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 […]

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 Send out a press release on your unpublished manuscript!

As this article from slate.com describes, yet again someone has received a lot of media attention for their unpublished research.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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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