My eldest son Dan went out to visit his girlfriend Beth, shortly before the Coronavirus crisis began, during her university placement in Toulouse. While they were there, they bought me this gift: As you can see, it’s a Lego-like self-assembly kit; but as you can also see from the mug in the background, it’s tiny.

I’ve written four posts about the R2R debate on the proposition “the venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”: part 1: opening statement in support part 2: opening statement against the motion part 3: my response for the motion part 4: the video!

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the […]

As I was figuring out what I thought about the new paper on sauropod posture (Vidal et al. 2020) I found the paper uncommonly difficult to parse.

Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in Scientific Reports (Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt.

It’s been a while, but to be fair the world has caught fire since I first started posting about the Research to Reader conference. Stay safe, folks. Don’t meet people. Stay indoors; or go outdoors where there’s no-one else. You know how it’s done by now. This is not a drill.

Our old sparring partner Cary Woodruff is a big fan of Monarobot, a Mexican artist who does all of her pieces in a Maya artistic style. So he commissioned this piece: Anyone can tell that this is an apatosaurine cervical in anterior view — but which apatosaurine cervical?

When I gave the talk about vertebral orientation for the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress at the end of 2018, I had to prepare it as a video — so I saved it on YouTube so it would outlive the conference: Having figured out the practicalities of doing this, it made sense to similarly make a […]

The Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference at the start of this week featured a debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I’ve already posted Toby Green’s opening statement for the proposition and Pippa Smart’s opening statement against it. Now here is my (shorter) […]

Yesterday I told you all about the Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference and its debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I posted the opening statement for the proposition, which was co-written by Toby Green and me. Now here is the opening statement […]