Search keywords
Very recently I installed a new plugin on this weblog.  A plugin is a standard way of extending the functionality of  WordPress software for self-hosted blogs. Our blog uses the WordPress package and is not hosted by the big providers as Blogger and WordPress, but is hosted by ourselves.

The new widget in the sidebar on the right, that has as title Search Keyword Cloud, is the result of  this new plugin. The new piece of software analyzes all visits that come to our site through search engines as Google or Bing.  This keyword analysis is possible because the search term is present in the headers of the http request to our server. The most frequent keywords are shown in the widget, not as a dull linear list, but as a cloud. The idea of a cloud, a web 2.0 concept,  is that viewers see quickly what the most important items are. The keyword search data are regularly reset to allow for changing search trends to show up more quickly.

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On my desk, right in front of the computer screen, lies a pile of paper. This pile gives me headaches, keeps me awake at night, and is a source of frustration on sunny weekends. It is the pile of unfinished manuscripts, gathered and carried along from earlier positions as a postdoc. Every paper has a story attached to it. Some papers are only in their first version, hardly more than a collection of raw data. Others have seen many revisions, have passed the eyes of multiple co-authors, and have got stuck just before submission, because something just is not quite right. There are papers of PhD students, co-workers, and of myself as leading author. Some contain data taken two years ago.

I am wondering how others are dealing with their unpublished data. Do you have a drawer full of brilliant work yet to be published? Or are you completely up to date with your results? For some people, it may be a reason for boasting: look at how many data I still have on the shelf! For a starting academic, unpublished data can be a life saver in times that you are starting a new lab and you need results to cover the gaps in your publication record. However, the pile also represents months of painstaking experiments, data analysis, and theory, lying there going to waste and most importantly – not being cited.

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I would like to start a discussion about the different customs that exist in research groups when it comes to the writing of articles. This is inspired by an experience I have had as a postdoc.

I consider my PhD time as the period when I was first exposed to writing scientifically. I think everything went typical: my first article was a real struggle, but afterwards things got easier. Looking back I consider my PhD time as the time I really learned to write in a structured way. And I have come to view this experience as essential in the development of a young scientist.

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To my disgust I recently discovered that scientist hire the services of commercial art bureau’s to have them make their figures. The resulting glossy, shining figures are supposed to increase the chances of acceptance in high-impact journals as Science and Nature. Nowadays with every submission to these journals the authors include a couple of – professionally made – illustrations, as suggestions to the editors to use them for the cover in case the article gets accepted.  What is next? A ghost writer who produces the text, but who is not part of the list of authors?

Kids like illustrations
To keep the attention of children books for kids are full of illustrations, and in many cases they represent animals. Adults are supposed to be able to digest heavier texts. The French quality newspaper Le Monde, founded in 1944, waited until 1984 to publish photographs.

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I suppose that your paper has been accepted for publication in a scientific  journal. You successfully rebutted all the comments of the referees. Great.

But now, what do you do next?  Just and wait and sit for you to become famous automatically? It depends on the quality of the paper. If this was just a middle-of-the-road paper spending time on its promotion seems a waste. But what if you are very proud and you are convinced this really is an important result? An interview on national tv would be great.

Target group
Whose attention would like to draw? Colleague scientists, science writers, or the public at large?

Editor is also eager
Nowadays journal editors also are eager to promote their best papers. So when you submit your paper, or after your paper is accepted, you are usually requested to summarize the importance of your paper in laymen terms. If the journal is part of a large publishing house they will have a website that highlights their best papers; some papers will be selected to feature in their rss-feed, and if they have a monthly glossy your paper might feature in there.

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The H-Index is ruling science these days.

Recently an interesting article appeared in EuroPhysics News. I think this paper is of interest to all scientists, and not only to physicists:

Europhysics News Vol. 40, No. 5, 2009, pp. 26-29
DOI: 10.1051/epn/2009704

Bibliometric evaluation of individual researchers: not even right… not even wrong!
Franck Laloë[1] and Remy Mosseri[2]

[1]  Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS, CNRS and UPMC, Paris, France
[2]  Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée, UPMC and CNRS, Paris, France

Published online: 17 October 2009

Here is the pdf file. Or download it from the Europhysics News site.

Experimental observations always are coming with uncertainties. Any measurement is an estimate of the real value, if indeed such an objective value exist.

The uncertainty in the magnitude of a measured quantity is more important as the value itself. Many readers will find this remark alarming. The determination of the “error bars” is considered a dull, redundant exercise. Especially when the reported observable quantity has a surprising value that reporting it without the associated uncertainty will certainly get the authors the attention of the media, or get their manuscript accepted in Nature or Science.

The problem with a reported observable without an uncertainty is that people, including the reporting scientists, will draw conclusions from these observations that are in no way corroborated by that experiment.

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I think Wikipedia articles should never be allowed as references in the primary scientific literature.

Generation gap
The young generation is on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The older generation, if participating in a social network, will join the more sober-headed  LinkedIn. Young people even leave a virtual social network if they discover that too many members are of the old generation. I still remember situations where faculty members refused to use a computer or email.

In many cases they were cheaters, because all that computer work was done by their secretaries. Innovations are invariably accompanied by people denying their usefulness. After a period of habituation the new development is widely accepted. This pattern of denial, hostile reception to acceptance is notorious. Any critical remark on a modern development is returned with “You are old-fashioned. You better get used to the new situation”.

By the same token, any critical remark on the importance of web 2.0 developments for science is reciprocated by this “Wake up old guy!”. I am sure the rest of this post will meet the same resistance.

Successful scientists are driven by curiosity and by ego. Lay people find it disappointing when told that egos of individual scientists play a  crucial role in the progress of science. But the same people complain that their country has produced too few Nobel prize winners.

First discovery claims and disputes have always been part of science, from Newton to Montaigner (Nobel prize medicine 2008). Big ego’s and accompanying priority claims will always be part of science.

Example 1
Today I read an amusing story by Herman de Lang in the Dutch magazine Tijdschrift voor Natuurkunde (September 2009) about Millikan, the physicist who was the first to determine the charge of the electron. Robert Millikan had such a big ego that people at Caltech, where Millikan was president,  had defined the unit of vanity as the “Kan”. But to classify people on the vanity scale it was easier to use the milliKan.

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Summary
Reed-Elsevier’s daughter Elsevier has introduced as an experiment a new way of publishing science. The “paper” is now basically a website, in which the idea of a linear text is abandoned. The web interface implements access to text fragments, graphs, supplementary material, interview with an author, through hyperlinked tabs and mundane hyperlinks. In my opinion this development is a step backward and scientist should avoid publishing their material this way.

Elsevier’s solution to a non-existing problem
Scientist agree that way too many papers are being published. In addition commercial publishers keep on launching new journals in an already overcrowded market. The desktop-publishing  innovation has radically improved the productivity of scientists. There are many factors that hamper the progress of science, but the alleged inadequacy of present-day science publishing is not one of them.

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