Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the importance of social networks in science. When you do your PhD and perhaps some postdoc projects here and there, it is hard to think about what it takes to become a successful scientist other than doing brilliant science. Although scientific skills are undoubtedly important, I believe that one of the key ingredients which can make or break a scientific career is a good network of friends.

Nowadays Wikipedia is commonly used by scientists at every possible level to make quick and dirty check on the most various facts. It might be the exact form of a mathematical formula, the definition of some quantity or even the birthdate of some famous collegue. For simple facts we can say that Wikipedia entries are rather accurate; anyhow if the validity of the information you are searching is really an important issue you should never trust the net and you better search some good reference. The biggest doubts arises when you start looking on articles regarding your field of expertise: the best you can hope is that they are incomplete but, most of the time, you can easily find blatant mistakes or huge misconceptions.

Nothing to be surprised of: most likely that article wasn’t written by an expert but by a student that has either a second hand knowledge of the subject or didn’t yet manage to grasp it. Since it is your field of expertise you probably know everything about it so you don’t need the Wikipedia article; therefore you are probably not interested at all in making it better. You will just leave it as it is with a slightly worse opinion of Wikipedia quality.

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.

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.

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.

I used to go to the library. Every couple of weeks or so I would go and check the journals, browse through their tables of content (TOCs), and flip through the pages. You would find odd articles in areas there weren’t quite your own. Slowly over time journals got bigger and were published more frequently. Then they started emailing TOCs out, which seemed like a pretty good improvement as you could just read them on your computer. Gradually, I started to run out of time: the TOCs were just too long and there were too many of them. Virtual journals (such as the Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science) offered some hope but they don’t cover all journals such as Elsevier journals, so you would still end up having to read a bunch of emailed TOCs.

For a couple of years, I tried an RSS reader. A free reader, such as NetNewsWire for the Mac or FeedDemon for Windows (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/) can collect RSS feeds containing TOCs from you chosen journal. FeedDemon has to possibility of searching through your feeds. That worked pretty well until I switched to a Mac and found that NetNewsWire couldn’t search through feeds. By the time the TOCs were simply to huge to read them “raw”.

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.

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Scientists’s desk
What general office software is useful for scientists? I come to the following enumeration: an email client, a calendar manager, a browser, a document formatter (for non-scientific papers), a spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft sells software providing all these functionalities, and indeed many scientists use the Microsoft products Outlook, Internet Explorer, MS-Word, MS-Excel and MS-PowerPoint. However, with free - technically speaking - superior products Google is now challenging the leading position of Microsoft in this traditionally Microsoft territory

Tired of Microsoft
After having followed each and every update of the MS-DOS and Windows operating systems for the last thirty (30) years I have had it with Microsoft. I am not going to defend the Redmond boys any longer when my colleagues shame them. On the contrary: I will give my peers additional arguments.

A scientific manuscript will carry in the majority of cases more than one author. In this post I want to describe some of the technical problems associated with multiple authors.  So nothing here about the sociological and psychological aspects of dealing with co-authors. The book, by the way, discusses these aspects in some detail.

Writing after the facts
If everything that had to be done, has been done, all research has been carried out,  all calculations have been performed and all results are available, writing up is a simple process. The first author - and only he - works on the manuscript (Latex-type, or in case of real emergency MS-Word) and after he has finished, the correction process can start. I have explained in my book in detail how to deal with this correction process. But here I want treat a new situation.