O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. –William Blake Peter Lawrence has weighed into the debate on the state of research in an article for Lab Times, boldly…
Vitek quotes a Polish proverb, If you’re going to fall off a horse, make it a big one. In that vein, take a look at this graph (don’t look too closely; it’s deliberately a tiny bit obscure): What I’ve been doing this week is mostly hacking away in Perl at some of the information in…
…what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause Thomson, in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reckon there ain’t nowt wrong with the Journal Impact Factor: The impact factor has had success and utility as a journal metric due to its concentration on…
I’ve been remiss. I should have talked a bit about the events of last Saturday: truth is I was struck by a stomach bug on Tuesday night and have been a little bit out of things. If you’re interested, there is a video of the ‘Fringe Frivolous‘ event of the Friday evening and lots and…
Alejandro brings my attention to ScienceWatch’s list of most-cited institutions in science. This is the list of the ‘top’ twenty institutions out of just over four thousand. For some value of ‘top’, he says snarkily. Now, we know there are serious problems with citation metrics, but essentially it’s all we’ve got to go on, so…
Shirley Wu kicked off an interesting conversation on Friendfeed yesterday, reporting on a conversation that questioned the ‘quality’ of our old friend PLoS One. Now there’s a debate that’s going to go round and round, possibly generating rather more heat and noise than useful work. The conversation, thanks to Peter Binfield, then turned onto article…
Somewhere in the depths of PLoS One an article lurks… Liz Allen and her friends at the Wellcome performed an interesting study on papers that came out of labs that were at least partially funded by Wellcome grants. What they did was to figure where each of the nearly 700 papers ended up being published,…
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