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 […]
Tag: Igor
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 […]
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 […]
Tips from the blog III – violin plots
Having recently got my head around violin plots, I thought I would explain what they are and why you might want to use them. There are several options when it comes to plotting summary data. I list them here in order of granularity, before describing violin plots and how to plot them in some detail. […]
Belly Button Window
A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views. Time to analyse what people are reading… The most popular post on the blog (by a long way) is “Strange Things“, a post about the eLife impact factor (2824 views). The next most popular […]
What The World Is Waiting For
The transition for scientific journals from print to online has been slow and painful. And it is not yet complete. This week I got an RSS alert to a “new” paper in Oncogene. When I downloaded it, something was familiar… very familiar… I’d read it almost a year ago! Sure enough, the AOP (ahead of print […]
Tips from the Blog II
An IgorPro tip this week. The default font for plots is Geneva. Most of our figures are assembled using Helvetica for labelling. The default font can be changed in Igor Graph Preferences, but Preferences need to be switched on in order to be implemented. Anyway, I always seem to end up with a mix of Geneva […]
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. […]
You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)
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 […]
Vitamin K
Note: this is not a serious blog post. Neil Hall’s think piece in Genome Biology on the Kardashian index (K-index) caused an online storm recently, spawning hashtags and outrage in not-so-equal measure. Despite all the vitriol that headed Neil’s way, very little of it concerned his use of Microsoft Excel to make his plot of Twitter […]