A few days ago, Retraction Watch published the top ten most-cited retracted papers. I saw this post with a bar chart to visualise these citations. It didn’t quite capture what the effect (if any) a retraction has on citations. I thought I’d quickly plot this out for the number one article on the list. The plot […]
Category: publishing
White label: the growth of bioRxiv
bioRxiv, the preprint server for biology, recently turned 2 years old. This seems a good point to take a look at how bioRxiv has developed over this time and to discuss any concerns sceptical people may have about using the service. Firstly, thanks to Richard Sever (@cshperspectives) for posting the data below. The first plot shows the number of […]
The Great Curve: Citation distributions
This post follows on from a previous post on citation distributions and the wrongness of Impact Factor. Stephen Curry had previously made the call that journals should “show us the data” that underlie the much-maligned Journal Impact Factor (JIF). However, this call made me wonder what “showing us the data” would look like and how journals might […]
Creep Diets: Fewer papers published at JCB
A couple of years ago, a colleague sent me this picture* to say “who put J Cell Biol on a diet?”. I joked that maybe they publish too many autophagy papers and didn’t think much more of it. Recently, Ron Vale put up this very interesting piece on bioRxiv discussing what it takes to publish […]
Pull Together: our new paper on “The Mesh”
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. Title of the paper: The mesh is a network of microtubule connectors that stabilizes individual kinetochore fibers of the mitotic spindle What’s it about? When a cell divides, the two new cells need to get the right number of chromosomes. If this process goes wrong, it […]
Wrong Number: A closer look at Impact Factors
This is a long post about Journal Impact Factors. Thanks to Stephen Curry for encouraging me to post this. tl;dr — I really liked this recent tweet from Stat Fact It’s a great illustration of why reporting means for skewed distributions is a bad idea. And this brings us quickly to Thomson-Reuters’ Journal Impact Factor […]
Middle of the road: pitching your paper
I saw this great tweet (fairly) recently: I thought this was such a great explanation of when to submit your paper. It reminded me of a diagram that I sketched out when talking to a student in my lab about a paper we were writing. I was trying to explain why we don’t exaggerate our findings. And […]
To Open Closed Doors: How open is your reference list?
Our most recent manuscript was almost ready for submission. We were planning to send it to an open access journal. It was then that I had the thought: how many papers in the reference list are freely available? It somehow didn’t make much sense to point readers towards papers that they might not be able to access. […]
Waiting to happen II: Publication lag times
Following on from the last post about publication lag times at cell biology journals, I went ahead and crunched the numbers for all journals in PubMed for one year (2013). Before we dive into the numbers, a couple of points about this kind of information. Some journals “reset the clock” on the received date with manuscripts […]
Waiting to Happen: Publication lag times in Cell Biology Journals
My interest in publication lag times continues. Previous posts have looked at how long it takes my lab to publish our work, how often trainees publish and I also looked at very long lag times at Oncogene. I recently read a blog post on automated calculation of publication lag times for Bioinformatics journals. I thought it would […]