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.

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.

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.

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.

Note: this is not a serious blog post. Neil Hall’s think piece in Genome Biology on the Kardashian index (K-index) caused an online storm recently, spawning hashtags and outrage in not-so-equal measure.

When it comes to measuring the impact of our science, citations are pretty much all we have. And not only that but they only say one thing – yeah – with no context. How can we enrich citation data?

I thought I’d share a procedure for rotating a 2D set of coordinates about the origin. Why would you want do this? Well, we’ve been looking at cell migration in 2D – tracking nuclear position over time. Cells migrate at random and I previously blogged about ways to visualise these tracks more clearly.

What does the life cycle of a scientific paper look like? It stands to reason that after a paper is published, people download and read the paper and then if it generates sufficient interest, it will begin to be cited.

What is the best music to listen to while writing a manuscript or grant proposal? OK, I know that some people prefer silence and certainly most people hate radio chatter while trying to concentrate.

This post is about a paper that was recently published. It was the result of a nice collaboration between me and Francisco López-Murcia and Artur Llobet in Barcelona.

I was looking at the latest issue of Cell and marvelling at how many authors there are on each paper. It’s no secret that the raison d’être of Cell is to publish the “last word” on a topic (although whether it fulfils that objective is debatable). Definitive work needs to be comprehensive.