A Day In The Life III

This year #paperOTD (or paper of the day for any readers not on Twitter) did not go well for me. I’ve been busy with lots of things and I’m now reviewing more grants than last year because I am doing more committee work. This means I am finding less time to read one paper per day. Nonetheless I will round up the stats for this year. I only managed to read a paper on 59.2% of available days…

The top ten journals that published the papers that I read:

• 1 Nat Commun
• 2 J Cell Biol
• 3 Nature
• 4= Cell
• 4= eLife
• 4= Traffic
• 7 Science
• 8= Dev Cell
• 8= Mol Biol Cell
• 8= Nat Cell Biol

Nature Communications has published some really nice cell biology this year and I’m not surprised it’s number one. Also, I read more papers in Cell this year compared to last. The papers I read are mainly recent. Around 83% of the papers were published in 2015. Again, a significant fraction (42%) of the papers have statistical errors. Funnily enough there were no preprints in my top ten. I realised that I tend to read these when approving them as an affiliate (thoroughly enough for #paperOTD if they interest me) but I don’t mark them in the database.

I think my favourite paper was this one on methods to move organelles around cells using light, see also this paper for a related method. I think I’ll try again next year to read one paper per day. I’m a bit worried that if I don’t attempt this, I simply won’t read any papers in detail.

I also resolved to read one book per month in 2015. I managed this in 2014, but fell short in 2015 just like with #paperOTD. The best book from a limited selection was Matthew Cobb’s Life’s Greatest Secret. A tale of the early days of molecular biology, as it happened. I was a bit sceptical that Matthew could bring anything new to this area of scientific history. Having read Eighth Day of Creation, and then some pale imitations, I thought that this had pretty much been covered completely. This book however takes a fresh perspective and it’s worth reading. Matthew has a nice writing style, animating the dusty old main characters with a insightful detail as he goes along. Check it out.

This blog is going well, with readership growing all the time. I have written about this progress previously (here and here). The most popular posts are those on publishing: preprints, impact factors and publication lag times, rather than my science, but that’s OK. There is more to come on lag times in the New Year, stay tuned.

I am a fan of year-end lists as you may be able to tell. My album of the year is Battles – La Di Da Di which came out on Warp in September. An honourable mention goes to Air Formation – Were We Ever Here EP which I bought on iTunes since the 250 copies had long gone by the time I discovered it on AC30.

Since I don’t watch TV or go to the cinema, I don’t have a pick of the year for that. When it comes to pro-cycling, of course I have an opinion. My favourite stage race was Critérium du Dauphiné Libere which was won by Chris Froome in a close contest with Tejay van Garderen. The best one-day race was a tough pick between E3 Harelbeke won by Geraint Thomas and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad won by Ian Stannard. Although E3 was a hard man’s race in tough conditions, I have to go for Stannard outfoxing three(!) Etixx Quick Step riders to take the win in Nieuwsblad. I’m a bit annoyed that those three picks all involve Team Sky and British riders…. I won’t bore everyone with my own cycling (and running) exploits in 2015. Just to say, that I’ve been more active this year in any year since 2009.

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I shouldn’t need to tell you where the post title comes from. If you haven’t heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, you need to rectify this urgently. The greatest album recorded on 4-track equipment, no question. 🙂