[Reposted from our total-impact blog. Heather Piwowar and I are co-PIs.] We just heard: total-impact has been awarded $125,000 by the Sloan Foundation! What does this mean for users? By April 1, 2013, we plan to hit important milestones in three areas: Product: addition of over a dozen new information sources to total-impact.org, particularly data repositories 60 [...]
Author Archives: jason
Twitter and the new scholarly ecosystem
November 30, 2011 – 3:00 pm
This is a copy of a guest post I wrote for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog: In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the Web as a tool for scholarly communication at CERN. In the two decades since, his creation has gone on to transform practically every enterprise imaginable–except, somehow, scholarly communication. Here, instead, we [...]
Open Access: 3 koans
February 2, 2011 – 3:39 pm
1. The teacher was sitting one day beneath a cherry tree, regarding the birds as they ate its fruit. A student approached the teacher and spoke: “Master, I am afraid that if I make my research notes open, others will steal my good ideas.” Instead of answering the student, the master turned and cursed the [...]
my.altmetrics.org: alt-metrics for your CV
January 15, 2011 – 2:59 am
The PLoS alt-metrics study is moving well; we’ve transitioned to an open notebook built on GitHub (which is awesome and a good topic for another post) and findings are starting to emerge. I’m starting to think about next steps, and to me the obvious one is to build a frontend for our crawler–giving working scholars [...]
Has journal commenting failed?
January 7, 2011 – 4:00 am
It’s a great idea: take all the insights, suggestions, and criticisms on scholarly articles, the comments shared in journal clubs and scribbled in margins the world over, and make them accessible to everyone. Attach them to the article itself; make it a conversation, not an artifact. We have blog commenting, video commenting–why not article commenting? [...]
MEDLINE literature growth chart
October 18, 2010 – 5:35 pm
We all know the volume of scientific literature is growing. I went looking for an infographic showing this, but wasn’t satisfied with what I found, so I made one, based on the publication dates of articles in MEDLINE. I got the data by searching PubMed with the query (“[year]“[Publication Date])where [year] was each year from [...]
Scientometrics 2.0
July 10, 2010 – 10:21 pm
I’m excited that I’ve had two papers accepted this week: “Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web,” with Brad Hemminger, and “How and why scholars cite on Twitter” (online soon) with Kaitlin Costello. What’s special about these two papers is that they are the start of a research project that [...]
Markup languages: who’s who?
April 1, 2010 – 10:21 pm
Is HTML XML? This question came up in a conversation with Sarah and @k8lin, and ended up being harder than I thought it’d be. There seems to be a fair amount of confusion on the topic, especially given the W3C’s recent abandonment of XHTML 2.0 and growing use of HTML5. So, I decided to lay [...]
Portrait of the artist as a phrenology illustration
January 22, 2010 – 5:25 pm
The first assignment in my infoVis class was to make a visual introduction to ourselves. I drew a self-portrait in profile, then added my categorized interests in the style of a 19th-century phrenology illustration (compare with actual period illustrations here and here). Phrenology is interesting stuff. Though phrenologists had nearly everything wrong, modern neuroimaging has [...]
$35 homemade whiteboard coffee table
December 22, 2009 – 8:10 pm
Whiteboards are great infovis tools, but expensive and need space. Solution: the whiteboard coffee table. It’s the very poor man’s Microsoft Surface (with no BSOD!). Also, if your taste in home decor tends toward the spartan (as does mine), this makes a great dinner table; it’s durable and really easy to clean. Most importantly, it’s [...]
