As part of the Carnival that Prof-like Substance is organizing on Pre-tenure advice, I thought I’d throw in a piece of advice that anyone who asks me this question gets from me. Here it is: Create a calendar and block out time for you. Sounds simple, and honestly a little stupid, but it’s the best advice I can give. Why? When you start your job, or a semester, your calendar is empty.

This post is about a paper that was recently published. It was the result of a nice collaboration between me and Francisco López-Murcia and Artur Llobet in Barcelona. The paper in a nutshell The availability of clathrin sets a limit for presynaptic function Background Clathrin is a three legged protein that forms a cage around membranes during endoctosis.

Preprints are rapidly becoming popular in biology as a way to speed up the process of science, get feedback on manuscripts prior to publication, and establish precedence (Desjardins-Proulx et al. 2013). Since biologists are still learning about preprints I regularly get asked which of the available preprint servers to use. Here’s the long-form version of my response. The good news is that you can’t go wrong right now.

I was looking at the latest issue of Cell and marvelling at how many authors there are on each paper. It’s no secret that the raison d’être of Cell is to publish the “last word” on a topic (although whether it fulfils that objective is debatable). Definitive work needs to be comprehensive. So it follows that this means lots of techniques and ergo lots of authors.

As I’ve argued here, and in PLOS Biology, preprints are important. They accelerate the scientific dialog, improve the quality of published research, and provide both a fair mechanism for establishing precedence and an opportunity for early-career researchers to quickly demonstrate the importance of their research.

This post is about metrics and specifically the H-index. It will probably be the first of several on this topic. I was re-reading a blog post by Alex Bateman on his affection for the H-index as a tool for evaluating up-and-coming scientists.

A great quote from a classic paper by J.B.S. Haldane “On Being The Right Size” (1926). You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. The paper is available here. — The post title is taken from ‘Falling and Landing’ by The Delgados from their LP ‘Domestiques’.

We have a new paper out! You can read it here. I thought I would write a post on how this paper came to be and also about our first proper experience with preprinting. Title of the paper: Non-specificity of Pitstop 2 in clathrin-mediated endocytosis. In a nutshell: we show that Pitstop 2, a supposedly selective clathrin inhibitor acts in a non-specific way to inhibit endocytosis.

A recent opinion piece published in eLife bemoaned the way that citations are used to judge academics because we are not even certain of the veracity of this information. The main complaint was that Google Scholar – a service that aggregates citations to articles using a computer program – may be less-than-reliable. There are three main sources of citation statistics: Scopus, Web of Knowledge/Science and Google Scholar;

How long does it take to publish a paper? The answer is – in our experience, at least – about 9 months. That’s right, it takes about the same amount of time to have a baby as it does to publish a scientific paper. Discussing how we can make the publication process quicker is for another day. Right now, let’s get into the numbers. The graphic shows the time taken from submission-to-publication for papers on which I am an author.