Last week, ALM (article-level metric) data for PLoS journals were uploaded to Figshare with the invitation to do something cool with it. Well, it would be rude not to. Actually, I’m one of the few scientists on the planet that hasn’t published a paper with Public Library of Science (PLoS), so I have no personal agenda here. However, I love what PLoS is doing and what it has achieved to disrupt the scientific publishing system.

I am incredibly excited to announce that I am the recipient of one of the Moore Foundation’s Investigators in Data-Driven Discovery awards. To quote Chris Mentzel, the Program Director of the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative: I feel truly honored to have been selected. All the finalists that I met at the Moore Foundation in July were amazing as were all of the semi-finalists that I knew. I did not envy the folks making the final decisions.

So here it is, the first of the positions we’ll be advertizing as part of our move to the University of Florida. The official ad is below, but a few comments first. The position is for a student to work with me, but for those who aren’t really familiar with our groups, it’s important to note that my group works closely with Ethan White’s lab (we provide desk space that mixes the labs together, we have a single group lab meeting,

What is your h-index on Twitter? This thought crossed my mind yesterday when I saw a tweet that was tagged #academicinsults It occurred to me that a Twitter account is a kind of micro-publishing platform. So what would “publication metrics” look like for Twitter? Twitter makes analytics available, so they can easily be crunched. The main metrics are impressions and engagements per tweet.

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science . After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

A colleague once told me that they only review three papers per year and then refuse any further requests for reviewing. Her reasoning was as follows: I publish one paper a year (on average) This paper incurs three peer reviews Therefore, I owe “the system” three reviews. It’s difficult to fault this logic. However, I think that as a senior scientist with a wealth of experience, the system would benefit greatly from more of her input.

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We macroecologists are scattered across the globe, often with little in person access to other macroecologists. Often we’re lucky if there’s another person at our institution that has even heard the word macroecology. Sadly, we don’t have a lot of venues for bringing large groups of macroecologists together. Many of the ones that do occur tend to be local in attendance or focused on one area of macroecology. But plans are afoot, my friends!

When it comes to measuring the impact of our science, citations are pretty much all we have. And not only that but they only say one thing – yeah – with no context. How can we enrich citation data? Much has been written about how and why and whether or not we should use metrics for research assessment.

I thought I’d share a procedure for rotating a 2D set of coordinates about the origin. Why would you want do this? Well, we’ve been looking at cell migration in 2D – tracking nuclear position over time. Cells migrate at random and I previously blogged about ways to visualise these tracks more clearly. Part of this earlier procedure was to set the start of each track at (0,0). This gives a random hairball of tracks moving away from the origin.