Literature at Large

We launched the F1000 Journal Rankings on Monday. We’ve taken the ratings given to articles by F1000 Faculty Members, and cooked up a way of ranking journals using those scores. This is a new venture for us, one that is both exciting and slightly terrifying. (Updated: Read Declan Butler’s piece in Nature, here.) First, why…

Morgan, in her latest post here at Naturally Selected, makes the point that indirect action is more effective than confrontation at getting your ideas accepted. The thought occurred to me that the real staring-eyed prophets–you know the ones I mean, we’ve all had those emails–probably wouldn’t be convinced by such an argument, and as they’re…

One of the first and most important things a neophyte scientist learns–or at least, is taught–is the importance of keeping a comprehensive and accurate record. We all know it’s a good thing, and yet I’d wager most of us struggle with it. Who hasn’t scribbled a calculation or a measurement on a handy paper towel,…

In case you haven’t seen it already, there’s an intriguing new article in Infection and Immunity, Retracted Science and the Retraction Index. It’s by the Editor in Chief of Infect. Immun. Ferric C. Fang and Arturo Casadevall–Editor in Chief of mBio and long-serving F1000 Member in Medical Microbiology. Fang, with Casadevall, looked at retractions in…

Remember the news story about alien life that turned out not to be about that at all (here, and links therein)? Well, in a triumph for open science advocates everywhere, Rosie Redfield has started trying to replicate the GFAJ-1 growth experiments, and is reporting progress on her own blog. (It’s the reporting progress thing that…

More reaction to the Select Committee’s report on peer review, released last week. The Royal Society of Chemistry uses the occasion to trump its “subject repository style journal”, RSC Advances. Their press release also reminds me that they have a freely available chemical database, ChemSpider–which appears to have come on in leaps and bounds since…

You might have seen that the UK government has released its Select Committee’s report on peer review in science. The chair of the committee, Andrew Miller MP, says that the “general oversight of research integrity in the UK [is] unsatisfactory and complacent.” Note that he doesn’t say that the research is unsatisfactory–simply the oversight. I…

Mendeley today released version 1.0 of their desktop client. Hard to believe, I know, that this milestone isn’t long past. Mendeley is a free reference manager, integrated with an article-centric social network. You can see a short video about what it can do here: What is Mendeley? from Mendeley. It’s not escaped our notice that…

It was Kuhn, quoting Max Planck, who claimed that for science to progress (through the discarding of old hypotheses and the adoption of new ones) that opponents of progress had to die. It remains to be seen whether the general acceptance of that hypothesis itself will outlive the current generation (or not). But as our…

There’s an interesting article just out in Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, which “publishes substantive content of interest to science and technology librarians.” Written by John Carey, head librarian at Hunter College, City University of New York, the article examines the concept of “invisible colleges“: mechanisms that promote dissemination of knowledge and fuel the…