University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall has done a lot of work documenting “predatory” open access publishers (as distinct from legitimate open access publishers like Plos). In a new post, he discusses the rise of a similar phenomenon: the gaming of article-level metrics, including by for-profit companies specifically set up for that purpose.
The Lab and Field risks the wrath of the Twitterverse by suggesting that “academic hipsters” are sometimes too quick to recommend that others adopt new software packages or other new ways of working. I have a related post.
What if your abstract were given a dramatic reading by a professional actor? (HT Jeremy Yoder, via Twitter)
UPDATE: And one more from Andrew Gelman: a total authorship and peer review fail. Andrew sends us to Life Science PhD Adventures, which reports on a recently published paper in Organometallics that contains the following sentence (emphasis added):
Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound,just make up an elemental analysis…
I’m reminded of a friend of mine in high school who noticed that her history teacher was only making comments on the first and last pages of her history papers. So in the middle of every page of her next paper, except the first and last page, she inserted “The price of bananas in the Bahamas is 39 cents.” She got comments on the first and last page only, and an A on the paper! So for her next paper, she wrote a first page and a last page, and stuck an old English paper in the middle. She got comments on the first and last page only, and an A on the paper. I’m surprised to learn that this history teacher also reviews for Organometallics.
*puts on hipster glasses and skinny jeans. clicks.*
TeX came out in 1978, LaTeX in the early 1980s. Most theoreticians were using TeX before it became cool.
And what have they moved on to using now that TeX is cool?
Over on the original “hipster” post Falko Buschke comments:
“Of course, I use MSWord, but I do so ironically.”
It’s a close race whether our commenters or The Lab and Field’s are the funniest. 🙂
“What? You use R? You should really consider switching to Julia”
Ok, our commenters are the funniest. 🙂
I don’t know – someone compared Word to the Pabst Blue Ribbon of word processors! (over-priced and generally poor quality).
Re: that Organometallics paper, Retraction Watch has more:
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/insert-data-here-did-researcher-instruct-co-author-to-make-up-results-for-chemistry-paper/