Market your science on YouTube
This past Christmas break I read Explaining Research by Dennis Meredith. As his bio states, “Dennis Meredith’s career as a science communicator has included service at some of the country’s leading research universities, including MIT, Caltech, Cornell, Duke and the University of Wisconsin. He has worked with science journalists at all the nation’s major newspapers, […]
Misrepresenting Science: Saturn’s North Pole “Hurricane”
By now, you may have read about the imagery from the Cassini mission to Saturn. The NASA press release calls it a “large hurricane”. The European Space Agency has a similar release. Nice false-color imagery, yes. But, bad science. Hurricanes are storms fueled by the release of latent heat from condensing water that is originally […]
Government Guidelines for Concise and Clear Writing
Brian Curran sends me this article in Government Executive called “8 Tips to Improve Your (And Your Agency’s) Writing”. This guidance comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, who recently developed a Writing Style Guide. You can download this 114-page PDF here. After those 8 tips, the author provides this Pop Quiz. Pop Quiz: Which […]
The Importance of Not Being Cited
This title comes from a 1973 paper in Current Contents by Eugene Garfield called “Uncitedness III—The Importance of Not Being Cited”. In there, Garfield talks about three reasons why papers may not be cited. I. “the uncitedness of the mediocre, the unintelligible, the irrelevant, the eccentric.” II. “the uncitedness of the meritorious but undiscovered or […]
How to determine authorship order quantitatively
Feuding coauthors on your paper? Petty arguments about who did more work? Colleagues whining because you didn’t include them in the author list of your latest Nature paper? I recently discovered the following paper, which reminded me of several articles that produce a quantitative approach to determining author order. Authorship of scientific articles within an […]
