Just Science is an effort to collect blog posts about science that are written within one week. Just Science 2008 will start tomorrow and ends February 8. Science bloggers that agree to participate should write one daily blog entry for these five days.
Nature today published a report on the prevalence of duplicate papers in Medline. In this report Mounir Errami and Harold Garner estimate that there as many as 200.000 duplicate papers in Medline or 1% of all published papers. The article has already been widely cited, including of course Nature News and Nature Network, but also Noble Intent and DigitalKoans. The original paper by Errami and Garner was published in Bioinformatics .
Advice by your supervisor, books, workshops and a lot of experience can improve the quality of your scientific writing. But when you are about to submit your paper and don't want to take any chances – especially when English is not your first language – a scientific writer can be helpful.
Thomson Scientific last week announced ResearcherID . ResearcherID tries to solve a problem that has annoyed me for many years. In contrast to papers and journals, authors are not associated with a unique ID in databases such as PubMed. You are lucky if you have an uncommon last name that contains only letters from the English alphabet.
M. Mitchell Waldrop has posted a draft version of an article called Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?. The article will appear in Scientific American (which, like the Nature Publishing Group, is owned by Macmillan). In this article he talks about the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies in research. The largest part of the article is about Open Notebook Science and OpenWetWare in particular.
I'm a regular reader of TechCrunch, a popular blog about internet products and companies. But somehow I missed the article just before christmas that talks about the popularity of different Google products. In this analysis, traffic for Google Scholar was down 32% compared to 2006. I haven't seen this information reproduced somewhere else, but the number for most of the other Google products were higher than 2006, as expected.
Buzzword is a free online word processor based on the Adobe Flash technology. I previously wrote about Buzzword and how it could be used to write a scientific paper. The first impressions were positive, so I decided to write my next paper with Buzzword. This paper has been submitted this week. What did I like and dislike about Buzzword? Good Most importantly, there is only one version of your manuscript.
A recent Nature article, repeated in a Nautilus blog post, talks about author accountability. The article suggests that at least one author per collaborative group signs a statement with reference to Nature's publication policies. This policy would certainly help avoid honorary authorship , but it can be difficult to enforce in large research projects. I would like to make another suggestion.
How could you improve your scientific writing skills? Two months ago I talked about books. Another idea would be a scientific writing workshop. This weekend I attended such a workshop, organized by Julia Klapproth and Barry Drees from Trilogy Writing & Consulting. The workshop was organized as a 1½ day course with many group exercises.
Are you tired of writing a paper, based on real experiments? SciGen could come to the rescue, at least if you do computer science research. SciGen is a program that creates random papers, complete with results, discussion, graphs and references. Some of these random papers have been accepted at conferences or even for publication. SciGen is of course a hoax.