The Importance of Thinking Before Writing

I was helping a student with a paper he was writing. He said a lot of interesting things, just not being very effective at what he was trying to convey. Here was my advice to him. If you can write down 1–3 bulleted sentences that convey your principal results or points that you want to […]

Plagiarism and Self-Plagiarism Policy

Recently, I had the opportunity to help develop a policy for plagiarism and self-plagiarism for the journals of the American Meteorological Society. That policy was published in the February 2015 issues of the various journals. Although the policy for plagiarism was perhaps not too surprising, the policy on self-plagiarism is, as far as I can […]

Godwin’s Law for Emails to Journal Editors

“…there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.” – Wikipedia entry for Godwin’s Law I am proposing a corollary: Godwin’s Law for Emails to Journal Editors. If […]

BEST Journals demonstrate what it takes to be the best.

I wish I could say this was a joke, but it’s part of a real email from BEST Journals to me, asking me to submit my papers to them within the next four days. Gotcha. I wasn’t doing anything anyway. ————————- From: BEST Journals Subject: Calling for Origianl Papers Aug Edition Date: August 7, 2014 […]

The impact factor as a useful metric is becoming less useful.

With the release of the 2013 impact factors recently, I was reminded about a fascinating piece over at the London School of Economics and Political Science Impact Blog from a few years ago. The article argues that the relationship between impact factor and the citations by journal has been declining since 2012. The authors argue […]

Scientific integrity matters! Fabricated peer reviewers lead to 60 retractions.

Thanks to The Week‘s report, I was alerted to the 60 retracted articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control. The explanation and list of retracted papers is here. More saucy details can be found here. Kudos to the Editor-in-Chief Ali H. Nayfeh and SAGE for carrying out the investigation and retracting the papers. This […]

Thoughts on the impact factors and other metrics: Royal Meteorological Society journals

Recently, I’ve been having some discussions with people about the impact factors for the Royal Meteorological Society journals (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Weather, Meteorological Applications, Atmospheric Science Letters, and International Journal of Climatology). The issues of how to raise impact factors for journals are not simple. The impact factors of nearly all […]

Oh…snap! 1895-style.

From the mini-Annals of Improbable Research (“mini-AIR”) “Pitted Pebbles in the Bunter Conglomerate of Cannock Chase.” T. Mellard Reade, Geological Magazine, vol. 2, no. 8, August 1895, pp. 341-5. LINK: The author instructs: “Mr. W. S. Gresley criticizes the summing-up of my views… It would have been more satisfactory if Mr. Gresley could have read […]

Want quick publicity? Send out a press release on your unpublished manuscript!

As this article from slate.com describes, yet again someone has received a lot of media attention for their unpublished research. This time the study was on the eventual decline of Facebook. The slate article does a fine job of undermining the premises of the paper and showing them not to be valid (particularly the one […]

Sell no manuscript before its time

This classic TV advertisement from the late 1970s features Orson Welles proclaiming that Paul Masson winery will not sell its wine until it is ready. Unfortunately, many authors “sell” their manuscript to journals before they are ready to enter peer review. The manuscripts are often sloppy, lacking careful proofreading. References are not in the proper […]

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