I recently finished An Essay on Science and Narcissism by Bruno Lemaitre. I found this book really insightful and thought I would write some notes about it here. The book was published in 2016 although I only just got around to reading it. You can grab a copy for free here. There’s an abbreviated form […]
Tag: science
Voice Your Opinion: naming your lab
There are perennial topics of discussion on Science Twitter. An example of this is: should figures be at the end of a manuscript are interspersed in the text. These topics tend not to be resolved because there are strong arguments (and personal preferences) on each side. I am not sure whether it is even possible […]
Talkshow: why don’t scientists do gigs?
The coronavirus crisis has meant that scientific meetings and seminars have moved online. This change has led to me wondering: why don’t scientists give talks the way that musicians do gigs? The idea is: after posting a preprint or publishing a paper, a scientist advertises that they will livestream a seminar to explain the work. […]
Inspiration Information: some book recommendations for kids
As with children’s toys and clothes, books aimed at children tend to be targeted in a gender-stereotyped way. This is a bit depressing. While books about princesses can be inspirational to young girls – if the protagonist decides to give it all up and have a career as a medic instead (the plot to Zog […]
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. […]
Strange Things
I noticed something strange about the 2013 Impact Factor data for eLife. Before I get onto the problem. I feel I need to point out that I dislike Impact Factors and think that their influence on science is corrosive. I am a DORA signatory and I try to uphold those principles. I admit that, in the […]
My Blank Pages
Books about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology are plentiful. If you haven’t read any, the best place to start are the books written by some of the Nobelists themselves: “I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier” by Perutz, “My Life in Science” by Brenner. Also, “Sequences, Sequence, Sequences” by Sanger, “What Mad Pursuit” by […]
A Day In The Life
#paperoftheday #potd A common complaint from other PIs is that they “don’t read enough any more”. I feel like this too and a solution was proposed by a friend of a friend*: try to read one paper per day. This seemed like a good idea and I started to do this in 2013. The rules, obviously, […]
So Long
How long does it take to publish a paper? I posted the picture below on Twitter to show how long it takes for us to publish a paper. The answer is 235 days. This is the median time from submission at the first journal to publication online or in print. The data are from our […]