Barcode for scientists

Soon every scientist will be assigned a unique number, ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). That will be just a little tattoo on the inner side of the wrist... just kidding.

There aren't that many unique last names out there and looking for a paper by someone with a popular name might be a pain. For instance, according to statistics, the author named Y. Wang publishes more than 10 papers a day, and obviously it's not the same person :-)

Also, sometimes people change their names, use nicknames, or omit some of their initials, so introducing such unique ID's will be greatly appreciated.

The idea was around for quite a long time, with a few attempts of realization (one of those being the ResearcherID by Thomson Reuters). I hope it will work out this time.


Take care,

Misha

Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945

There were so many remakes on this war movie episode, but this one is probably the best. The embedding is disabled, so here we go: Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945.

Take care,

Misha

How long does it take for an article to be accepted?

I posted it on facebook at some point, but it certainly deserves a wider audience :-)

Take care,

Misha

Boycott Elsevier

It turns out that a number of people suddenly discovered my blog and I didn't update it for a while. In a nutshell: I moved to the US, changed the research subject a little (I just have to write a popular post about my research at some point!), and things of that sort, which is nothing but peanuts :-) Here comes some funny stuff.

After coming to the US I was surprised how many people are opposing Elsevier, and deny publishing, reviewing, or collaborating with them otherwise.

The reason is that Elsevier was actively pushing so-called Research Works Act, the directive that would prohibit open-access publishing of the federally funded research. Apart from just being unscientific, this directly contradicts the NIH policy stating that the taxpayers-funded research must be freely accessible online.

This very effort was triggered by mathematicians and spread widely across the general scientists' community, a good example is the website, where everyone can sign the "boycott petition."

Finally, Elsevier withdrew the support for the act, but it seems that most of the scientists' activity was prompted by Elsevier's pricing and things of that sort alone, without people discussing the Journal of Chaos Solitons and Fractals (Google it) and 6 fake medical journals they've been publishing. A few years ago my PhD institution and I had a funny story related to it, which made some established scientists join the boycott movement (if we met - ask me in person :-).

Apparently, all that is a consequence of Elsevier being run as a money-making machine, as juxtaposed to many publishing houses ran by scientific societies, like APS, ACS, AAAS, and so on.

It's nice that we don't hear such stories about the Nature magazine that also belongs to the commercial publisher.

Take care,

Misha

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

I didn't know that a predecessor of the famous Annals of Improbable Research (whose staff runs the Ig Nobel Prize award) was The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

It was founded almost 60 years ago and apparently became a very credible scientific magazine. At least, some people take it very seriously:

"...JIR received attention from American military intelligence when a copy of one of their articles was found among other papers in an abandoned terrorist headquarters in the Middle East. The article was a highly unrealistic and farcical explanation of how to build a nuclear weapon that some unwitting Al Qaida member had filed away. Nonetheless the discovery prompted a short-lived official investigation..." (wiki)

Take care,

Misha

How to Publish a Scientific Comment

A nice essay by Prof. Rick Trebino from Georgia Tech (here is the comment he finally published). I heard people complaining that publishing comments is hard  - a lot of politics involved, journal editors don't want to confess in publishing wrong articles, and so on.

Perhaps, it might be a good idea to make a separate journal publishing only comments and replies to them, as guys propose here (in Russian). In such a way one may highlight all the fraud/misconduct/delusion cases via peer-reviewed comments and replies, without any troubles due to politics of a given journal.

No, really, why don't people do that.

Take care,

Misha

Hell for scientists

First Circle: Limbo

"The uppermost circle is not a place of punishment, so much as regret. Those who have committed no scientific sins as such, but who turned a blind eye to it, and encouraged it by their awarding of grants and publications, spend eternity on top of this barren mountain, watching the carnage below and reflecting on how they are partially responsible..."

Second Circle: Overselling

"This circle is reserved for those who exaggerated the importantance of their work in order to get grants or write better papers. Sinners are trapped in a huge pit, neck-deep in horrible sludge. Each sinner is provided with the single rung of a ladder, labelled 'The Way Out - Scientists Crack Problem of Second Circle of Hell"

Third Circle: Post-Hoc Storytelling

"Sinners condemned to this circle must constantly dodge the attacks of demons armed with bows and arrows, firing more or less at random. Every time someone is hit in some part of their body, the demon proceeds to explain at enormous length how they were aiming for that exact spot all along."

Fourth Circle: P-Value Fishing

"Those who tried every statistical test in the book until they got a p value less than 0.05 find themselves here, an enormous lake of murky water. Sinners sit on boats and must fish for their food. Fortunately, they have a huge selection of different fishing rods and nets (brandnames include Bayes, Student, Spearman and many more). Unfortunately, only one in 20 fish are edible, so they are constantly hungry."

Fifth Circle: Creative Use of Outliers

"Those who 'cleaned up' their results by excluding inconvenient data-points are condemned here. Demons pluck out their hairs one by one, every time explaining that they are better off without that hair because there was something wrong with it."

Sixth Circle: Plagiarism

"This circle is entirely empty because as soon as a sinner arrives, a winged demon carries them to another circle and forces them to suffer the punishment meted out to the people there. After their 3 year "post" is up, they are carried to another circle, and so on..."

Seventh Circle: Non-Publication of Data

"Here sinners are chained to burning chairs in front of desks covered with broken typewriters. Only if they can write an article describing their predicament, will they be set free. Each desk has a file-drawer stuffed full of these, but the drawers are locked.

Eighth Circle: Partial Publication of Data

"At any one time exactly half of the sinners here are chased around by demons prodding them with spears. The demons choose who to chase at random after ensuring that the groups are matched for age, gender, height and weight. Howling desert winds blow a constant torrent of articles announcing the success of a new program to enhance participation in physical exercise - but with no mention of the side effects."

Ninth Circle: Inventing Data

"Here Satan himself lies trapped forever in a block of solid ice alongside the worst sinners of all. Frozen in front of their eyes is a paper explaining very convincingly that water cannot freeze in the environmental conditions of this part of Hell. Unfortunately, the data were made up."

via 

Take care,

Misha

Physical Review X

American Physical Society started a new journal - Physical Review X. It's somehow analogous to the New Journal of Physics: an online-only open-access journal, covering all branches of physics. As far as I understand, there will be no page limit for articles, and you'll have to pay $1500 to publish there (you also retain copyright to your articles due to open-access).

The first call for papers opens in March 2011, so hurry up! :-)

via

Take care,

Misha

Chemistry Journals and Chinese Mothers

Two links for today:

1) "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" - how Chineese kids are raised

2) Chemistry Craziness - Taylor&Francis granted free access to the plethora of chemistry journals until January, 31

Take care,

Misha

Starting your car think about Einstein

Today a funny article appeared online:

R. Ahuja et al., "Relativity and the Lead-Acid Battery", Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 018301 (2011)

Scientists from Uppsala and Helsinki calculated the voltage produced by a lead-acid battery (such as we got in cars). The theory yielded 2.13 V, which is in compelling agreement with experiment (2.11 V).

The funny part is that most of this voltage (1.7-1.8 V) arises from the relativistic effects in Pb compounds.

As the authors put it: "Finally, we note that cars start due to relativity."


Take care,

Misha

8-year old kids publish an article

That's so-o-o sweet: Blackawton et al. "Blackawton bees", Biol. Lett. (2010).

via1, via2


Lev Landau was used to count the age of a scientist from the year he published the first article. Landau himself published his first one at the age of 18, so these kids have at least 10 years of a head start.


Take care,

Misha

Referees' quotes

That's awesome: referees's quotes 2010 from the journal of Enviromental Biology.


"This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future." 

"The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style."

"Merry X-mas! First, my recommendation was reject with new submission, because it is necessary to investigate further, but reading a well written manuscript before X-mas makes me feel like Santa Claus."


Take care,

Misha

The shortest research paper ever

This one is really the shortest. :-) There is also a referee comment...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf

via Daniel Lemire

Misha

A nice title

It's an art to write a title in such a way that no one even needs to read an article:

"In general, the less degeneracy the less transition. A principle for time‐dependent Hamiltonian systems in quantum mechanics", H. Gingold, J. Math. Phys. 28, 2400 (1987).

Misha

...and papers citing it

Nowadays we have around such science databases as Web of Knowledge and Scopus, monitoring all the citations a published paper gets.

I think it would be nice to use "see ref. [x] and papers citing it" along with familiar "see ref. [x] and references therein" while writing articles.

It may come in handy if you refer to a field when a good up-to-date review is not published yet. Just cite one of the "citation classics" or an old Nobel lecture, "and all papers citing it".

Misha

How to plot spin-up and spin-down?

Nice figure with an energy levels diagram from one of the papers:

V.H. Kurreck, B. Kirste, W. Lubitz, Angew. Chem. 96, 171 (1984)

Thanks to Stasia Gonchar for passing it on to me.

Misha

Boycott to Nature Publishing Group

University of California threatens Nature Publishing Group with boycott, after the publisher proposed to raise the cost of California's license for its journals by 400 percent next year.

UC faculty members wrote a letter, explicitly stating that researchers will be strongly encouraged not to contribute papers to Nature journals or review manuscripts for them, if NPG doesn't negotiate.

Seven years ago this tactics worked out with Elsevier.

Pumping the journal impact factor

I found a funny last year story at the forum of Russian researchers. A guy (nicknamed ST) quotes a message that he got from the Editor of one of the physics journals after submitting a paper there:

"Editor's Final Remark
In addition to the reviewers' comments given above, I recommend the authors to address and cite the relevant articles published in "....Journal ....". Such improvement on the revised version of the manuscript would not only provide a solid background to the readers regarding the current state-of-knowledge on this topic, but also promote the awareness of the available information resources in "... Journal ....". I would appreciate authors' concern and sensitivity on this matter."

So, the Editor not even encourages, but 'recommends' citing his own journal. And such 'improvements on the revised versions of manuscripts' seem to work: in his post ST mentions that the impact factor of this journal raised from 2.7 to 3.4 within one year, which is quite a jump.

Cheating is unscientific.

Take care,

Misha

Topless models

As you've understood, I do a little literature search now, and I came across the following (Italian) article:



Is there any chance to figure out what the "topless models" are about? It looks like the Google outcome is about something different.

Hm, probably 50 years ago even Italian prime minister was interested in these topless models... :-)

The shortest article ever

I'm pretty sure I've posted it somewhere about 3-4 years ago, but anyway. This is the shortest article I've ever seen, it was published in Physical Review:


Guys involved in the 'variation of fundamental constants' business always show it in the talks. But I wonder whether it was a joke or not...