I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science. Statistics is a topic that many people find difficult to grasp. I think there are a couple of reasons for this […]
Tips from the blog IV – averaging
I put a recent code snippet put up on the IgorExchange. It’s a simple procedure for averaging a set of 1D waves and putting the results in a new wave. The difference between this code and Average Waves.ipf (which ships with Igor) is that this function takes the average of all points in the wave and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]