## A Day In The Life II

I have been doing paper of the day (#potd) again in 2014. See my previous post about this.

My “rules” for paper of the day are:

1. Read one paper each working day.
2. If I am away, or reviewing a paper for a journal or colleague, then I get a pass.
3. Read it sufficiently to be able to explain it to somebody else, i.e. don’t just scan the abstract and look at the figures. Really read it and understand it. Scan and skim as many other papers as you normally would!
4. Only papers reporting primary research count. No reviews/opinion pieces etc.
5. If it was really good or worth telling people about – tweet about it.
6. Make a simple database in Excel – this helps you keep track, make notes about the paper (to see if you meet #3) and allows you to find the paper easily in the future (this last point turned out to be very useful).

This year has been difficult, especially sticking to #3. My stats for 2014 are:

• 73% success rate. Down from 85% in 2013
• Stats errors in 36% of papers I read!
• 86% of papers were from 2014

Following last year, I wasn’t so surprised by the journals that the papers appeared in:

1. eLife
2. J Cell Biol
3. Mol Biol Cell
4. Dev Cell
5. Nature Methods
6. J Cell Sci
7. J Neurosci
8. Nature Cell Biol
9. Traffic
10. Curr Biol
11. Nature
12. Nature Comm
13. Science

According to my database I only read one paper in Cell this year. I certainly have lots of them in “Saved for later” in Feedly (which is a black hole from which papers rarely emerge to be read). It’s possible that the reason Cell, Nature and Science are low on the list is that I might quickly glance at papers in those journals but not actually read them for #potd. Last year eLife was at number 9 and this year it is at number 1. This journal is definitely publishing a lot of exciting cell biology and also the lens format is very nice for reading.

I think I’ll try to continue this in 2015. The main thing it has made me realise is how few papers I read (I mean really read). I wonder if students and postdocs are actually the main consumers of the literature. If this is correct, do PIs rely on “subsistence reading”, i.e. when they write their own papers and check the immediate literature? Is their deep reading done only during peer reviewing other people’s work? Or do PIs rely on a constant infusion of the latest science at seminars and at meetings?

## Insane In The Brain

Back of the envelope calculations for this post.

An old press release for a paper on endocytosis by Tom Kirchhausen contained this fascinating factoid:

The equivalent of the entire brain, or a football field of membrane, is turned over every hour

If this is true it is absolutely staggering. Let’s check it out.

A synaptic vesicle is ~40 nm in diameter. So the surface area of 1 vesicle is

$$4 \pi r^2$$

which is 5026 nm2, or 5.026 x 10-15 m2.

Now, an American football field is 5350 m2 (including both endzones), this is the equivalent of 1.065 x 1018 synaptic vesicles.

It is estimated that the human cortex has 60 trillion synapses. This means that each synapse would need to internalise 17742 vesicles to retrieve the area of membrane equivalent to one football field.

The factoid says this takes one hour. This membrane load equates to each synapse turning over 296 vesicles in one minute, which is 4.93 vesicles per second.

Tonic activity of neurons differs throughout the brain and actually 5 Hz doesn’t sound too high (feel free to correct me on this). We’ve only considered cortical neurons, so the factoid seems pretty plausible!

For an actual football field, i.e. Association Football. The calculation is slightly more complicated. This is because there is no set size for football pitches. In England, the largest is apparently Manchester City (7598 m2) while the smallest actually belongs to the greatest football team in the world, Crewe Alexandra (5518 m2).

A brain would hoover up Man City’s ground in an hour if each synapse turned over 7 vesicles per second, while Gresty Road would only take 5 vesicles per second.

What is less clear from the factoid is whether a football field really equates to an “entire brain”. Bionumbers has no information on this. I think this part of the factoid may come from a different bit of data which is that clathrin-mediated endocytosis in non-neuronal cells can internalise the equivalent of the entire surface area of the cell in about an hour. I wonder whether this has been translated to neurons for the purposes of the quote. Either way, it is an amazing factoid that the brain can turnover this huge amount of membrane in such a short space of time.

So there you have it: quanta quantified on quantixed.

The post title is from “Insane In The Brain” by Cypress Hill from the album Black Sunday.

## Half Right

I was talking to a speaker visiting our department recently. While discussing his postdoc work from years ago, he told me about the identification of the sperm factor that causes calcium oscillations in the egg at fertilisation. It was an interesting tale because the group who eventually identified the factor – now widely accepted as PLCzeta – had earlier misidentified the factor, naming it oscillin.

The oscillin paper was published in Nature in 1996 and the subsequent (correct) paper was published in Development in 2002. I wondered what the citation profiles of these papers looks like now.

As you can see there was intense interest in the first paper that quickly petered out, presumably when people found out that oscillin was a contaminant and not the real factor. The second paper on the other hand has attracted a large number of citations and continues to do so 12 years later – a sign of a classic paper. However, the initial spike in citations was not as high as the Nature paper.

The impact factor of Nature is much higher than that of Development. I’ve often wondered if this is due to a sociological phenomenon: people like to cite Cell/Nature/Science papers rather than those at other journals and this bumps up the impact factor. Before you comment, yes I know there are other reasons, but the IFs do not change much over time and I wonder whether journal hierarchy explains the hardiness of IFs over time. Anyway, these papers struck me as a good test of the idea… Here we have essentially the same discovery, reported by the same authors. The only difference here is the journal (and that one paper is six years after the other). Normally it is not possible to test if the journal influences citations because a paper cannot erased and republished somewhere else. The plot suggests that Nature papers inherently attract much more cites than those in Development, presumably because of the exposure of publishing there. From the graph, it’s not difficult to see that even if a paper turns out not to be right, it can still boost the IF of the journal during the window of assessment. Another reason not to trust journal impact factors.

I can’t think of any way to look at this more systematically to see if this phenomenon holds true. I just thought it was interesting, so I’ll leave it here.

The post title is taken from Half Right by Elliott Smith from the posthumous album New Moon. Bootlegs have the title as Not Half Right, which would also be appropriate.

## My Favorite Things

I realised recently that I’ve maintained a consistent iTunes library for ~10 years. For most of that time I’ve been listening exclusively to iTunes, rather than to music in other formats. So the library is a useful source of information about my tastes in music. It should be possible to look at who are my favourite artists, what bands need more investigation, or just to generate some interesting statistics based on my favourite music.

Play count is the central statistic here as it tells me how often I’ve listened to a certain track. It’s the equivalent of a +1/upvote/fave/like or maybe even a citation. Play count increases by one if you listen to a track all the way to the end. So if a track starts and you don’t want to hear it and you skip on to the next song, there’s no +1. There’s a caveat here in that the time a track has been in the library, influences the play count to a certain extent – but that’s for another post*. The second indicator for liking a track or artist is the fact that it’s in the library. This may sound obvious, but what I mean is that artists with lots of tracks in the library are more likely to be favourite artists compared to a band with just one or two tracks in there. A caveat here is that some artists do not have long careers for a variety of reasons, which can limit the number of tracks actually available to load into the library. Check the methods at the foot of the post if you want to do the same.

What’s the most popular year? Firstly, I looked at the most popular year in the library. This question was the focus of an earlier post that found that 1971 was the best year in music. The play distribution per year can be plotted together with a summary of how many tracks and how many plays in total from each year are in the library. There’s a bias towards 90s music, which probably reflects my age, but could also be caused by my habit of collecting CD singles which peaked as a format in this decade. The average number of plays is actually pretty constant for all years (median of ~4), the mean is perhaps slightly higher for late-2000s music.

Favourite styles of music: I also looked at Genre. Which styles of music are my favourite? I plotted the total number of tracks versus the total number of plays for each Genre in the library. Size of the marker reflects the median number of plays per track for that genre. Most Genres obey a rule where total plays is a function of total tracks, but there are exceptions. Crossover, Hip-hop/Rap and Power-pop are highlighted as those with an above average number of plays. I’m not lacking in Power-pop with a few thousand tracks, but I should probably get my hands on more Crossover or Hip-Hop/Rap.

Using citation statistics to find my favourite artists: Next, I looked at who my favourite artists are. It could be argued that I should know who my favourite artists are! But tastes can change over a 10 year period and I was interested in an unbiased view of my favourite artists rather than who I think they are. A plot of Total Tracks vs Mean plays per track is reasonably informative. The artists with the highest plays per track are those with only one track in the library, e.g. Harvey Danger with Flagpole Sitta. So this statistic is pretty unreliable. Equally, I’ve got lots of tracks by Manic Street Preachers but evidently I don’t play them that often. I realised that the problem of identifying favourite artists based on these two pieces of information (plays and number of tracks) is pretty similar to assessing scientists using citation metrics (citations and number of papers). Hirsch proposed the h-index to meld these two bits of information into a single metric, the h-index. It’s easily computed and I already had an Igor procedure to calculate it en masse, so I ran it on the library information.

Before doing this, I consolidated multiple versions of the same track into one. I knew that I had several versions of the same track, especially as I have multiple versions of some albums (e.g. Pet Sounds = 3 copies = mono + stereo + a capella), the top offending track was “Baby’s Coming Back” by Jellyfish, 11 copies! Anyway, these were consolidated before running the h-index calculation.

The top artist was Elliott Smith with an h-index of 32. This means he has 32 tracks that have been listened to at least 32 times each. I was amazed that Muse had the second highest h-index (I don’t consider myself a huge fan of their music) until I remembered a period where their albums were on an iPod Nano used during exercise. Amusingly (and narcissistically) my own music – the artist names are redacted – scored quite highly with two out of three bands in the top 100, which are shown here. These artists with high h-indeces are the most consistently played in the library and probably constitute my favourite artists, but is the ranking correct?

The procedure also calculates the g-index for every artist. The g-index is similar to the h-index but takes into account very highly played tracks (very highly cited papers) over the h threshold. For example, The Smiths h=26. This could be 26 tracks that have been listened to exactly 26 times or they could have been listened to 90 times each. The h-index cannot reveal this, but the g-index gets to this by assessing average plays for the ranked tracks. The Smiths g=35. To find the artists that are most-played-of-the-consistently-most-played, I subtracted h from g and plotted the Top 50. This ranked list I think most closely represents my favourite artists, according to my listening habits over the last ten years.

Track length: Finally, I looked at the track length. I have a range of track lengths in the library, from “You Suffer” by Napalm Death (iTunes has this at 4 s, but Wikipedia says it is 1.36 s), through to epic tracks like “Blue Room” by The Orb. Most tracks are in the 3-4 min range. Plays per track indicates that this track length is optimal with most of the highly played tracks being within this window. The super-long tracks are rarely listened to, probably because of their length. Short tracks also have higher than average plays, probably because they are less likely to be skipped, due to their length.

These were the first things that sprang to mind for iTunes analysis. As I said at the top, there’s lots of information in the library to dig through, but I think this is enough for one post. And not a pie-chart in sight!

Methods: the library is in xml format and can be read/parsed this way. More easily, you can just select the whole library and copy-paste it into TextEdit and then load this into a data analysis package. In this case, IgorPro (as always). Make sure that the interesting fields are shown in the full library view (Music>Songs). To do everything in this post you need artist, track, album, genre, length, year and play count. At the time of writing, I had 21326 tracks in the library. For the “H-index” analysis, I consolidated multiple versions of the same track, giving 18684 tracks. This is possible by concatenating artist and the first ten characters of the track title (separated by a unique character) and adding the play counts for these concatenated versions. The artist could then be deconvolved (using the unique character) and used for the H-calculation. It’s not very elegant, but seemed to work well. The H-index and G-index calculations were automated (previously sort-of-described here), as was most of the plot generation. The inspiration for the colour coding is from the 2013 Feltron Report.

* there’s an interesting post here about modelling the ideal playlist. I worked through the ideas in that post but found that it doesn’t scale well to large libraries, especially if they’ve been going for a long time, i.e. mine.

The post title is taken from John Coltrane’s cover version of My Favorite Things from the album of the same name. Excuse the US English spelling.

## Belly Button Window

A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views. Time to analyse what people are reading…

The most popular post on the blog (by a long way) is “Strange Things“, a post about the eLife impact factor (2824 views). The next most popular is a post about a Twitter H-index, with 498 views. The Strange Things post has accounted for ~50% of views since it went live (bottom plot) and this fraction seems to be creeping up. More new content is needed to change this situation.

I enjoy putting blog posts together and love the discussion that follows from my posts. It’s also been nice when people have told me that they read my blog and enjoy my posts. One thing I didn’t expect was the way that people can take away very different messages from the same post. I don’t know why I found this surprising, since this often happens with our scientific papers! Actually, in the same way as our papers, the most popular posts are not the ones that I would say are the best.

Wet Wet Wet: I have thought about deleting the Strange Things post, since it isn’t really what I want this blog to be about. An analogy here is the Scottish pop-soul outfit Wet Wet Wet who released a dreadful cover of The Troggs’ “Love is All Around” in 1994. In the end, the band deleted the single in the hope of redemption, or so they said. Given that the song had been at number one for 15 weeks, the damage was already done. I think the same applies here, so the post will stay.

Directing Traffic: Most people coming to the blog are clicking on links on Twitter. A smaller number come via other blogs which feature links to my posts. A very small number come to the blog via a Google search. Google has changed the way it formats the clicks and so most of the time it is not possible to know what people were searching for. For those that I can see, the only search term is… yes, you’ve guessed it: “elife impact factor”.

Methods: WordPress stats are available for blog owners via URL formatting. All you need is your API key and (obviously) your blog address.

Instructions are found at http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php

A basic URL format would be: http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php?api_key=yourapikey&blog_uri=yourblogaddress replacing yourapikey with your API key (this can be retrieved at https://apikey.wordpress.com) and yourblogaddress with your blog address e.g. quantixed.wordpress.com

Various options are available from the first page to get the stats in which you are  interested. For example, the following can be appended to the second URL to get a breakdown of views by post title for the past year:

&table=postviews&days=365&limit=-1

The format can be csv, json or xml depending on how your preference for what you want to do next with the information.

The title is from “Belly Button Window” by Jimi Hendrix, a posthumous release on the Cry of Love LP.

## What The World Is Waiting For

The transition for scientific journals from print to online has been slow and painful. And it is not yet complete. This week I got an RSS alert to a “new” paper in Oncogene. When I downloaded it, something was familiar… very familiar… I’d read it almost a year ago! Sure enough, the AOP (ahead of print or advance online publication) date for this paper was September 2013 and here it was in the August 2014 issue being “published”.

I wondered why a journal would do this. It is possible that delaying actual publication would artificially boost the Impact Factor of a journal because there is a delay before citations roll in and citations also peak after two years. So if a journal delays actual publication, then the Impact Factor assessment window captures a “hotter” period when papers are more likely to generate more citations*. Richard Sever (@cshperspectives) jumped in to point out a less nefarious explanation – the journal obviously has a backlog of papers but is not allowed to just print more papers to catch up, due to page budgets.

There followed a long discussion about this… which you’re welcome to read. I was away giving a talk and missed all the fun, but if I may summarise on behalf of everybody: isn’t it silly that we still have pages – actual pages, made of paper – and this is restricting publication.

I wondered how Oncogene got to this position. I retrieved the data for AOP and actual publication for the last five years of papers at Oncogene excluding reviews, from Pubmed. Using oncogene[ta] NOT review[pt] as a search term. The field DP has the date published (the “issue date” that the paper appears in print) and PHST has several interesting dates including [aheadofprint]. These could be parsed and imported into IgorPro as 1D waves. The lag time from AOP to print could then be calculated. I got 2916 papers from the search and was able to get data for 2441 papers.

You can see for this journal that the lag time has been stable at around 300 days (~10 months) for issues published since 2013. So a paper AOP in Feb 2012 had to wait over 10 months to make it into print. This followed a linear period of lag time growth from mid-2010.

I have no links to Oncogene and don’t particularly want to single them out. I’m sure similar lags are happening at other print journals. Actually, my only interaction with Oncogene was that they sent this paper of ours out to review in 2011 (it got two not-negative-but-admittedly-not-glowing reviews) and then they rejected it because they didn’t like the cell line we used. I always thought this was a bizarre decision: why couldn’t they just decide that before sending it to review and wasting our time? Now, I wonder whether they were not keen to add to their increasing backlog of papers at their journal? Whatever the reason, it has put me off submitting other papers there.

I know that there are good arguments for continuing print versions of journals, but from a scientist’s perspective the first publication is publication. Any subsequent versions are simply redundant and confusing.

*Edit: Alexis Verger (@Alexis_Verger) pointed me to a paper which describes that, for neuroscience journals, the lag time has increased over time. Moreover, the authors suggest that this is for the purpose of maximising Journal Impact Factor.

The post title comes from the double A-side Fools Gold/What The World Is Waiting For by The Stone Roses.

## Tips from the Blog II

An IgorPro tip this week. The default font for plots is Geneva. Most of our figures are assembled using Helvetica for labelling. The default font can be changed in Igor Graph Preferences, but Preferences need to be switched on in order to be implemented. Anyway, I always seem to end up with a mix of Geneva plots and Helevetica plots. This can be annoying as the fonts are pretty similar yet the spacing is different and this can affect the plot size. Here is a quick procedure Helvetica4All() to rectify this for all graph windows.

## Six Plus One

Last week, ALM (article-level metric) data for PLoS journals were uploaded to Figshare with the invitation to do something cool with it.

Well, it would be rude not to. Actually, I’m one of the few scientists on the planet that hasn’t published a paper with Public Library of Science (PLoS), so I have no personal agenda here. However, I love what PLoS is doing and what it has achieved to disrupt the scientific publishing system. Anyway, what follows is not in any way comprehensive, but I was interested to look at a few specific things:

1. Is there a relationship between Twitter mentions and views of papers?
2. What is the fraction of views that are PDF vs HTML?
3. Can citations be predicted by more immediate article level metrics?

The tl;dr version is 1. Yes. 2. ~20%. 3. Can’t say but looks unlikely.

1. Twitter mentions versus paper views

2. Fraction of PDF vs HTML views

I asked a few people what they thought the download ratio is for papers. Most thought 60-75% as PDF versus 40-25% HTML. I thought it would be lower, but I was surprised to see that it is, at most, 20% for PDF. The plot below shows the fraction of PDF downloads (counter_pdf/(counter_pdf+counter_html)). For all PLoS journals, and then broken down for PLoS Biol, PLoS ONE.

This was a surprise to me. I have colleagues who don’t like depositing post-print or pre-print papers because they say that they prefer their work to be seen typeset in PDF format. However, this shows that, at least for PLoS journals, the reader is choosing to not see a typeset PDF at all, but a HTML version.

Maybe the PLoS PDFs are terribly formatted and 80% people don’t like them. There is an interesting comparison that can be done here, because all papers are deposited at Pubmed Central (PMC) and so the same plot can be generated for the PDF fraction there. The PDF format is different to PLoS and so we can test the idea that people prefer HTML over PDF at PLoS because they don’t like the PLoS format.

The fraction of PDF downloads is higher, but only around 30%. So either the PMC format is just as bad, or this is the way that readers like to consume the scientific literature. A colleague mentioned that HTML views are preferable to PDF if you want to actually want to do something with the data, e.g. for meta-analysis. This could have an effect. HTML views could be skim reading, whereas PDF is for people who want to read in detail… I wonder whether these fractions are similar at other publishers, particularly closed access publishers?

3. Citation prediction?

ALMs are immediate whereas citations are slow. If we assume for a moment that citations are a definitive means to determine the impact of a paper (which they may not be), then can ALMs predict citations? This would make them very useful in the evaluation of scientists and their endeavours. Unfortunately, this dataset is not sufficient to answer this properly, but with multiple timepoints, the question could be investigated. I looked at number of paper downloads and also the Mendeley score to see how these two things may foretell citations. What follows is a strategy to do this is an unbiased way with few confounders.

The dataset has a Scopus column, but for some reason these data are incomplete. It is possible to download data (but not on this scale AFAIK) for citations from Web of Science and then use the DOI to cross-reference to the other dataset. This plot shows the Scopus data as a function of “Total Citations” from Web of Science, for 500 papers. I went with the Web of Science data as this appears more robust.

The question is whether there is a relationship between downloads of a paper (Counter, either PDF or HTML) and citations. Or between Mendeley score and citations. I figured that downloading, Mendeley and citation, show three progressive levels of “commitment” to a paper and so they may correlate differently with citations. Now, to look at this for all PLoS journals for all time would be silly because we know that citations are field-specific, journal-specific, time-sensitive etc. So I took the following dataset from Web of Science: the top 500 most-cited papers in PLoS ONE for the period of 2007-2010 limited to “cell biology”. By cross-referencing I could check the corresponding values for Counter and for Mendeley.

I was surprised that the correlation was very weak in both cases. I thought that the correlation would be stronger with Mendeley, however signal-to-noise is a problem here with few users of the service compared with counting downloads. Below each plot is a ranked view of the papers, with the Counter or Mendeley data presented as a rolling average. It’s a very weak correlation at best. Remember that this is post-hoc. Papers that have been cited more would be expected to generate more views and higher Mendeley scores, but this is not necessarily so. Predicting future citations based on Counter or Mendeley, will be tough. To really know if this is possible, this approach needs to be used with multiple ALM timepoints to see if there is a predictive value for ALMs, but based on this single timepoint, it doesn’t seem as though prediction will be possible.

Methods: To crunch the numbers for yourself, head over to Figshare and download the csv. A Web of Science subscription is needed for the citation data. All the plots were generated in IgorPro, but no programming is required for these comparisons and everything I’ve done here can be easily done in Excel or another package.

Edit: Matt Hodgkinson (@mattjhodgkinson) Snr Ed at PLoS ONE told me via Twitter that all ALM data (periodically updated) are freely available here. This means that some of the analyses I wrote about are possible.

The post title comes from Six Plus One a track on Dad Man Cat by Corduroy. Plus is as close to PLoS as I could find in my iTunes library.

## You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)

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. The main metrics are impressions and engagements per tweet. As I understand it, impressions are the number of times your tweet is served up to people in their feed (boosted by retweets). Engagements are when somebody clicks on the tweet (either a link or to see the thread or whatever). In publication terms, impressions would equate to people downloading your paper and engagements mean that they did something with it, like cite it. This means that a “h-index” for engagements can be calculated with these data.

For those that don’t know, the h-index for a scientist means that he/she has h papers that have been cited h or more times. The Twitter version would be a tweeter that has h tweets that were engaged with h or more times. My data is shown here:

My twitter h-index is currently 36. I have 36 tweets that have been engaged with 36 or more times.

So, this is a lot higher than my actual h-index, but obviously there are differences. Papers accrue citations as time goes by, but the information flow on Twitter is so fast that tweets don’t accumulate engagement over time. In that sense, the Twitter h-index is less sensitive to the time a user has been active on Twitter, versus the real h-index which is strongly affected by age of the scientist. Other differences include the fact that I have “published” thousands of tweets and only tens of papers. Also, whether or not more people read my tweets compared to my papers… This is not something I want to think too much about, but it would affect how many engagements it is possible to achieve.

The other thing I looked at was whether replying to somebody actually means more engagement. This would skew the Twitter h-index. I filtered tweets that started with an @ and found that this restricts who sees the tweet, but doesn’t necessarily mean more engagement. Replies make up a very small fraction of the h tweets.

I’ll leave it to somebody else to calculate the Impact Factor of Twitter. I suspect it is very low, given the sheer volume of tweets.

Please note this post is just for fun. Normal service will (probably) resume in the next post.

Edit: As pointed out in the comments this post is short on “Materials and Methods”. If you want to calculate your ownTwitter h-index, go here. When logged in to Twitter, the analytics page should present your data (it may take some time to populate this page after you first view it). A csv can be downloaded from the button on the top-right of the page. I imported this into IgorPro (as always) to generate the plots. The engagements data need to be sorted in descending order and then the h-index can be found by comparing the numbers with their ranked position.

The post title is from the quirky B-side to the Let It Be single by The Beatles.

## Pay You Back In Time

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. However, I think that as a senior scientist with a wealth of experience, the system would benefit greatly from more of her input. Actually, I don’t think she sticks rigorously to this and I know that she is an Academic Editor at a journal so, in fact she contributes much more to the system than she was letting on.

I thought of this recently when – in the space of one week – I got three peer review requests, which I accepted. I began to wonder about my own debit and credit in the peer review system. I only have reliable data from 2010.

Reviews incurred as an author are in gold (re-reviews are in pale gold), reviews completed as a peer are in purple (re-reviews are in pale purple). They are plotted cumulatively and the difference – or the balance – is shown by the markers. So, I have been in a constant state of owing the system reviews and I’m in no position to be turning down review requests.

In my defence, I was for two years Section Editor at BMC Cell Biology which means that I contributed more to the system that the plot shows. Another thing is reviews incurred/completed as a grant applicant/referee. I haven’t factored those in, but I think this would take the balance down further. I also comment on colleagues papers and grant applications.

Thinking back, I’ve only ever turned down a handful of peer review requests. Reasons being either that the work was too far outside my area of expertise or that I had a conflict of interest. I’ve never cited a balance of zero as a reason for not reviewing and this analysis shows that I’m not in this category.

In case any Editors are reading this… I’m happy to review work in my area, but please remember I currently have three papers to review!

The post title comes from a demo recording by The Posies that can be found on the At Least, At Last compilation on Not Lame Recordings.