Running, motivation and toys
Mo Farah, double gold medal-winning distance runner, showed us this summer how important strategy is to winning a race. He runs the race from the back of the pack and then over the last 500m or so...
View ArticleAnother way to measure your research impact
The h-index attempts to reduce a researcher’s output to a single number: your h-index is the number of papers you’ve published, N, that have been cited at least N times. It seems like a broader measure...
View ArticleNot quite a book prize
It is the season for scientific prizes – this month already we have had the K. J. Zülch Prize, the Perkin medal, the Keio medical science prize, the Balzan prizes, the Golden Goose awards and the...
View ArticleIn defence of reviews
Doug Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, published an enormous review article in 2009 on iron chelation and disease. The review had 2,469 references. (D. B. Kell BMC Med. Genom. 2, 2; 2009). I’m not...
View ArticleAuthorship
From time to time I have to go into our store to hunt through old (pre-war) reprints of medical research articles and I am always struck by the prevalence of single authorship in articles of that...
View ArticleThe joys of a Wikipedia edit-a-thon
Last week the Royal Society held a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to try and help redress the gender imbalance in Wikipedia’s coverage of biographies of scientists. Twenty volunteers gathered in the library of...
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Library Camp UK 2012
The creative energy unleashed by an unconference is a wonderful thing. I attended LibCamp2012 recently and was surprised that a disparate bunch of people can self-assemble such a varied and interesting...
View ArticleCustomer relations
Journal publishers are more interested in librarians than they ever used to be. The move to e-journals and big deals has changed the balance between individual and institutional subscriptions, making...
View ArticleSolo Hackday
Once upon a time I might have described myself as a techie. My career was founded on my willingness to install hgopher and Trumpet Winsock and fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys. This gave people...
View ArticleLudwig Guttmann
This is mainly a plug for my first foray onto Occam’s Corner, plus a place to list some of the sources of information that I used, and to tell the story of the chase for a missing document. I feel...
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Candles and rings
Today, 2 February, is Candlemas day, halfway between the shortest day and the spring equinox. It is officially the end of the Christmas season, though I suspect most people would be surprised to learn...
View ArticleMoves to extend NIH open access mandate
We all love to be different – it seems to be a feature of much human activity that we cherish little foibles that set us apart. This is certainly true in the scholarly communications arena, though more...
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High altitude boots
I received an email today with the subject line “High altitude boots”. For a moment I thought it was going to be an advert for extreme high-heeled shoes, but it turned out to be a request for a copy of...
View ArticleFerreting (1)
After commenting on my last post that I am only called on three or four times a year to ferret out interesting old documents, here I am again with more tales of history. It seems to be a boom year for...
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Ferreting (2)
Following on from my previous post, my last bit of ferreting around last month was in support of the Strictly Science exhibition, organised by colleagues at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. This...
View ArticleLast night I dreamt I went to Mendeley again
Two weeks ago I was down in Bournemouth at the UKSG conference – a great gathering of library and publishing people. As usual I took my running kit along and unusually I actually used them instead of...
View ArticleMDPI – another OA publisher
I recently was alerted to the existence of an Open Access (OA) publisher that I had not heard of before: MDPI. Their name stands for “Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute” and they are based...
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An 80th annivirusary
For most of us, appearances on TV are still unusual enough to generate some excitement. Even just a slight chance of a televisual encounter can get the pulse racing. Last December I became briefly...
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The building takes shape
My Institute will vanish in a couple of years’ time and will be reborn as part of a brand-new Institute: the Crick. One of the advantages of working in an Institute that is going through these...
View ArticleLibrary Day in the Life 2013 – Monday
Sadly the Library Day in the Life project has ended. It provided a chance twice a year for librarians round the world to explain what they did each working day for a week. I took part twice, in 2011...
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