A couple of months ago we took a poll to see what the attitudes of ecologists were towards the concept of senior authorship.

I’ve read two great posts in the last couple of days that highlight what the recent debate over the the possibility of ‘arsenic based life’ has shown about how scientists are leveraging the modern web to quickly evaluate, discuss and improve science. Marc Cadotte, Nicholas Mirotchnick and Caroline Tucker have a great post over at EEB & flow that will fill in the background for you.

We’ve had a bit of discussion here at JE about potential solutions to the tragedy of the reviewer commons, so I found a recent letter in Nature (warning – it’s behind a pay wall) suggesting that there may not actually be a problem interesting.

…in the last 10 years ecology, specifically macroecology, has produced not one, but at least half a dozen different unified theories of biodiversity. These theories broadly unify ideas of area, abundance and richness to produce from a few underlying principles such seemingly distinct patterns as the species–area curve and the species abundance distribution.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m not a big fan of the configuration of most comprehensive exams, but my post on the matter keeps languishing on my out of control To Do list.

Senior authorship is the practice whereby the last position on an author line is occupied by the leader of the lab in which the project was conducted (i.e., the P.I., the advisor, whatever terminology you prefer). Being the senior author on a paper is considered a sign of leadership on the project and is arguably […]

Anyone who has been around the halls of academia for a while has heard some well meaning soul talk about how we produce too many PhD students for the number of faculty positions, that this is unfair, and that therefore we should take fewer students. The most recent version of this idea on the web goes so far as calling the academic enterprise a Ponzi scheme. I’ve never personally found this argument very convincing.

I really appreciated Jeremy and Owen’s follow up to my original post about PubCred. They have clearly thought a lot about the feasibility of implementing their system and while I still don’t agree that it’s quite as straightforward as they propose ¹ I am will to concede that they would get the details figured out pretty quickly. So, that leaves three questions: 1) Who should decide the details of the system?

After posting about PubCreds I emailed the authors of the original article to invite a response because: 1) it’s only fair if you’re going to criticize someone’s idea to give them a chance to defend it; and 2) I think that the blogosphere is actually the ideal place to have these kinds of discussions because […]

Yesterday I arrived in Oxford, after a 3.5 hour bus transfer from London Stansted. Long, boring ride (though I might have seen a few red kites , but seeing that they were near extinct, I am wondering what other large bird of prey has strong split tail like a swallow). Showed once more that the UK infrastructure has hardly changed since the 19th century. Enjoying an undergraduate room at one of the colleges.