I run a Masters module called MD997. Over six weeks, students have to write a grant proposal and then assess their peers’ proposals at a mock grant panel. Each student bases their proposal on a paper. They present that paper to the class and then they write their proposal using the paper as a springboard. […]
Tag: papers
Ferrous: new paper on FerriTagging proteins in cells
We have a new paper out. It’s not exactly news, because the paper has been up on bioRxiv since December 2016 and hasn’t changed too much. All of the work was done by Nick Clarke when he was a PhD student in the lab. This post is to explain our new paper to a general […]
Methods papers for MD997
I am now running a new module for masters students, MD997. The aim is to introduce the class to a range of advanced research methods and to get them to think about how to formulate their own research question(s). The module is built around a paper which is allocated in the first session. I had […]
The Digital Cell: Workflow
The future of cell biology, even for small labs, is quantitative and computational. What does this mean and what should it look like? My group is not there yet, but in this post I’ll describe where we are heading. The graphic below shows my current view of the ideal workflow for my lab. The graphic is pretty self-explanatory, but […]
Voice Your Opinion: Editors shopping for preprints is the future
Today I saw a tweet from Manuel Théry (an Associate Ed at Mol Biol Cell). Which said that he heard that the Editor-in-Chief of MBoC, David Drubin shops for interesting preprints on bioRxiv to encourage the authors to submit to MBoC. This is not a surprise to me. I’ve read that authors of preprints on bioRxiv […]
A Day In The Life III
This year #paperOTD (or paper of the day for any readers not on Twitter) did not go well for me. I’ve been busy with lots of things and I’m now reviewing more grants than last year because I am doing more committee work. This means I am finding less time to read one paper per day. […]
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 […]
Middle of the road: pitching your paper
I saw this great tweet (fairly) recently: https://twitter.com/jkpfeiff/status/589148184284254208/ 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. […]
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. […]