Posters are an important tool to communicate your research findings to a larger audience. The format is different from oral presentations or full papers, and special rules for a good poster apply. Posters can be an important step before a full publication, although many posters will never be peer-reviewed and published. The problem with posters is that they are second class citizens to oral presentations in most meetings.

Donald Kennedy, the edior-in-chief of Science, yesterday wrote an editorial about a legal dispute between the New England Journal of Medicine and the drug company Pfizer. Pfizer wants the NEJM to provide the reviewer comments on submitted papers about the two Pfizer products celecoxib (Celebrex) and valdecoxib (Bextra). Both drugs are used to treat pain and belong to the COX-2 inhibitor class of drugs.

There are many reasons to list all your publications online. Maybe you are looking for a new job or want to attract students to start their PhD in your lab. Usually you find this information on the home page of your laboratory or department, but several tools can automate this process.Nature Network You can list your publications in your Nature Network profile. Simply add the DOI or Pubmed ID in the form provided.

A Nature News article last week talked about the confusion that happens if a number of authors have the same or similar names (Scientific publishing: Identity crisis). This is apparently a special issue in China because of the difficulties transliterating Chinese characters into English and the use of only a limited number of surnames.

Nature Network turns one year old today and it's time to celebrate. We already have a number of interesting – and entertaining – birthday celebrations. I want to contribute with my personal experience at Nature Network. During the day I treat cancer patients and do cancer research at a German University hospital.

Cancer is caused by genetic changes ¹ . Oncogenes harbor activating mutations that cause or promote cancer, whereas tumor suppressor genes ² protect from cancer. In this model, genetic changes in one copy of an oncogene, but both copies of a tumor suppressor gene are required to initiate cancer.

Just Science is an effort to collect blog posts about science that are written within one week. Just Science 2008 will start tomorrow and ends February 8. Science bloggers that agree to participate should write one daily blog entry for these five days.

Nature today published a report on the prevalence of duplicate papers in Medline. In this report Mounir Errami and Harold Garner estimate that there as many as 200.000 duplicate papers in Medline or 1% of all published papers. The article has already been widely cited, including of course Nature News and Nature Network, but also Noble Intent and DigitalKoans.

Advice by your supervisor, books, workshops and a lot of experience can improve the quality of your scientific writing. But when you are about to submit your paper and don't want to take any chances – especially when English is not your first language – a scientific writer can be helpful.

Thomson Scientific last week announced ResearcherID. ResearcherID tries to solve a problem that has annoyed me for many years. In contrast to papers and journals, authors are not associated with a unique ID in databases such as PubMed. You are lucky if you have an uncommon last name that contains only letters from the English alphabet. For the rest of us, a typical PubMed search for your name will also pick up papers by other authors.

January is an important month for Macintosh users. MacWorld Expo takes place every year in San Francisco and we usually see a lot of new software and hardware. The MacBook Air is a wonderful new subnotebook perfect for successful scientists with many talks to give and enough money to spend. But Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is probably the most important new product from a scientists perspective.