a professor at a research university is largely a self-study affair. For me the keys to productive self-study are good information and self-reflection. Without good information you’re not learning the right things and without self-reflection you don’t know if you are actually succeeding at implementing what you’ve learned.