“ Excuse me; the whole tenure system is ridiculous. A guaranteed job for life only encourages the faculty to become complacent. If we really want science to advance, people should have chips implanted in their skulls that explode when they say something stupid.” Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory Between the recent ACUMEN (academic careers understood through measurement and norms) workshop and my searches for a post-doc, it seemed like an excellent time to look at one of the most important land marks in an academic’s career: the tenure.
Earlier this week, my favorite citation management tool Mendeley announced that it had sold itself to a very large, for-profit scholarly publishing company, Elsevier.
I recently taught a fun workshop called "Mobile Apps for Research and Education." We talked about some apps to access library databases, then shared some favorite apps for getting work done.The mobile apps for accessing library resources are always a bit weird.
When most folks think about Girl Scouts, they think about cookies. I love the cookies (peanut butter patties are my favorite) but thinking about Girl Scouts brings to my mind calculus, the glacial border region of Western New York, and the friendships I shared with a remarkable group of women who have all gone on to have successful careers in science and engineering fields.
Last week, the Obama administration issued a directive declaring that scientists have to share the results of their taxpayer funded research. I was happy to hear this, as I have always been a big advocate of sharing (well, my little sister might disagree with the "always" part, but you know what i mean).
As the sole science librarian at a small liberal arts college, I work with faculty and students in a variety of disciplines. This means that I need to understand the literature of those disciplines, and understanding the literature means knowing at least a little bit about the metrics that are used to measure it: impact factors, h-indexes and altmetrics can all be interesting and useful, but establishing context can be difficult.For example, is an h-index of 9 good, bad or indifferent?
Science seems to be full of controversies and conflicts; famous scientists willing to kill and be killed for their pet theories, former students challenging the views of their academic "parents" and so on.
Over the course of my life I have gone by many names: Ba Ba (early childhood nickname given to me by a younger sister learning to talk), Beege (my grandma calls me this, I'm never quite sure how to spell it), Bonnie, Red (a camp nickname), BONNIE JEAN MULLER (when my parents were angry at me), Bonnie Muller, Bonnie Swoger, etc.
This post is a re-worked and updated version of a post that appeared on my blog, the Undergraduate Science Librarian, in October 2011. One of the most fun sciencey things I've seen lately is the #overlyhonestmethods meme on twitter.
What's wrong with citation analysis?Other than your papers not being cited enough, what's wrong with measuring scientific influence based on citation count?
