Today marks the 59 anniversary of the seminal paper from Watson and Crick describing the structure of DNA. It is definitely worth re-reading. I can't believe how short it is and how long Nature papers have become.
Archive for the 'Publishing' category
I don't mean to be the citation police but...
After reading your thesis, you have been very stingy with the citations. How are you going to throw out percentages and values without a citation likes it some type of common knowledge. If this were a manuscript they would bounce it back to you in under an hour because they can't verify your claims because there are no references. So a question I pose dear reader is do we hold a thesis to the same level of scrutiny as a manuscript with respect to proper citations? Or should it be held higher or lower?
Oh and don't just cite reviewers, how about you give credit to the poor fuckers that actually did the work and not to someone who just writes up a "state of the field" review every few years.
AAP response to research works act.
The Association of American Publishers has put in its official two cents on the Research Works Act*. Excuses are pretty lame in my opinion.
*You may not be able to access this link because Wikipedia will be going black in order to protest SOPA and PIPA**.
**Oh and of course you may not be able to access these either.
Pubwhat?
I was talking to a grad student about publications and access to articles a while back and thought that I should write a little primer on it for other noobs to read. So I think somewhere somehow sometime someone listed the stat that NIH funded projects generate nearly 80,000 articles per year. And since the government is coughing up the money for us to do the work, in the spirit of transparency, these articles and the results and conclusions contained in them should be made available to the public.
And since Joe and Josephine Six Pack can’t really afford access to medical journals, researchers, whose research is funded by the NIH, are required to post articles in the PubMedCentral (PMC) library within 12 months of publication. The requirement is limited to peer-reviewed articles, and doesn’t include book chapters or conference proceedings, etc. I believe these requirements kicked in for anyone receiving direct funding from the NIH starting FY 2008, so don’t go grieving some PI about stuff they published back in ’68. Why are we doing this?
-Well first off, you are letting your investors, the taxpayers, see what we are up to.
-Next you are putting your science out there and hopefully making a name for yourself.
-Pumping up your citation stats
-Prepping yourself for future Open Access regulations that are starting to take root in other agencies such as the NSF.
-So Nana who lives in East Jesunuckistan can see your latest article when she fires up her Prodigy account on her 14.4 kb/s dial up account.
And for you noobs, PubMedCentral ≠ PubMed. PubMed holds citations for more than just journal articles dating back to around post-WWII, it also includes links to PMC in it. Also PMCID is not the same as PMID, but if you have one and need to get to the other, here is the converter. And sometimes you will have to wait since articles don’t always get a PMCID number right away and you are just stuck with the temporary NIHMSID.
So how do you make sure your stuff ends up in PMC? Great question, there are generally four typical routes that this happens.
1. Publish in a journal that deposits all final published articles in PMC that don’t require any action on the author’s part. This is the easiest option of all and here is a list of journals that will do it for you.
2. Make arrangements to have publisher deposit final published article into PMC.
3. You deposit the peer-reviewed manuscript via the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) process. This differs from the previous two options in that those options use the journal’s final article and this option publishes the article in the manuscript format, so it’s not as pretty.
4. Some publishers will kick start the submission process in NIHMS but you have to finish it. They’ll dump the article in the hopper but you have to give it the thumbs up.
A lesser-known option is that you can pay me to do it for you. Yeah it will cost you a little more, but when your article’s PDF pops up on PMC with actual liquor stains on it, you’ll feel mighty proud.
Do you really count a review article as a publication?
So for a while (around a year) I have been writing a dinky little review article for my boss*. This has been put onto my priority list and taken off several times by my PI, as I'm already up to my ears in experiments and don't have much time for this thing. The last time I put it down I was halfway through a first draft. Since today was a slow day in the lab, I decided to rededicate myself to this damn thing. I honestly just need to get this invited review done so that I can stop feeling like the ancient mariner with an albatross slung around his neck. My goal is to get a first draft finished in the next week or so and throw the damn thing down on my boss's desk and tell him the ball is in his court.
My question is how do you folks view review articles? Is it a waste of time, that would rather be better spent in the lab generating work for a "real" publication? Do you find them worthwhile or are we saturated with too many review articles as it is**?
*This dinky review article will count towards my publication requirements for graduation as well as serve as the introductory chapter in my thesis, so its worth it to get it done and out of the way.
**I find review articles nice for certain fields but with respect to non-coding RNAs there are almost as many review articles as research articles. And damn if there isn't a review article out on a specific pathway in my field every year from the same damn lab. Its enough to drive you batty.
