Statistical Traps to Avoid #1: Autocorrelation
Eddie Haam and K.K. Tung (2012, J. Atmos. Sci.) examine the purported relationship between the 11-year solar cycle and 2–4-year cycle in La Niña. The authors demonstrate that there is no relationship between these two variables that they have found that is statistically significant. Instead, the autocorrelation between the two quasi-periodic variables is likely to […]
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 importance of picking good terminology the first time
In an early paper that I lead authored, I used the term cold surge to describe the cold front associated with the Superstorm of March 1993. Schultz, D. M., W. E. Bracken, L. F. Bosart, G. J. Hakim, M. A. Bedrick, M. J. Dickinson, and K. R. Tyle, 1997: The 1993 Superstorm cold surge: Frontal […]
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’ […]
More thoughts about scientific poster presentations
May 16, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations, Resources
As our academic year comes to an end and our undergraduate and masters students are busy preparing scientific posters of their dissertation research, I am reminded of why I dread having to grade these posters every year. Students usually just dump their manuscript into a poster template and then trim it down until it fits. […]
ISI Impact Factors versus Scopus SJC Factors
May 13, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
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?
May 12, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
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 […]
Let there be stoning!
May 8, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations, Resources
Thanks to Bogdan Antonescu for pointing out to me the latest entry in Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen blog. It discusses an article “Let there be stoning!” written by Jay Lehr about bringing an end to incredibly boring speakers. If only more speakers would follow this advice: The average conference paper is 20 minutes in length. […]
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 […]
