Nearly two years ago I suggested that the idea of using the last position on an author line to indicate the “senior author” was bad for collaborative, interdisciplinary, fields such as ecology. While I still believe this to be true I’m wondering if this is a battle that has already been quietly fought and lost.

The Ecological Database Toolkit Large amounts of ecological and environmental data are becoming increasingly available due to initiatives sponsoring the collection of large-scale data and efforts to increase the publication of already collected datasets.

Anyone who has been around the halls of academia for a while has heard some well meaning soul talk about how we produce too many PhD students for the number of faculty positions, that this is unfair, and that therefore we should take fewer students.

I really appreciated Jeremy and Owen’s follow up to my original post about PubCred.

After posting about PubCreds I emailed the authors of the original article to invite a response because: 1) it’s only fair if you’re going to criticize someone’s idea to give them a chance to defend it; and 2) I think that the blogosphere is actually the ideal place to have these kinds of discussions because […]

We have a postdoc position available for someone interested in the general areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics.

The peer review system has recently been under increasing pressure as the number of papers submitted has been skyrocketing.

Some days I really wonder whether the bureaucratic infrastructure at institutions of higher education has any idea whatsoever that their job is to support the research and teaching missions of the university.

Successfully doing creative science is hard. The further along you get in a research career the more things are competing for your time and energy and the more distracted you are from your primary goals. This distraction becomes increasingly problematic when it distracts your subconscious as well as your conscious mind.

Our inaugural Things you should read post is about Brian McGill’s new paper on unifying unified theories of macroecological patterns. One of the major challenges to understanding ecology is that there are so many different ways to characterize the structure of ecological systems.

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the social web can/should play an increasing role in filtering the large quantity of published information to allow the best and most important work to float to the top (see e.g., posts by The Scholarly Kitchen and Academhack). In its simplest form the idea is that […]