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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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.

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One writes a scientific article when she thinks she has enough new material in which a sizable fraction of the community is interested. In the time of writing, any article should be written with a lot of enthusiasm, as if it is going to appear on the cover of the most cited journal in the field. But sooner or later, one should decide about the submission destination.

Choosing the journal where you want to publish your article is a very nontrivial task. Frankly speaking, my mind gets occupied with this question, from a very early stage. It may be partly due to my lack of experience or because of my light-weighted publication list.

It may happen that even very experienced scientists cannot publish their article in their firstly-chosen journal. In these cases they may need to try 3 or 4 different journals, and re-format their article a couple of times. This process consumes a lot of work and energy, without adding to the scientific content. Some of this excess work could have been avoided if the first choice was made less ambitiously.

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Having been a member of so many committees in which the quality of various applicant-scientists were compared, I think, I know how to read a curriculum vitae and a publication list.

Please, do not try to magnify your publication list with trash as unrefereed papers and conference abstracts. It is pollution that will irritate the committee.

A serious applicant will lists the following items separately, when applying for a job or applying for promotion:

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1. List of refereed papers. With *all* the authors and also in the order in which they appear in the journal. In case of an extreme long list (more than ten), say at least how many co-authors there are . In addition report the number of published pages each article entails.
2. List of conference proceedings, if  they cannot be classified as peer-reviewed. Again with all the authors. And again state the number of published pages for each item.
3. List of popular papers. With all the authors and with the number of published pages.
4. List of invited talks at international conferences, with the names of co-authors if applicable.