PhysMath Central Blog
So I'm a bit late coming to this, but this is cool nonetheless. Peter Jacobs of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the ALICE experiment at the the LHC at CERN, describes the real physics behind FlashFoward, the novel and TV series gripping nerds across the world!
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:49 Comments (0)
Not even wrong: a disassembly of impact factors and indices
An editorial in Europhysics News (http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epn/2009704) caught my eye recently as it is one of the few dissections of impact factors I have read which applies some scientific and logical thinking to the process of awarding impact factors to journals or individuals.
The authors, Franck Laloë and Remy Mosseri, tackle some the assumptions made in the bibliometry game and come out with a few startling suggestions for how to maximize your own h-index.
Central to their point is the real purpose of references within scientific articles. They are not, they argue, some sort of prize list among all published articles in the relevant scientific domain. Rather, their real purpose is to give the reader information that is needed to understand the article. In context a citation could be made to; another article which describes much of the background (e.g. review articles), similar articles (to simplify writing and avoid tensions with colleagues), 'wrong' articles (in case of corrections) and articles describing instrumentation and methods.
Looking at impact factors derived from the SCI, the following problems were identified by the authors:
1 - Books are not counted towards impact factors, despite the fact that they are often the best way of making a big impact within a given field.
2 - Whether you are a lone author or a coauthor with several other people, the citation is counted as the same for each person. Why not, they ask, divide citations by the number of authors of an individual paper?
3 - Short-termism: examine the longevity of ideas by only looking at citations from 3 years or more.
4 - Data input is not homogenous over time and there are inevitable human errors in inputting/correcting it
They argue that the real reason for the success of impact factors is based on facility - saving time for in-depth evaluations of journals and, especially, individuals. They then give a tongue in cheek 'recipe for success' in which your research is geared towards improving your h-index:
1 - Work in same group of 5-6 colleagues who publisher their articles in common
2 - Don't take too much scientific risk, choose to work in larger scientific domains
3 - Don't waste time publishing books
4 - When you write articles, remember that public relations are important.
I leave the final word to the authors:
Finally, it seems that the faith in these indices is not very different from something that escapes rationality. One could compare this with astrology and numerology, which pretend to be scientific but have never gone through the process of scientific selection.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:10 Comments (0)
PhysMath Central, along with our colleagues at BioMed Central and Chemistry Central, are moving to new offices on Friday 20th March. That's the entrance on the right hand side.
Our new contact details will be as follows:
PhysMath Central Ltd
236, Gray's Inn Road
London, WC1X 8HL
UK
+44 20 3192 2000 (switchboard)
+44 20 3192 2013 (customer services)
+44 20 3192 2011 (fax)
Please update your records accordingly. Plus, new Google Streetmap UK view below!
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Posted by Chris Leonard at 09:50 Comments (0)
Recently I have read two very inspiring and stimulating articles which should fire the imagination of any working research scientist.
The first is a transcript of a talk given by Richard Hamming of Bell Labs 23 years ago, entitled "You and Your Research"
This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question ``Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?'' From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.
Given its age, it is still amazingly relevant.
The second piece was shorter and more to-the-point, but encapsulated the Hamming talk perfectly: Do Epic Shit.
We hope you'll be inspired!
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:19 Comments (0)
Some thoughts on unique author IDs
What I want to write about today is this idea, seemingly fashionable
on blogs and FriendFeed (and PLoS editorials) at the moment, of
authors switching from using their names to identify themselves on
papers to using some other form of ID. The so-called unique author ID
problem.
Now if your name is Xanthe Unique, you might be wondering what the problem is exactly - you just write your name and that's it. It is indexed in Scopus/ISI/whatever subject-specific repository holds sway in your field. However, there is a problem where you may not being credited for your work if any of the following conditions apply:
1 - You share your name with someone else. There is a unusual case in high
energy physics where there are two people called Michel Tytgat working in approximately the same area. Obviously more likely if you
are called John Smith or Jesus Garcia.
2 - Your name is
transliterated. Maybe you are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, or any
of the places which do not use the Roman character set. In order to be
included in the relevant database/journal/website etc your name needs
to be transliterated to Wei He or whatever. Sometimes it could be
transliterated slightly differently (Wei Hei) and sometimes this
can overlap with shared name problem described above in the western character set where it
never existed in the original language.
3 - You have changed your
name. Most common case here is the women who get married and take their
husband's names. Jayne Smith changes to Jayne Brown, but is still the
same person.
4 - You write your name differently. In order to
identify yourself correctly each time, you need to write your name the
same each time on each paper, or make sure your coauthors do. It could
be the case that the same person is identified as (taking myself as an
example) - C. Leonard, C.J. Leonard, Chris Leonard, Christopher Leonard, Christopher J. Leonard, Christopher James Leonard etc.
So
how to make sure that your work (and citations) are being credited to
you? Well, one idea starting to gain sway is the concept of not
referring to yourself by name, but by some other unique identifier such
as a number.
The advantages are clear. All of the confusions
above could be circumvented and any aliases could be documented on a
unique author homepage.
So how might this happen? Well, this is
something I spent some time thinking about around a year ago at a
discussion about the next generation of bibliographic services in
high-energy physics. I was on a mini team looking at the unique author ID problem and whilst this team was looking at HEP in particular, I was
aware that this was an opportunity to solve the problem for all of
science (note that Scopus has already implemented something like this, all be it not open and behind a subscription wall).
Here, with some image mockups from the time, are some of my thought on the matter.
1 - A central, independent website is in charge of assigning and cataloging all author id numbers.
2 - An author comes to the website to be assigned a unique author id.
3 - The author uses this id in addition to his name on all scientific papers (and publishers publish them alongside the names)
4
- The author has a homepage on this central repository website where he
can list aliases, former institutions, and we can autogenerate a
bibliiogrpahy (which in itself brings up issues about a&i databases
in future). The author can also link to other identifiers about himself
such as OpenID etc. Photos, links to blogs, homepages etc could also be
inserted here. Could also list old email addresses which no longer work.
5 - Anyone can apply for an author id. Authors of grey literature are also encouraged to use this UAID.
6
- This website will not try to validate the applicant as being unique.
It is in their own interests to apply once and use only one UAID number.
Who
would operate this website? A cross-publisher body such as CrossRef
would seem to be one candidate, or otherwise it would be a wholly
independent body - possibly funded by publishers. Clearly I need to
work on it a bit more and I am almost certain it has overlap with many
of the other discussions on the web at the moment, but if I read them
all, I wouldn't be able to get any work done!
I have also decided to share my slides from the time on SlideShare.
Let me know what you think.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 14:45 Comments (13)
In the last few days, people requesting a new password have found that it hasn't been working. This is because we were doing something wrong. Many apologies. It is all fixed now and all passwords should currently work. If you wish, you can still request a new password and that will work too. Thanks for your patience whilst we fixed this.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:47 Comments (0)
I'll be at Online tomorrow for the session on STM Information in Focus, amongst other things. Drop me a line if you want to meet up. I'll be trying to keep abreast of everything on Twitter too, via FlockUp.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:36 Comments (0)
I can't remember how I came across this site, but it sure is entertaining if you can suspend credulity and credibility for a short while. My favourite? Physics carols from the last 4 decades. Sample from 'Phrosty the Photon':
Phrosty the Photon was quite a quantum sight,
with a zero mass and an endless life,
and a speed approaching light.
There must have been some magic in a physics lab one year,
for when they studied X-ray beams
ole Phrosty did appear, Ohhhhhh,
Phrosty the Photon says he knows he’s not that large,
but he said one day if he comes this way,
he’ll give us all a charge.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:46 Comments (0)
A wiki of formalized mathematics
Cameron Freer, an instructor in pure mathematics at MIT, is working on a fascinating new project called vdash.org (vdash being the mathematical symbol for logical provability)- a mathematical wiki which only allows 'true' statements to be added by the users. The goal of the project is simple: all mathematics in one place, in a common language, which anyone can edit (although edits are computer-verified for mathematical correctness). The results could be amazing. Putting all mathematics research into an inter-linked, formalized application could reveal connections not recognized before and could feasibly even advance some fields without additional work being necessary. This is in addition the educational benefits such a project could have.
It's early days, but worth watching the brief video above to see what could happen.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 09:04 Comments (1)
Round-up of links we have recently loved
Things have been a little hectic, so we are simply listing here a collection of links which have stopped us getting on with work and caused us to open a new tab in Firefox. Hopefully they will do the same for you:
- BBC News: Tim Berners-Lee is increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation and wants a way to help people separate rumour from real science
- UK petition to get publically funded research published in OA journals
- The Economist on user-generated science
- Jon Udell on machine readability of data. If you ever wondered why we insist on fully-marked up xml when people currently tend to print off pdfs, this is a simple example why.
- The next 50 years of science: In the next 50 years, as the technologies of information and
knowledge accelerate, the nature of the scientific process will change
even more than it has in the last 400 years.
- Ever wondered what $700bn in science funding would look like?
- A proposed standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data
- Perils of non-OA publishing: Dear Nature...
- BioMed Central's Matt Cockerill on the future of science
- Science in the 21st century - a fantastic-looking conference with all the presentations in mp3 and streaming video format for ipod enjoyment.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 14:14 Comments (0)
I found this interesting blog post on Nature's dissection of BioMed Central's comments today:
It made me wonder why people are generally more likely to reply to a blog post than comment on a scholarly article. Certainly it is easier to comment on a blog post (often no registration or email verification needed), but maybe the fact that the comment is archived alongside the article makes people reluctant to comment unless they are 100% sure of their facts. After all, no one wants to be seen to be wrong in perpetuity! If you have never commented on a scientific article, what are your reasons. Did you agree 100% with all the articles you have read?While the normal forms of commenting occurred (criticism, requests for clarification, interpretive comments), to me the most interesting part of the commentary generated was the additional information users contributed, including links and downloads. This is new in richness and immediacy, factors that are unique to the online form.Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, Jul 2008
Posted by Chris Leonard at 16:01 Comments (0)
The above is a Wordle representation of a recent talk at Ted by Murray Gell Man on Beauty and Truth in Physics.
Below is a Wordle representation of the abstracts of published manuscripts in PMC Physics A to date [click image to reveal full awesomeness]. Why not play with it yourself to see what you can create?
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:31 Comments (0)
Mathematicians criticize impact factors
The Wall Street Journal's blog reports on the increasing dissatisfaction of mathematicians with impact factors. Nothing really new in the blog posting (for those who follow bibliometrics), but interesting to see that the arguments are getting much wider exposure now.
The posting was inspired by the release of the report by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) on Citation Statistics. Brief excerpt:
For journals, the impact factor is most often used for ranking. This is a simple average derived from the distribution of citations for a collection of articles in the journal. The average captures only a small amount of information about that distribution, and it is a rather crude statistic. In addition, there are many confounding factors when judging journals by citations, and any comparison of journals requires caution when using impact factors. Using the impact factor alone to judge a journal is like using weight alone to judge a person's health.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:12 Comments (0)
To further celebrate the launch of PMC
Biophysics, we have a T-shirt competition for you!
We have pun-tastic
tshirts for PMC Physics A and B, but now it's up to you: come up with a clever
slogan for the new journal, ideally referencing both biophysics and open
access:
Inspiration might be found from the scope of the journal -
beyond that, it's up to you.
The reward for the winning slogan will be
nifty, high-quality tshirts for you and two friends, with your biophysical
slogan across the front, and our logo on the back.
Entries should be
emailed to info@physmathcentral.com by
the 31st of July, and we will announce the winners and their idea on the
blog.
Pun away!
Posted by Morag Hickman at 13:04 Comments (1)
Zotero support for PhysMath Central
We are very pleased to announce that PhysMath Central now has Zotero support.
On each abstract and full-text article page you will notice the blue Zotero icon in the address bar, which you can click to add the bibliogrpahic information to your Zotero account. And if you don't know what Zotero is, click here and find out more. You'll be glad you did.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:08 Comments (0)