Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
Most articles today are results of teamwork, whether it's only two authors working together or thousands, (think CERN). As science keeps getting bigger, authorship no longer equals actual writing, but one way or another of contribution to team effort...
I love almost everything about my job as a science librarian at a primarily undergraduate college. The one exception is when I am called upon to teach students how to format their citations for the Reference list at the end of their papers.I really dislike formatting citations...
Do you belong to a tiny scholarly society? The kind that has just a few hundred members and no paid staff? Do you publish something? A newsletter, conference proceedings or a small journal?Well, listen up, because I have a few suggestions based on some recent frustrating experiences.I understand that as a tiny society, you can't afford professional web development like Elsevier or Springer or ACS...
Every enthusiastic scientist knows that once you reach a certain level of specialization, there are very few people in your immediate surroundings that actually understand what you say.
Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch...
Self-citing is often frowned upon, being considered (and sometimes is) vanity, egotism or an attempt in self-advertising. However, everyone self-cite because sooner or later, everyone builds upon previous findings "Given the cumulative nature of the production of new knowledge, self-citations constitute a natural part of the communication process." (Costas et al., 2010).The argument whether citation analysis should include self-citation has been going on since the early days of citation analysis and is still ongoing...
This summer, I taught an introductory geology summer school class, heading back to my academic roots. Throughout the six week class, I asked my students to find a news story or blog post each week related to some aspect of geology from credible sources...
Information Culture is a relatively new blog here at Scientific American Blogs, and as the network celebrates its one year anniversary, we are especially curious about who our readers are and how they found us...
Despite its many faults (see part I), the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is considered an influential index to a journal's quality, and publishing in high-impact journals is essential to a researcher's academic career...
In my last post, I made the argument that peer review makes science better. Every article is reviewed by at least a couple of experts prior to publication, and this helps prevent really bad science from appearing alongside the good stuff...
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