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.

The Deutsche Ärzteblatt is the official journal of the German Medical Association, just as the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Starting January 21, an English language version of the journal will be available. The publisher and editors of the journal decided to make this step to have the journal articles better indexed in databases such as PubMed and available to more readers.

M. Mitchell Waldrop has posted a draft version of an article called Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?. The article will appear in Scientific American (which, like the Nature Publishing Group, is owned by Macmillan). In this article he talks about the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies in research. The largest part of the article is about Open Notebook Science and OpenWetWare in particular.

I'm a regular reader of TechCrunch, a popular blog about internet products and companies. But somehow I missed the article just before christmas that talks about the popularity of different Google products. In this analysis, traffic for Google Scholar was down 32% compared to 2006. I haven't seen this information reproduced somewhere else, but the number for most of the other Google products were higher than 2006, as expected.

Picking the right journal is one of the most important decisions when you start to work on a paper. You probably have a gut feeling of the journals that are best suited for your paper in progress. To make this decision more objective, you can rely on the Impact Factor of a journal. The Impact Factor is roughly the average number of citations per paper in a given journal and is published by  Thomson Scientic.

U.S. President Bush today signed into law the federal spending bill that includes provisions for NIH-funded research. Final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of NIH-funded research have to be publicly available at PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication. The Open Access mandate for NIH-funded research was voluntary since 2005. Fewer than 5% of research papers were actually made publicly available.

Buzzword is a free online word processor based on the Adobe Flash technology. I previously wrote about Buzzword and how it could be used to write a scientific paper. The first impressions were positive, so I decided to write my next paper with Buzzword. This paper has been submitted this week. What did I like and dislike about Buzzword?Good Most importantly, there is only one version of your manuscript.

We usually look forward to a well-written paper about central aspects of your research. But sometimes you are frustrated. Maybe someone has done (almost) the same experiments, but was quicker in getting the work published. Then you can at least publish your results, probably in a less prestigous journal, to confirm these findings.

A recent Nature article, repeated in a Nautilus blog post, talks about author accountability. The article suggests that at least one author per collaborative group signs a statement with reference to Nature's publication policies. This policy would certainly help avoid honorary authorship , but it can be difficult to enforce in large research projects. I would like to make another suggestion.

How could you improve your scientific writing skills? Two months ago I talked about books. Another idea would be a scientific writing workshop. This weekend I attended such a workshop, organized by Julia Klapproth and Barry Drees from Trilogy Writing & Consulting. The workshop was organized as a 1½ day course with many group exercises.

Are you tired of writing a paper, based on real experiments? SciGen could come to the rescue, at least if you do computer science research. SciGen is a program that creates random papers, complete with results, discussion, graphs and references. Some of these random papers have been accepted at conferences or even for publication. SciGen is of course a hoax.