Engqvist and Frommen (DOI) conclude in their recent article in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that it is difficult to manipulate your own h-index through self-citations.
According to Thomson Scientific, my h-index is not worth mentioning in a Nature Network blog 3. Could I manipulate this?

Well, two articles (one on facilitation of tree regeneration and one on secondary dispersal of seeds) need one more citation each. I could go downstairs and promote those articles to some of my colleagues. I could finally write that summarizing article on my PhD thesis and solve the issue through self-citation. Or I can wait for genuine citations by other foresters interested in restoration of forest on semiarid hillslopes (fat chance).

In any case, it doesn’t help me a lot. If I manage to increase my h from 3 to 4, the next article needs four citations to get my h to 5.

I am not sure someone will look up my h-index to evaluate me anyway. A reviewer (say, someone who is going to decide on my latest postdoc application) is much more likely to look me up in Web of Science and not find my articles in the 258 results returned after a Author=(Aerts R) search. Including the name of my promoter doesn’t help, because my letter in Frontiers was a solo project, in an other publication his name is misspelled in Web of Science, and three more papers are still not listed in WOS. And because ResearcherID is explicitly linked to WOS, those three missing papers are not on my ResearcherID page either…

My solution? For papers, a good personal publication list on the webpage of our research group (note the nifty ‘publication profile’ I added above), and an up to date record of other stuff on the net on ClaimID

(These issues have been discussed before on NN, but an update doesn’t hurt, does it?)

Bob O’Hara was playing with TagCrowd, an online utility to produce tag clouds of any text.
Following his suggestion (and wasting a considerable amount of time), I fed all my PhD thesis chapters through the tag cloud generator.

But instead of just posting the complete list of tagclouds, I decided to make a cloud of clouds. So finally, I know what the essence of my thesis is.

(From FlickR)

From time to time people (especially undergrads) ask me what it is that I ‘do’ as a postdoc. I usually tell them that I do exactly the same as before my PhD defense two years ago, but without the stress of having to finalize a thesis.
Next time, I’ll show them this comic from Piled Higher and Deeper artist Jorge Cham.

© Jorge Cham

I attended an international conference on mountain forest ecology last week (Mountain Forests in a Changing World, BOKU, Vienna, see abstracts here and my contribution on Nature Precedings). With many contributors from such exotic countries as Bhutan and Armenia, this congress opened a whole new part of the world for me, that is closer to Belgium than most tropical countries where I’ve worked before. During a free afternoon, I walked through Vienna with colleague Jonathan Lenoir from France. We passed, among others, the Naschmarket, where we met the esteemed dr. Falafel (pictured below). I haven’t looked at his most recent publications yet, but I’m sure the editors at Nature may expect something fascinating soon (word has it’s going to be something about chickpeas).

(From Flickr)

Geckos are nice animals. In our house in Ethiopia, they lurked next to the light bulbs on the ceiling and were part of our integrated insect pest management program (the other components being free roaming spiders, mosquito nets and mozzy coils).
Nature News led me to some cool research on geckos (Active tails enhance arboreal acrobatics in geckos, by Jusufi et al. in PNAS). The story made it to the cover of the journal. I think their Figure 4 (see reprint) would make a good T-shirt cover too.

(Shirt from ThinkGeek and Geckos form PNAS)

One strategy to publish a paper in a top ecological journal, is to combine a hot topic (e.g. ‘habitat fragmentation’) with a sexy subject (e.g. ‘panda’, see for instance Ecological Applications 17:4).

But how about this one in Functional Ecology 21:3 :’Variation in sperm size within and between ejaculates in a cockroach’?
I don’t know what kind of looks Harris gets when he explains what he’s doing during his long shifts in the lab, but I do know it’s not the kind of sexy subject I had in mind.

Because I wondered what kind of animals receive most attention in scientific literature – the cute or the ugly – I searched ISI Web of Knowledge for gorilla, panda or dolphin (sexy) and compared the results with a search for bedbug, flea or cockroach (not so sexy).

Graphs: ISI Web of Knowledge; Images: Wikipedia.org

Against my expectations, our cute animals are not so hot after all. The cockroach and his itchy friends have received far more attention (8618 publications; >100000 citations) than Flipper et al. (5208 publications; just over 50000 citations) during the past 20 years. However, the number of papers on our flagship species is increasing steadily, while the numbers of bug papers per year remains more or less constant. In a few years time, my strategy may prove to be right, but for now, I would say you better use nasty animals to write hot papers.

Enceladus is not a plant or animal genus (that I know of), it’s an icy moon of Saturn). Today, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft approaches this moon within 50 km of its surface. Not a usual topic for my blog, but such a good shot in interplanetary carambole is worth mentioning. NASA calls it an in your face flyby.

Polar jets sending ice into space ((c) NASA)

More information on Nature News.

On the occasion of the announcement of sir David Attenborough’s retirement, the Flemish talk show De Laatste Show aired the famous clip of the documentary The Life of Birds featuring the Australian Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae).

Image© Ian Michael Thomas 2007 on Flickr

The clip (see Video Google) illustrates the bird’s amazing talent to mimic songs of other birds in an effort to attract females to his display site. With its built-in MP3 recorder and player, the feathery sound box also reproduces the sounds of camera shutters, car alarms… and chain saws.

While this is really hilarious at first, one of the guests (cartoonist Kamagurka) raised an interesting point: “If a bird living in the rainforest starts mimicking chain saw sounds, isn’t it time to start asking ourselves some questions? This bird is singing its own song of desctruction.”
In my opinion, the guest is right: a species being listed in the 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (LR/LC) should not be imitating the sound of habitat destruction.

I like Google Earth and I like elephants.

Stumbled upon via Amazing Nature

(You can also see them in Google Maps but for details you really need GE and go to 10.903497N, 19.93229E.)

In their recent communication “Come all ye scientists, busy and exhausted. O come ye, O come ye, out of the lab”, Ladle and colleagues demonstrate that a growing number of scientists is submitting manuscripts on Christmas day. The increasing pressure to publish and the advent of online editorial systems have rendered scientific writing a 24-7 industry, and I agree that this may have contributed to the observed trend. Nevertheless, I believe there may be another reason involved in the rising number of Santa papers: the pleasure of having your work published with an exceptional submission date.

To demonstrate this, I searched for ‘Received 29 February [year]’ and ‘Received 1 March [year]’ and different format variations hereof, using Google Scholar, to find out how many manuscripts were received by academic journals on leap day (a widely accepted special day) and on the corresponding sixtieth day of the revised Julian calendar in normal years – the first of March – between 1980 and 2005. I found that more papers were submitted during the studied period on leap day than on the corresponding day of the next year. What’s more, also on the first of March in leap years, there were more submissions than on the subsequent regular first of March.

Figure 1 (on Flickr)
Number of published papers initially submitted on 29 February and 1 March, showing higher submission rates in leap years, except in the weekends (asterisks).

The trend was consistent, except in week-ends, which suggests that leap day submitters have a publishing niche, that some of them probably submit too late, but also that they prefer weekends over work (Figure 1). As notable dates widely vary between regions and cultures, I suspect many more, but maybe less obvious, submission peaks exist, along with more personal or accidental peaks related to birthdays or, for instance, Friday the Thirteenths. For one I plead guilty, having submitted this letter initially to the editor of Nature… on February 29.

Naturally, this letter was not retained for publication, which made me think again: where there is a submission peak, there must also be a rejection peak. The editors must be busy!