There’s been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the “Research Works Act”– John’s roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I’m generally in favor of this, but Aram says […]
Category: Publishing
How to Read a Scientific Paper
My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to […]
O Brave New-Media World That Has Such Bloggers In It
I’ve been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn’t create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site: The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with […]
Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen
This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain– here’s the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense– Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been […]
Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to “unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text.” Like Bee, I couldn’t resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I […]
Filtering Isn’t the Problem
Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating “social media” alternatives for academic publishing, citing “disastrous consequences” of the “filter-then-publish” model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I’m not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is: The […]
Academic Poll: Refereeing Ethics
The “peer reviewers get worse” item in this morning’s Links Dump drew an immediate comment elsewhere to the effect of “of course they do, because they start pawning reviews off on their students. This one was a surprise to me, so here’s a quick poll to see if my subfield of physics is really that […]
Science on the Tree 2010: Literature
Continuing our series of science-themed Christmas tree ornaments, we have this cute pair of reading bears: “But wait,” you say, “reading isn’t a science!” Ah, but while reading itself may not be a science, science is nothing without the scientific literature. The really essential step in the process of science is the communication of scientific […]
A Quick Reputational Poll
In a place I can’t link to, I encountered the somewhat boggling statement that “Nature leans more in the direction of Popular Science than Critically Peer Reviewed [Journal].” Thus, a quick poll: Nature is:online surveys Context is for the weak.
How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke’s How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading […]