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 […]
Tag: statistics
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 […]
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 […]
Very Best Years
What was the best year in music? OK, I have to be upfront and say that I thought the answer to this would be 1991. Why? Just a hunch. Nevermind, Loveless, Spiderland, Laughing Stock… it was a pretty good year. I thought it would be fun to find out if there really was a golden […]
Some Things Last A Long Time
How long does it take to publish a paper? The answer is – in our experience, at least – about 9 months. That’s right, it takes about the same amount of time to have a baby as it does to publish a scientific paper. Discussing how we can make the publication process quicker is for […]
I’m Gonna Crawl
Fans of data visualisation will know the work of Edward Tufte well. His book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is a classic which covers the history and the principals of conveying data in a concise way, that is easy to interpret. He is also credited with two different dataviz techniques: sparklines and image quilts. It […]
All Together Now
In the lab we use IgorPro from Wavemetrics for analysis. Here is a useful procedure to plot all XY pairs in an experiment. I was plotting out some cell tracking data with a colleague and I knew that I had this useful function buried in an experiment somewhere. I eventually found it and thought I’d […]
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, […]