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.

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.

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.

In an ideal world scientists prepare their conference talk way ahead of time. In a realistic world they prepare their talk one or two days before they get on the plane. Or they do it on the plane. In earlier days,  when a presentation was done with the help of overhead projectors, transparencies that were very clearly made while being in the air were referred to as “air-plane transparencies”. These slides showed all the signs of shaky fingers. In this post I will tell you something about my last-minute preparations for my latest presentation.

Laptop with a screen crash
I used to present my talks using a Dell laptop. Reliable, sturdy and so heavy that additional physical exercises were not necessary. About two  weeks before my conference in Crete would start the unexpected happened: my laptop had a crash, that is to say the screen stopped working and even hooking up an additional monitor did not save me. I only lost about a few hours of work. I always backup my data regularly so this little damage was a reward for my consistent backup procedure.

Every scientific journal nowadays has a web-listing with a lot of useful links added to each abstract page, like citing and related articles. This features are among commodities for almost any web-publishing service.  Many news websites or other political or economic magazines allow, or even actively solicit, comments from their readers on their websites. This feature is (deliberately) absent for scientific publications.

I am wondering, why? I discussed this issue with a few senior researchers and a publisher. They were all against allowing web-comments. That describes why it has not yet happened, but I am not yet convinced that it is impossible. Here, I list a few of their reasons and some thought of my own.

Quality and Credibility: One major concern about web-comments is their quality. The level of discussion must be kept high, unless a good comment will be hidden among thousands of mere “opinions” of “professional comment writers” who comment on everything. Even on very popular blogs, more than fifty comments is often not followed anymore.

Last year, the UK had a giant review of all its university departments to arrive at rankings of departments by subject. This review was called the research assessment exercise (RAE) 2008 and my department (a physics department) didn’t do so well. Therefore, I had an extra good look at the RAE results. In January, we got some more details including a ranking of our papers. Each academic had submitted four papers published between 2001 and 2008, which were graded by a panel from 1* to 4*. The meaning of this ranking is 4* (world-leading), 3* (internationally excellent), 2* (internationally recognised), and 1* (nationally recognised). From my department’s result, I could work out a formula relating the impact factor (IF) of the journals to the quality of the paper as judged in the RAE 2008. The Physics panel chair Sir John Pendry vehemently denied a few weeks ago that his panel used IFs. That may be true but then my formula calculates the perceived quality of a paper as judged by our peers. I thought you might be interested in that judgement.

In the olden days, you had to do a lot of hard work, a lot of well thought-through research, in order to get a paper published, and that was it. In the not quite so olden days, just publishing your results was not enough: you also had to push your results to the general press. A press release might help and a few really exiting results might make it to the newspapers. Today, all you need is an idea and a well-written press release, not something as old-fashioned as a result.

Gebakken lucht

This appeared on the BBC News website today: ‘A sample taken from what are believed to be the only polar bear remains to have been found in Britain has defied DNA analysis, it has emerged’. Let me translate that for you: ‘no results were obtained, it emerged’. To be clear here, researchers in Ireland took the remains of an 18,000-year-old polar bear, tried to extract its DNA, and failed. Then they still got their results on the homepage of the BBC News website. This shows that, in order to become a famous scientist, you do not need to have great results, just great press releases. I would not want to talk down the intelligence of the researchers involved; quite to the contrary. You too, if you are smart, should think about your press release. Hmmm, ‘researchers with big lasers find nothing, it emerged’….I like the ring of that!

Every scientist has to cope with the problem of managing references (or citations, or notes, or literature, or whatever you call it.)  When writing his second paper he discovers that he has to type a number of references that he already typed in when preparing his first paper. This repetitive action calls for a repository of references. In an ideal world many group members submit their references to this repository and after some time a very efficient storage medium has been created.

Pitfalls
Alas. The real world is never like this. And for many reasons. Typos in entries will live for ever, or will give rise to duplicate entries. Incomplete entries will downgrade the usefulness of the database. Inconsistent use of case (uppercase, lowercase, title case) is causing a mess. Different spelling of names will lead to duplicate entries, or to angry readers when they see their name misspelled in a list of references in an article in a high-impact journal. Many programs (or ‘wizards’) that import references cannot deal with extended characters (leave alone Unicode).  Names with diacritics (like umlauts) are dealt with either inconsistently or wrongly.  Partitioning of names into initials, first names and last names is full of traps and many import filters fall in those traps. In this respect the following error in the book Latex by Leslies Lamport (an excellent book and excellent macro package, of course) is typical: on page 141 (Chapter on “The Bibliography Database”) Lamport discusses “von Beethoven, Ludwig”. The name of course is Ludwig van Beethoven, as the name is of Flemish origin. And indeed “Van” is not his middle name.