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 [...]
Category Archives: academia
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 [...]
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 [...]
Use Zotero in a separate window
September 25, 2009 – 5:05 pm
As I’ve written before, I love the free citation manager Zotero. And the group and sharing features that just dropped as part of v2.0b7, while still a little buggy, are taking the awesomeness up another level. But one thing about Zotero has always really annoyed me: the horizantally-split screen. I never feel like I [...]
Grad school: because your uncle at Lehman Bros. is not such a great connection now.
October 7, 2008 – 12:50 pm
A nice bit of infoVis from the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper. Kind of not the best news for someone who’s applying to doctoral programs this fall…um, can my app go in a special pile for people who’ve been planning this for years, regardless of what the economy would’ve done?
