Maintaining a blog can be a boon to your career, increasing your profile in the scientific community, connecting you to collaborators, and helping you land new grants or jobs.
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." Terry Pratchett
This page displays the number of entries (articles) in PubMed (Medline) published every year, that conform to search strategy (such as a phrase) you enter.
"I teach critical appraisal to biological science and medical students at the University of Leicester and have devised my own list of questions". See: http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2010/03/begin-beyond.html
"The benefits of membership to a scientific society are decreasing every year. Lately, I’m asking: Why bother?" See also: http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2010/03/scholarly_societies_why_bother.php
Call for the internet. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
Does scientific attention - as expressed through citations, media coverage, or practitioner knowledge - accrue to quality or reward the real contributors of breakthroughs? Or does attention in scientific publishing create a closed loop?
"Changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritisation across universities, science and research; some switching of modes of study in higher education; and reductions in budgets that do not support student participation."
Critique: An inward-looking scheme which must eventually collapse doe to failure to recruit new talent (and lack of a proper career structure will speed that up). Bye bye UK science.
The Society of Biology is a single unified voice for biology: advising Government and influencing policy; advancing education and professional development; supporting our members, and engaging and encouraging public interest in the life sciences. The Society has been created by the unification of the Biosciences Federation and the Institute of Biology, and is building on the heritage and reputation of these two organisations to champion the study and development of biology, and provide expert guidance and opinion.
If this is unstoppable, then whatever the timescale the alarm bell has to ring and businesses (not just publishers — including universities) have to accept that change is inevitable and plan quite carefully to deal with it.
Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 4381 journals in the directory.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
"For adoption of new technologies in science, it has to be an order of magnitude more useful than current tools. We just don’t have the time to waste learning new tools that only marginally increase our productivity." Discussion: http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/bceaea67/scientists-still-not-joining-social-networks
Web2.0 technologies continue to grow, both in diversity and usage and have the potential to impact all areas of learning. How can a bioscientist navigate the technologies of Web2.0 and why should you bother? The Centre for Bioscience would like to bring together examples of Web 2.0 which enhance student learning or academic scholarship. The day will advocate useful approaches rather than advocating particular programmes.
EndnoteWeb, RefWorks, Connotea, CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley. Nice summary of the state of the art by Martin Fenner. Conclusion - not much to choose in some ways - personal preference!
This is the winning entry into the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest by. It demonstrates how scientific article publishing can be improved by applying Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0/Semantic Web approaches to add value to article content. The application enhances content navigation, allows commenting on specific paragraphs and features of images, and allows facts to be asserted about the article and its contents.
Those who attempt to regain control of communications face outcry. Certain corners of the Internet have been erupting in argument in the past weeks following an announcement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York that it will henceforth require scientists who blog to ask the permission of presenters before firing up computers or mobile phones and publicizing their findings.
A free editing service for developing country researchers who are trying to publish their work has been launched by students from leading academic institutions. The service, SciEdit, is run by a team of undergraduate and postgraduate students in Canada, Europe and the United States. They aim to provide detailed editorial feedback in accordance with the standards of journals such as Nature and Science - where many of them have been published.
It’s a rich, rich source of information and interaction. But it’s doing my head in. That’s why Jim Hendler’s blog post last Friday hit home so well. His piece is about finding the time to blog, which itself is an issue for me. But if I add to that the distraction of Twitter, the problem is compounded. I keep thinking back to Richard Hamming’s remarks about sustaining that 10% extra effort in your science so as to reap long-term benefits in progress and productivity. And I wonder if blogging and twittering has soaked up that time from my schedule. I think it might have.
Welcome to the Virtual Analytical Laboratory or VAL! This is an on-line resource designed by staff in the School of Allied Health Sciences at De Montfort University. This resource is intended to help students on bioscience and laboratory-based degree programmes to gain essential laboratory skills, whether they are new to the university and have never been in a lab before, or whether they are returning to year 2 or 3 and are a bit rusty.
Wouldn't it be great if we could just pull a formatted list of our own publications from CiteULike and fend off the timewasters? Well you can, using CiteULike. Seach your library for: +author:("cann a") +year:2008
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh 16-17 June 2009 The aim of this national conference is to bring together practitioners in the teaching of science disciplines in HE to share their experiences, identify common challenges and an opportunity to share effective practice. The programme will include keynote lectures; short oral presentations; hands on workshops; posters and exhibitions.