What does the life cycle of a scientific paper look like? It stands to reason that after a paper is published, people download and read the paper and then if it generates sufficient interest, it will begin to be cited. At some point these citations will peak and the interest will die away as the work […]
Category: computing
Tips from the Blog I
What is the best music to listen to while writing a manuscript or grant proposal? OK, I know that some people prefer silence and certainly most people hate radio chatter while trying to concentrate. However, if you like listening to music, setting an iPod on shuffle is no good since a track by Napalm Death […]
All This And More
I was looking at the latest issue of Cell and marvelling at how many authors there are on each paper. It’s no secret that the raison d’être of Cell is to publish the “last word” on a topic (although whether it fulfils that objective is debatable). Definitive work needs to be comprehensive. So it follows […]
Blast Off!
This post is about metrics and specifically the H-index. It will probably be the first of several on this topic. I was re-reading a blog post by Alex Bateman on his affection for the H-index as a tool for evaluating up-and-coming scientists. He describes Jorge Hirsch’s H-index, its limitations and its utility quite nicely, so I […]
Very Best Years
What was the best year in music? OK, I have to be upfront and say that I thought the answer to this would be 1991. Why? Just a hunch. Nevermind, Loveless, Spiderland, Laughing Stock… it was a pretty good year. I thought it would be fun to find out if there really was a golden […]
I’m Gonna Crawl
Fans of data visualisation will know the work of Edward Tufte well. His book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is a classic which covers the history and the principals of conveying data in a concise way, that is easy to interpret. He is also credited with two different dataviz techniques: sparklines and image quilts. It […]
All Together Now
In the lab we use IgorPro from Wavemetrics for analysis. Here is a useful procedure to plot all XY pairs in an experiment. I was plotting out some cell tracking data with a colleague and I knew that I had this useful function buried in an experiment somewhere. I eventually found it and thought I’d […]
Counting backwards
I thought I would start add a blog to our lab website. The plan is to update maybe once a week with content that is too long for twitter but doesn’t fit in the categories on the lab website. I’m thinking extra analysis, paper commentaries, outreach activities etc. Let’s see how it goes. First up: […]