Being a PhD student for almost three years now, a challenge I keep on running into is assessing the research projects I have done. What I mean by assessing is: judging what is new and interesting about the research. During my Master’s I thought science is all about discovering new physics. But new physics is hard to define. In optics, one may say that all physics is already in Maxwell’s equations. However, sometimes the system at hand is too complicated to solve Maxwell’s equations, in other cases it only provides complicated mathematics.

A way I tried to define new physics is by asking the question, is this result surprising? Then I quickly ran into the issue that senior colleagues, experts in the field, are hard to surprise. And if they see something new, their expertise allows them to analyze a problem with relative ease. Hence a new insight is quickly born, and therefore this insight may not seem that special or newsworthy for them. Hence that insight is often called “trivial”.

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Being an author of a scientific paper is still the most secure building bock of a scientific career and a way to recognition. As a result people fight to be on the author list and are disappointed – if not angry – when they feel that they are left out for no good reason.

The criteria for earning a coauthorship  differ from discipline to discipline and from country to country. It is not uncommon for a director of a big institute to have a publication list of over a thousand entries. It is clear that he cannot even have read all those papers.

The ever increasing average number of authors on a publication brings about a problem in case the paper turns out to be based on fraudulent material, like cooked up data. Who should be held responsible?

To cope with this situation a number of journals, including high-impact journals as Nature and Science, request a short statement from the authors in which “The nature of the contribution of every author should be made clear”.

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A few important changes have been introduced for this blog:

1. user who registers has to wait approval
2. only logged-in registered users can comment

Why? I had to :

Here is a short contribution on how to correct misspelled citations in Web of Science. Citations have become the currency of science, which is used to reward scientists and scientific institutions. Small variations in citation scores can make millions of pounds difference in the financial outcomes of national Research Assessments . Therefore keeping your citation record updated is of critical importance.

ISI Web of Science has the possibility of reclaiming citations which have been misspelled in the original manuscripts. To do this, go to ‘Cited Reference Search’ and type in your name and initials in the author field. You will get a list of articles with the number of citations. Importantly, the articles which do not have a record assigned to them (i.e. the ‘View Record’ link) have not been correctly assigned to your citation record. This may be because the year, volume number, or page is incorrectly referred.

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I haven’t posted to this blog for while. There has been a perfectly good reason for this: I have been busy in the past year applying for and then moving to a new job. Now that things are settling down a tiny bit, I thought that some of you might be interested in some aspects of that.

Maybe it’s useful to tell you a bit about my scientific career. It’s quite ordinary, mind you, but then that makes it more not less interesting. I started out in Amsterdam. Went to nursery, primary school, high school, and university in Amsterdam. The choice to go to university in Amsterdam was guided by the (perfectly sensible) idea that everything outside of Amsterdam sucks. Then I also did my PhD in Amsterdam and it started to dawn on me that it was time to see something of the world. I did my postdoc in the US (Philadelphia) and stayed there for five years.

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When you look at modern scientific journals you will find that in the majority of papers (some of) the results are presented in graphical form, from a simple black-and-white X-Y plot to sophisticated multicolor 3D-plots.

The data that are graphed come from various origins, like filled-out surveys, output of detectors, or mathematical programs. If the data are gathererd or produced by a commercial computer program, the developers of that program will try to supply graphing capabilities within the program. Keeping users tied to a program is of high commercial value. So Microsoft’s programs Word and Excel supply plotting facilities, although the capability is so rudimentary that it does not deserve the name.

Plots produced by Mathematica
More sophisticated graphing facilities are supplied by the mathematical programs like Mathematica, Maple and MathCad. Not surprising a major part of the developers of these mathematical programs seem to have a degree in mathematics. And the results are impressive: Mathematica is of staggering high mathematical quality. The disadvantage of being developed by scientists that do not care much about communication is that the presentation quality of the plots from the mathematical programs is from poor to horrible. With a few exceptions, like Ian Stewart, mathematicians are notoriously bad in communicating their results to non-mathematicians. Natural scientists like chemists are better in this respect. The result is that the plots produced are of terrible quality. The plots generated by Mathematica could be used by eye doctors to check the eyes of their patients.

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In the Shakespeare play As You Like It main character Rosalind reads the epilogue, from which we cite:

If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;

The Dutch translation of the saying “Good wine needs no bush” is quite confusing as “bush” is translated by “krans”  which – translated back in English – means a wreath of laurel, that is some kind of prize. This is the wrong interpretation. In the 16th century (English) inns that were serving wine had to hang outside a bush of ivy. Good wine needs no bush, means that inns that would present excellent wine to their customers did not need to advertise their product by hanging a bush of ivy outside. Customers would come anyway.

Nowadays marketing has become a fact of life. Try to get customers, buyers or readers. Even if under false pretexts, or by plain lying – as in commercials- as long as you catch the attention you are doing well.

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Like many of my colleagues I get tens and tens of emails per day. My estimate is that about one quarter of is spam that by definition cannot be caught by any spam filter. I really get irritated by receiving these emails. I will give a few examples that I got today: (i) a the Journal of Chemical Physics with an email containing news flashes about recent developments and (ii) the Belgian funding organization FWO with an issue of their periodical newsletter. And also the Dutch science funding organizations STW and NWO send me regularly unsolicited emails.

I already discussed this point a few weeks ago, but I am getting so much of this email stuff that I post it this time as a single post and not buried in a larger post

I never asked
I never asked to be on these email lists. How do they get my email address? Well, for instance because I was friendly and accepted a review job for a journal. And the journal punishes me immediately with this unwanted subscription to their email newsletter. Or, I applied for a grant through a web-based interface where the authentication was done through my email address. This address is certainly going to be a valid email address. And yes, after my submission I am confronted with another unwanted email newsletter.

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Yet another conference invitation in my inbox, and I am wondering (again): how many conferences (broadly, meetings) should a scientist attend in a year? And of what kind, meaning, the large confluences of experts all over like a cleo, or the limited attendance meetings specialised in your research interest? In places where I come from, the first question is easily answered; one typically has funds to attend only one conference a year, two at the max if you are particularly endowed. Therefore, the second question becomes all the more important. What kind?

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The reason for writing this post is a bewildering experience on my side while preparing a talk a few months ago. I was invited to give presentation on May 17 of this year for a 200-people audience at a material science conference.  The organizers had asked me to deliver a critical – and if possible, humorous -  evaluation of the development in science that the presentation of results gets an ever increasing weight, much at the expense of the content. While preparing the slides for my speech I was looking for an example of a paper of outstanding presentation quality. So I checked which paper was selected that week (Published May 10, 2010) to be an outstanding example of  Physical Review Letters (PRL), the most important physics journal. I was shocked to discover that this scientifically indeed brilliant paper, selected by the prestigious board of editors, was of abominable presentation quality (I will give details later).

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