Citation index going up, a little

This really doesn't mean a whole lot, but TPP has a sort of weird fascination with seeing where and how his publications are cited.  You don't want to be an example of "couldn't grab his butt with both hands", and so far so good, but it's interesting to find out what other people see in your publications, how they are used.  Now a number of indexes have been proposed that allow you to make all sorts of bogus comparisons.  Understand that you do some research, and then you write a paper in an attempt to publish it, and when that occurs, other people find out about your research and its results and conclusions with the result that they cite your work to show the background or rationale or similarities or differences to their work, but that takes time.  The longer you publish the more your publications can be cited or ignored.  The more you publish, the more your publications can be cited or ignored, and there is a domino effect because getting cited alerts other people to your publications.  TPP published his 1st scientific paper nearly 40 years ago and has published regularly if not prolifically ever since.  For the longest time my h-index was 17, meaning that 17 of my publications had at least 17 citations; some have more than a hundred.  Really important papers get thousands of citations.  Just recently my h-index went up to 18!  To get a really high h-index you have to have a lot of papers with a lot of citations.  That can be easier in some fields than in others depending on how much and how many people work in that field, and this does not count selfies (self-citation).  People with 2 or 3 times as many publications may not have an h-index any higher than mine, and this then is why this could be used as a gauge of your impact on a field scientifically.  A colleague and friend is in ornithology, and he's been prolific and important, and his h-index is 23.  A couple of my super-star colleagues have h-indexes of 28 and 35.  Both are in big fields, but both do very good research and are more prolific publishers.  A really low index would suggest you have either few publications or lots of publications that only make a very minimal impact.  My h-index may go up another notch or two ultimately as some newer publications begin to get into the literature, but not the stuff of a power-house.   

Ask the professor: What do you do with yourself over the summer?

Yeah!  That just makes my morning!  What do us lazy professors do with our 3 month long summer vacation?  Well, let TPP offer a couple of answers.  First, we don't get paid.  Maybe you think we aren't working, but not to worry because we're not getting paid either.  That's an equation you can perhaps understand.  Certainly TV right now doesn't have much to offer.  Let's see both hockey and basketball are still playing and dominating the TV, and it's June, so how could anyone care?  Of course the locally favorite baseball team had already sunk to the basement of the league so we can't even be amused by their usual summer collapse.  So you know, you just sort of sit around doin' nuthin'.  Summer is when field biologists get to actually visit the field.  That's were this picture came from, and soon it will be time to revisit these plots, re-photograph them and collect some more data.  Hmm, actually haven't collected any data yet; still analyzing the images from the last time collection period.  Finished revising a journal manuscript because the author wanted us to cite a paper of his that is going to appear in the same volume so we had no way to knowing about it yet.  Bloody thanks for that bother.  Finished revising and re-formatting about 150 figures for a book manuscript, then checking all the chapters, figure captions, indexes, contents, keyword lists, and size/magnification spread sheets to make certain all the references to these figures were still all correct.  Even just assembling the entire thing (you'd think this would all be digital wouldn't you?) in hard copy (2) for submission took three days because you notice that not all of those things above were quite correct, so you fix everything on the fly.  A steady stream of recommendation requests, internship notifications, and other student-centered requests need to be done ASAP, and did TPP mention we don't get paid in the summer even though we continue to deliver the services students count on?  In his ample spare time TPP tries to keep entropy at bay with respect to his old house and his gardens.  Did a biological presentation, actually just a question and answer session, to explain to Unitarians how the biological world works (topics covered: biological magnification of heavy metal pollutants, phytoplankton productivity, bees and biodiversity, soy food products, antibiotics in food, coral reefs and global warming, nutrient cycling, and so on); received many thanks, many complements, no honorarium.  But rather than rant at him, told my dentist I was so bored with nothing to do that I was thinking of taking up golf (his game). 

Impact factor - Treemendous!

This won't mean much to most of you, but this is a very nice article about the accomplishments of Dr. Alex Shigo, a guy who actually single-handedly revolutionized tree care and urban forestry.  He did this with a great deal of energy, a redwood-sized personality, a lot of research, and he summarized a lot of this information in non-technical publications.  Some of you might be interested in some of his many publications, so here's the link to Alex's publications.  Tell them the Phytophactor sent you.  Many moons have since passed since the Phactor did his post-doctoral research with Shigo and one of his associates; it was a great learning experience; we dissected a lot of trees, but unfortunately, one of the things learned was that my future was not in forestry, which at the time was quite disappointing.  In the process the Phactor met Alex's ever so lovely daughter and her husband, the ever effervescent Dr. Chips, and it was she who called my attention to this article.  She has good reason to be very proud.  Very, very few people have such a great impact on their fields.  So here's a freebie; keep those darned lawn mowers away from your tree trunks.  

Picky, picky, picky

Scientific publishing is not for the faint of heart or the delicate, sensitive personality. The blog title pretty well describes the reviewers, the editors, and scientific journals: picky, picky, picky. Reviewers start with the assumption that the authors are drooling idiots who don't know the first thing about the research they have labored over, and probably don't know the pertinent literature either, and odds on no one knows statistics better than they. You really come to appreciate constructive reviews however rare. Editors are chosen to he picky hard-asses it seems, bent on maintaining scientific standards, meaning the science they do as opposed to the science you do. And the rules and regs constructed for journals makes your basic immigration process pale by comparison. Yet, in spite of this, it does seem to work out, and the Phactor has not had nearly so bad a time as all this, except for that one time, oh, and that other one, and a couple of more here and there, although the next to last one was the biggest breeze in my entire career (yea!). The most recent paper involved editorial demands to keep jumping through ever smaller hoops, and then gaining some small satisfaction when some of the changes insisted upon by the editor, which seemed at odds with the journal's own format instructions, were changed back (yes, the authors got it right!) by the copy editor, but it doesn't do to point such things out. So after all this masochism of doing and publishing science, there is a certain sense of satisfaction for getting a manuscript done, submitted, reviewed, and revised, today! And if the stoopid editor doesn't swoon in delight over these efforts, well, the Phactor will probably do what they ask, meekly.

Tough Review, but it's a masterpiece!

“It must be said at once that this book is better than having a sausage stuck to the end of your nose.” (Mark Golden’s review of a book by S. Pomeroy in Classical Review). How's that for not a very favorable review? Oh, but this one might top it, especially in science. "It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I’ve ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it’s a masterpiece." (P. Z. Myers, infamous blogger). Go here to see what publication this applies to. Good thing he doesn't review botany.

Finish book, check. Well, almost.

The Phactor's real-life alter ego has been a busy scholar of botany. During May, two manuscripts were completed, one start to finish, one finishing up a 3-yr-old project, submitted and accepted for publication at a major journal within 3 weeks and put to bed. Electronic communications make such head-spining speed possible, and if you do not appreciate this then you've never dealt with typed manuscripts, hard-copy photographic plates, and the mail. A third manuscript submitted earlier this year was accepted with revision and those are nearly done. But the big, it's-been-going-on-forever, gorilla-on-my-back project is a book on plant diversity for a more general readership, and it's done, today, well, almost. A nagging little chore remains, and that involves getting copyright permissions and correct attributions for all the figures that do not belong to the Phactor or that are not in the common domain. Hardly had the process begun, and already an undeliverable email has bounced back at me. Doesn't that mean they waive their rights to exercise copyright? And then you find the perfect image, a truly excellent photo, and not unreasonably, the photographer would like compensation, but even modest compensation is out of the question when you have no picture purchasing budget. This means you end up relying on fellow academics to do you a favor. So will the end of June arbitrary deadline set for submission be met or not? Hard to say. But as Douglas Adams used to say, "I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they rush by." Of course, publishing a book here in the twilight of books may be a foolish endeavor anyways, but it will still feel like something big was accomplished. Ah, but the Phactor has posted 342 (!) blogs already this year, and everyone knows that's where the action is! Please tell my chair.

Dealing with ecological rejection

I firmly believe in sabbatical leaves, and it is my great good fortune to have been allowed to take four of them. The academic world of science is difficult and it takes a concerted effort to try or explore new things, to learn new areas of science, and while taking a break from the week to week routine. As this is being written my fourth and last sabbatical leave is winding to a close. I'm taking a week to visit friends, a week to attend national scientific meetings, and that leaves two weeks to prepare for classes. Already I have people clamoring for a laboratory guide.

As part of this leave's exploration into new topics, I collaborated with an old friend and colleague. I dragged him to the rain forest to study insects that consume flowers, but aren't involved in pollination (my usual tropical topic). These insects had never been studied before, and in fact no one even knew these flowers were their brood substrate, or that they had two broods, a smaller one that produced bigger adults, and a larger one that produced smaller adults, or that they had a female biased population, and a number of other things. And we had fun doing it.

Oh, but science isn't science until its published, and our manuscript was just rejected. And the reason was it was too much natural history and not enough ecology. This means we didn't conduct an experiment aimed at determining some ecological principle, but just figured out a previously unknown biology. In the eyes of ecological snobs, ecological studies trump natural history. But ecological study is impossible until you know enough about the system to manipulate it.

Ecology is coming of age. It's getting snobby. Long treated as an inferior, less than demanding, descriptive field of science, barely divorced from Victorian natural history, ecology is now asserting itself by dumping on the very field that gave rise to ecology. This is because biology is done by people, and many people have need of a pecking order and having someone lower down to peck at to feel good about themselves. And this is nothing but someone inforcing their personal belief that ecology, as they define it, is better, more important, higher quality science than natural history.

Fortunately I know how to deal with such rejection. My lapsed membership in the organization will now be on permanent hold. Another publishing venue will be found, and our natural history will become part of biological knowledge, and then some stinking ecologist will use our study to do some "real science" that can get published in a top ranked journal, well, top ranked for ecology.