In a blog post last week, Dario Taraborelli officially announced ReaderMeter. ReaderMeter takes the usage data from reference managers (starting with Mendeley) to analyze the impact of publications by a particular author. ReaderMeter is a welcome addition to other metrics of researcher impact, most of which are citation-based. And ReaderMeter was hacked together in a few nights, so the service should improve over time.
This week PLoS Computational Biology published another helpful editorial in their 10 Simple Rules collection (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941): Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia. I have very rarely edited Wikipedia articles myself, and I suspect this behavior is the rule and not the exception among science bloggers.
Tables and figures contain the data of a scientific paper in condensed (and often visually appealing) form. This is why they are among the first thing we look at, and why they are often reused when we discuss the paper in a presentation or blog post.
Dear Christian Specht, Thank you very much for your detailed response in The Scientist to our previous letter regarding citation mutations.
Citation styles are one of the greater mysteries for the novice manuscript writer. There are numerous ways that authors, title, journal, etc. can be arranged and formatted (see examples below), and in bibliographies citations can be ordered either alphabetically or by order of appearance in the text. Laemmli UK . Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4.
Whereas most reference managers are either standalone applications and/or web-based, Zotero works as a Firefox plugin. This approach has many advantages, but is not for everybody.
Dear Scientist, last week you published an interesting article by Christian Specht about Mutations of citations. Dr. Specht found more than 600 wrong citations for the paper by Laemmli (Laemmli 1970), which has been cited at least 88633 times according to Scopus. Laemmli UK . Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4.
In March 2009 I posted an overview chart of how popular reference managers have implemented some important features. I’ve since updated this chart several times, and the chart probably has outgrown the format of a blog post.
Dear reader, two weeks ago I moved this blog from Nature Network to PLoS Blogs . I hope that most of my old readers have followed me here, and that I might even have a few new readers. Ed Yong recently talked about how he interacts with his many, many blog readers. One important strategy he uses is to ask his readers for feedback in regular intervals – he calls it delurking.
All science bloggers do a lot of reading for background information, or write blog posts based on a (newly published) paper, blog post or news item. So I thought that it would be a good idea to collect those references in a single place. Reading lists are perfect for this, and they are easy to create and maintain with web-based reference managers.
The Scholarly Kitchen is a group blog started by the Society for Scholarly Publishing in 2008. The blog posts by authors Kent Anderson, Phil Davis, David Crotty, Michael Clarke, etc. are an always interesting – and often thought-provoking – read about scholarly publishing. Two recent posts looked at peer review.