What is your h-index on Twitter? 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 […]
Category: science
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 […]
“Yeah” Is What We Had
When it comes to measuring the impact of our science, citations are pretty much all we have. And not only that but they only say one thing – yeah – with no context. How can we enrich citation data? Much has been written about how and why and whether or not we should use metrics for […]
Round and Round
I thought I’d share a procedure for rotating a 2D set of coordinates about the origin. Why would you want do this? Well, we’ve been looking at cell migration in 2D – tracking nuclear position over time. Cells migrate at random and I previously blogged about ways to visualise these tracks more clearly. Part of […]
Sure To Fall
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 […]
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 […]
Outer Limits
This post is about a paper that was recently published. It was the result of a nice collaboration between me and Francisco López-Murcia and Artur Llobet in Barcelona. The paper in a nutshell The availability of clathrin sets a limit for presynaptic function Background Clathrin is a three legged protein that forms a cage around […]
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 […]
Falling and Landing
A great quote from a classic paper by J.B.S. Haldane “On Being The Right Size” (1926). You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a […]