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 […]
Category: science
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 […]
Zero Tolerance
We were asked to write a Preview piece for Developmental Cell. Two interesting papers which deal with the insertion of amphipathic helices in membranes to influence membrane curvature during endocytosis were scheduled for publication and the journal wanted some “front matter” to promote them. Our Preview is paywalled – sorry about that – but I […]
If and When: publishing and productivity in the lab
I thought I’d share this piece of analysis looking at productivity of people in the lab. Here, productivity means publishing papers. This is unfortunate since some people in my lab have made some great contributions to other peoples’ projects or have generally got something going, but these haven’t necessarily transferred into print. Also, the projects people have been involved […]
Science songs
I thought I’d compile a list of songs related to biomedical science. These were all found in my iTunes library. I’ve missed off multiple entries for the same kind of thing, as indicated. Neuroscience Grand Mal -Elliott Smith from XO Sessions She’s Lost Control – Joy Division from Unknown Pleasures (Epilepsy) Aneuryism – Nirvana from […]
Division Day: using PCA in cell biology
In this post I’ll describe a computational method for splitting two sides of a cell biological structure. It’s a simple method that relies on principal component analysis, otherwise known as PCA. Like all things mathematical there are some great resources on the web, if you want to understand this operation in more detail (for example, this great […]
Sticky End
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The work was mainly done by Cristina Gutiérrez Caballero, a post-doc in the lab. We had some help from Selena Burgess and Richard Bayliss at the University of Leicester, with whom we have an ongoing collaboration. The paper in a nutshell We found that TACC3 binds […]
Joining A Fanclub
When I started this blog, my plan was to write about interesting papers or at least blog about the ones from my lab. This post is a bit of both. I was recently asked to write a “Journal Club” piece for Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, which is now available online. It’s paywalled unfortunately. It’s […]
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 […]
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. […]