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 Send out a press release on your unpublished manuscript!

As this article from slate.com describes, yet again someone has received a lot of media attention for their unpublished research.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Jon Zeitler forwarded me this story about a published article that was withdrawn from publication in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications when it was discovered that the authors were fictitious.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.

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 […]

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 […]

Should you cite operational numerical weather prediction models?

A colleague asked me a question about whether it was necessary to cite any published literature on numerical weather prediction models in your scientific papers. My response follows. I don’t have a rule, and the American Meteorological Society doesn’t either. I’ve seen papers with these models cited and other papers where they are not. My […]

The size of figures submitted for peer review

A common concern when reviewing a manuscript is, “Are the figures going to be legible when published in the journal?” Notice how small and unreadable the figure is above. You can click on it to see it in full size.) As you may know, the digital files for the figures are uploaded to the publishers’ […]

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. […]

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