To collaborate or not to collaborate?

You hear about these stories about how ideas from young scientists are stolen by more senior scientists. (The case of Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the X-ray crystallographic photographs of DNA being a prime one.) Yet, it is always disconcerting to read more and more stories about how people with good scientific ideas are taken advantage […]

Fictitious paper published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications

Jon Zeitler forwarded me this story about a published article that was withdrawn from publication in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications when it was discovered that the authors were fictitious. The work was apparently submitted to discredit another scientist’s work.

Help readers find your article online: Search engine optimization

The point of writing a scientific article is to get it read. How do you ensure that your article will reach the largest possible audience? Search engine optimization. I found this web page from Wiley about how to optimize your article for search engines. Optimizing your article for search engines will greatly increase its chance […]

Should peer reviewers be suggested by authors?

A recent editorial by Mounir Fawzi in Middle East Current Psychiatry asks the above question. The paper concludes: Traditionally, peer reviewers are designated by the editor. However, a recent trend, which is followed by the MECPsych, is to give authors an opportunity to suggest reviewers for their manuscripts. A few studies have compared author-suggested reviewers […]

Can you list acknowledgements in your CV?

From reader Ivan comes this question: “I would like to hear your comments about the practice of mentioning people in the Acknowledgement section of the reviewed papers. E.g. Can acknowledged person add this information in its CV? My impression is that this would motivate people to assist their peers more often and relax some of […]

Publishing companies recognize the benefits of open access when money is involved

When the open-access movement first started making progress against the publishing industry, the industry fought hard to claim that open access did not have the perceived benefit that some authors were claiming that it did: two to six times more citations for being open access (Harnad 2004). They published an article in the Journal of […]

Even Eloquent Science bloggers get rejected. ;-)

The title of this post relates to my post about our university president having her paper rejected. Recently I was informed that a paper that I was coauthor on that we submitted to Nature Geoscience was rejected. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the paper was at least considered for a […]

ISI Impact Factors versus Scopus SJC Factors

Thanks to Prof. Rene Garreaud of the Departamento de Geofisica, Universidad de Chile, for sending me this graphic showing the comparison between the Impact Factor of ISI Web of Knowledge and the SJC Factor of SCOPUS, for journals in atmospheric sciences. These scores are commonly used to assess the “prestige” or “quality” of scientific journals. […]

Why do good papers get few citations?

Have you ever looked at Google Scholar or your ISI Web of Science scores and wondered who was citing your papers and why were they citing them? After thinking a bit more about why certain papers on my CV have received as much or as little attention through citation, I decided it was time to […]

Communicating low-probability events

The authors start by asking, “What is the best way to communicate the risk of rare but extreme weather to the public?” Through a role-playing game where students pretended to be in charge of a road-salting operation, LeClerc and Joslyn (2012) found that the students were more likely to salt when receiving forecasts of temperatures […]

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