A city in 140 symbols: Leeds

Leeds has a redbrick university built out of white bricks. But if you look for a good weather in Britain – better go to the south of France.

The Hirsch-bar index: leave your boss' name out of the authors list

I think you know what the Hirsch-index is: if you have n papers cited at least n times – then your h-index is n. For instance, if out of your 10 papers two were cited 4 times, and the rest three times, then your h-index is 3. The index was introduced by Jorge Hirsch in 2005, and became an accepted tool to rank scientists within about one year: community found it useful that a scientist's productivity may be described by a single number. However, the h-index does not take into account such important things as the number of co-authors and the self-citations.

Recently Jorge Hirsch himself wrote a preprint, where he proposed a new, ħ (hbar) - index, that is aimed to solve at least one of these problems, multiple co-athorship. Indeed, the "mass graves" (sorry), published by high-energy physicists and the institute policies to include everyone's name to any article, can unreasonably increase the Hirsch-index, with no extra work.

Some of the h-index terminology before describing the ħ-index. You have the h-index n, if n of your papers belong to the "h core". The paper belongs to the h-core if it was cited n times or more. Your co-authors will probably have other h cores, and a given paper may belong there or not.

The ħ - index is defined in a similar way: you have the ħ - index m if m of your papers belong to the ħ-core. But, the paper belongs to the ħ-core if it was cited m times or more and it also belongs to the h-core of your co-authors. (Actually, the latter h should be also ħ, but since the index would be extremely difficult to compute in this case, Hirsch decided to relax the condition a bit)

In other words, only if the paper improves the h-index of all the authors, it will contribute to your ħ-index. Imagine that you have the h-index of 20, and you have a paper cited 25 times, co-authored by a student with a h-index of 5. Then, it will be included in your and the student's ħ-index, because it belongs to the h-cores of both of you. But, if you add a third author to this paper, say, a director of your institute with a h-index of 45, the paper will not count for any of you, because it doesn't belong to the director's h-core.

So, if you have 200 papers, cited 44 times each and co-authored by your director, who has the h-index of 45, none of them will count, and your ħ-index will be zero. Hirsch expects this to stimulate young scientists to work independently. However, he mentions, that the ħ-index will be definitely useless for postdocs, since they are used to include senior scientists in their papers.

I wonder whether it will be possible to eliminate self-citations at some point.

Theorists vs experimentalists again

Here is how I imagine the difference between experimental and theoretical particle physicists:


Left: Blind Reese can't spot the cheese. Right: Neither Phil can get a meal.

The LHC will be launched tomorrow

You may follow it online: here is a live display of the beam status. You may also follow CERN on twitter.

via cherstn (friends-only)

Another case of scientific fraud

The ETH Zürich research director Peter Chen decided to step down by the end of September after being accused of data falsifications:

"The institute made the announcement in a press release issued 21 September, saying 'there are suspicions that scientific data may have been falsified in two publications and a doctoral thesis in 1999 and 2000' while Chen was group leader. A panel of five chemists was formed earlier this year to investigate, confirming data had been falsified."

Chen will remain a full professor at ETH.

A city in 140 symbols: Frankfurt an der Oder

The Oder river separates Frankfurt from Polish town Słubice. Caravans of German smokers cross the bridge to buy cheap Polish cigarettes.

Who cites you is important: a new approach to ranking scientists

We are used to such metrics of a scientist's impact in a field like the number of papers published, how many times they are cited, and the h-index that the scientist has. These parameters are expected to rely on credit given to the researcher by the rest of community. However, they don't account for the important thing, namely who cites the published work.

In a paper recently published in Phys. Rev. E, Filippo Radicchi with colleagues propose a new ranking technique that captures this "who" issue: the citations coming from renowned scientists have more weight than those from less known researchers. The authors focused on physics and used the PROLA journal archive (1983-2006) as a testing ground for the methodology. The results show that the probability to win a major physics prize is more accurately predicted by their new method, than by the other metrics, such as citations count.

The only thing is probably missing here – the "negative" citations. The results may be cited as "doubtful" or "wrong" even by famous scientists, and the trustless paper will be scored higher. However, in the case of a scientist's rank, averaging over all his papers will probably make this contribution negligible.

Here is a website where you may figure out a rank of any scientist, based on his articles in physical review journals published before 2006. This piece of work was also highlighted in Physics.

Vitaly Ginzburg Dead at 93

Nobel Laureate Vitaly Ginzburg deceased yesterday due to heart failure. Apart from theoretical physics, he was renowned as an outspoken atheist and irreconcilable antagonist of religious obscurantism. Even being already seriously ill some two years ago, he wrote:

"...I'm 91 years old and suffer from an incurable blood disease, for that reason I cannot walk since about three years ago; I also have another difficulty that I don't feel like describing here. Passing through it would be probably much easier with a belief in God. But, until I'm in full possession of my faculties, I will never address to the mythic God. I would like to emphasise that the illness has no affect on my writings, and I ask my opponents to make no allowances for me..."

A city in 140 symbols: Prague

Prague is a charming old city with strikingly large historical center. The hilly landscape favors enjoying magnificent panoramic views.

Humans are not so far from monkeys in drinking

John Fenn and age discrimination

In European academia there is a mandatory retirement age: if a university professor becomes older than 65-68 years (depending on country), he cannot hold a position anymore. This was also the case in the US some 30 years ago, when the Age Discrimination in Employment Act still allowed for the mandatory dismissal of tenured workers.

A few days ago I was told a fascinating story of John Bennett Fenn. He was working at Yale for a quarter of a century, until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1987. After a while, the law was changed to fight the age discrimination, and Fenn became officially allowed to get a job. By that time his ex-position at Yale was still vacant, and he applied for it. Believe you or not, he didn't get it.

Eventually Fenn joined Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994, where he started working on the Electrospray ionization technique, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2002. John Fenn was 85 by that time and he still remains the oldest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Yale University claimed that Fenn was working on electrospray ionization while still holding a position there. After submitting a lawsuit against Fenn, Yale was awarded over one million dollars and partial patent rights to the technique.

A city in 140 symbols: Vienna

Vienna impresses with its calm old-fashioned style. No haste, no rush, just enjoy the legendary chocolate cake and astounding coffee.

The moronometer

There is a rumor that a renowned Soviet physicist Arkady Migdal thought up a device dubbed "the moronometer". That was a spool of thread placed in a breast pocket of the jacked in such a way that the thread slightly sticks out. Then Migdal was hanging around and meeting people. During such sporadic conversations a company exclaimed "Hey, you've got a thread there!", and tried to detach it, in fact unreeling the spool. Some folks kept pulling the lengthening thread for a while.

According to Migdal, the company's silliness is proportional to the resulting length of the thread.

Reference (Russian)

A city in 140 symbols: Luxembourg

Luxembourg: the admirable capital of the last Grand Duchy in the world. Marvelous architecture is spiced by their own outstanding language.

The Journal of Chemical Physics

I'm reading a terrific review by Dudley Herschbach. In the introduction he mentions, that one of the reasons to establish the Journal of Chemical Physics in 1933 was the impossibility to publish any pure theory in the Journal of Physical Chemistry by that time. This remained the case for another two decades or so, unless plenty of acknowledged theoretical results emerged.

Nowadays pure theory is almost never published in science magazines, such as Nature or Science. We definitely need to found another one.

The Communist Thesis Competition

A PhD student of the MSU Physics Faculty, young communist V. L. Ginzburg, made a commitment to defend his thesis prior to the university's anniversary.

(source)

I don't know exactly, which anniversary is meant there: Ginzburg defended his thesis in 1940, while the MSU was founded in 1755. This might be the 185-years one.

P.S. Don't ask me what the famous theorist is doing in the lab.

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions

A funny thing by Roy F. Baumeister:

"...As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see.

Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited.

To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews..."

More Nobel prize predictions

Chaz Orzel organized a "Nobel Prize Betting Pool" - if you want a guest spot in his blog you may submit your guess as well.

Thomson Reuters came up with some quantitative predictions, based on the citation count.

Let's see what is going to happen next Tuesday, when the prize in Physics will be announced.

Color figures for free

It turned out that since the 1st of August the Journal of Chemical Physics publishes color figures in print for free: here is the Editor's announcement.

Not sure I ever read a printed version of any journal...

A city in 140 symbols: Budapest

Budapest: a fusion of Europe and the Soviet Union. The castle is gorgeous, but the atmosphere is quite scary: we have seen a hold-up there.

Links for 27.09.2009

1) There is no single future for scientific journals - by Michael Nilsen

2) A speech for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences - by Terry Tao

3) Buying success, Saudi style - Physicsworld.com

4) A bad time to get sick? - NHS reports that a number of hospital deaths rises on the day junior doctors join wards (they call it black Wednesday)

Politics and scientific misconduct

It turned out that a paper, published in 2009 by Iranian science minister Kamran Daneshjou has plagiarized a 2002 paper by W. Lee et al. Here is a blog post about it. Later, Nature published a long news article, where other cases of plagiarism are revealed.

This is not a very recent story, somehow: a month ago the Los Angeles Times was doubting the validity of Daneshjou's PhD degree.

This is kind of popular among politicians: a few years ago Russian president Putin was accused in plagiarizing his PhD thesis.

P.S. According to Nature's new investigation there are two Iranian ministers involved.

A city in 140 symbols: Berlin

Berlin: a large city with empty streets and not so many tourist attractions. Very multicultural, green and comfortable for living, though.

A city in 140 symbols

My wife an I very much like to travel, so it would be nice to come up with a "travel guide for twitterers". We propose it to be the following: the city should be described in 140 symbols, including the city name, with no more than two sentences. The next post will be about the city we live in, namely Berlin. If you would like to describe any cities within the format, please leave a comment.

Papers don't need paper anymore

Here is an interesting essay by Paul Graham about the future of publishing, shared on twitter by Michael Nilsen. The main idea is that "economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper", in other words they do not sell content, but gain money solely for production. This might be a problem in the era of online publishing.

Today is of no doubt that paper versions of scientific journals will not last for long time. The process has already started: the American Chemical Society has basically interrupted printing anything, except for JACS and two review journals. The New Journal of Physics has no paper version from the very beginning.

An application

Today I've got an application for a PhD position by e-mail. Well, this is probably not the best idea to send those to PhD students...

The candle problem

If you are an experimentalist, please just skip it. I'll post something for you tomorrow.

Here is a famous test by Karl Duncker, he created it to study the "functional fixedness". So, you have a candle, a box of thumb-tacks and a book of matches:



The task is to attach the candle to the wall, in such a way that the wax doesn't drip onto the table (or the wall).

This is not kind of complicated, or is it? However the results of Duncker's studies were amazing - people solving the problem just to make fun were much faster than those, who were promised a reward (say, 50 dollars) for being the fastest.

Who will be the future Nobel laureates?

The Wall Street Journal listed possible winners for this year and the future. There is also one scientist from Atomic, Molecular and Optical physics community - Daniel Kleppner (MIT).

Peer-review reviewed

Most of you have probably seen the recent peer-review survey, and the post in Nature blog about it. Well, some scientists are satisfied by referees of their papers, some are not.

What looks a bit weird to me is the "how to improve peer-review" part. Usually there are two ideas:
i) to make the referee's name open, and
ii) to make the review process double-blind, with both names of authors and reviewers hidden from each other.

Well, if we take "a spherical society in a vacuum", say, an ideal one with no politics involved in research, then the first point might probably work. But I don't understand how can one hide the authors' names: people are used to cite their own work, such as an experimental machine they have built or a code they have written. So, the authors will not be obvious only when submitting their first contribution to the field.

That is surprising that 76% of researchers are favoring the double blind system.

How far can you go to get cited?

That's amazing how hard some authors work on promoting their own papers.

Here is a number of submissions to the astro-ph section of the arXive, by time of day, in 10 minute bins:

I took it from the recent investigation by Haque and Ginsparg.

The thing is that 16:00 (US eastern time) is the deadline for the daily submission to the arxive. So, the papers submitted at 16:01 will be the first for the next day and will appear on the top of the daily mailing. You are probably wondering why is that important? Recent research by Dietrich and also the preprint I cited above show that articles appearing the first are more visible and far better cited than others.

No matter how good your work is, just put it on the top of the list.