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Arguing for scientific socialism in ecology funding

26 06 2012

What makes an ecologist ‘successful’? How do you measure ‘success’? We’d all like to believe that success is measured by our results’ transformation of ecological theory and practice – in a conservation sense, this would ultimately mean our work’s ability to prevent (or at least, slow down) extinctions.

Alas, we’re not that good at quantifying such successes, and if you use the global metric of species threats, deforestation, pollution, invasive species and habitat degradation, we’ve failed utterly.

So instead, we measure scientific ‘success’ via peer-reviewed publications, and the citations (essentially, scientific cross-referencing) that arise from these. These are blunt instruments, to be sure, but they are really the only real metrics we have. If you’re not being cited, no one is reading your work; and if no one is reading you’re work, your cleverness goes unnoticed and you help nothing and no one.

A paper I just read in the latest issue of Oikos goes some way to examine what makes a ‘successful’ ecologist (i.e., in terms of publications, citations and funding), and there are some very interesting results. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Australian Research Council, citation, ecology, funding, h-index, impact, impact factor, publication, science
Categories : conservation biology, ecology, education, impact, investment, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Knowledge slavery

29 01 2012

Another workshop; another productive week.

As many readers will know, I’ve spent the last week in the mountains north of Madrid working on a series of conservation ecology papers with host Miguel Araújo (of the Integrative Biology and Global Change Group at the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences), my lab colleagues, Barry Brook, Damien Fordham and Salvador Herrando-Pérez, and Miguel’s post-doc, Regan Early.

Let me tell you, staying in the craggy granite Sierra de Guadarrama mountains at a well-known health spa eating explosively flavourful Spanish food and drinking an immodest selection of the region’s delicious wines, is particularly conducive to scientific productivity (yes, I AM a jammy tart). Although unlikely to be followed by many (even if they have the means), I highly recommend the experience for those suffering from writer’s block.

But this post isn’t about the scenery, food, wine, hydrothermal treatment or even the content of the workshop at all (I just prefaced it as such to gloat); it’s about a particularly sore point for me and hundreds of thousands of other scientists the world over – our slavery to the scientific publishing industry.

And ‘slavery’ is definitely the most appropriate term here, for how else would you describe a business where the product is produced by others for free¹ (scientific results), is assessed for quality by others for free (reviewing), is commissioned, overviewed and selected by yet others for free (editing), and then sold back to the very same scientists and the rest of the world’s consumers at exorbitant prices.

This isn’t just a whinge about a specialised and economically irrelevant sector of the economy, we’re talking about an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. In fact, Elsevier (agreed by many to be the leader in the greed-pack – see how some scientists are staging their protest; also here) made US$1.1 billion in 2010! Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 17 Comments »
Tags: Elsevier, Peerage of Science, publishing, reviewing, Science publishing, Springer, Wiley
Categories : conservation, economics, research, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Supercharge Your Science V.2

24 11 2011

http://goo.gl/ogdT8

I suspect a lot of ConservationBytes.com readers will be attending the imminent 25^th International Congress for Conservation Biology to be held in Auckland from 5-9 December 2011 (it was to be held in Christchurch, but the venue was changed after that city fell down). I’ve now been to 3 previous ICCBs myself, and it should prove to be a good, informative (and fun) meeting.

I’ll be giving a talk or two, as will some of my students and postdocs, but I’m not spruiking those here (but you’re all invited, of course).

The main reason for this short post today is to advertise for Version 2 of our (i.e., Bill Laurance and me) popular ‘Supercharge Your Science‘ workshop. Yes, the organising committee of the ICCB decided it was a good idea to accept our application to repeat our previously successful series of presentations extolling the virtues of positive and controlled media interactions, social media and good writing techniques for ‘supercharging’ the impact of one’s science. You can read more about the content of this workshop here and here.

The description of the workshop (to be held from 19.00 – 21.00 on 6 December in the SkyCity venue) on the ICCB website is: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: Auckland, ICCB, International Congress for Conservation Biology, Media Training, New Zealand, SCB, social media, society for conservation biology, Writing Skills
Categories : biodiversity, conference, conservation, conservation biology, media, New Zealand, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing, words, writing tips

A supervisor’s lament

5 09 2011

Time for a little supervisory whinge. I’ve lamented these very issues over many a beer at many a conference, so I thought I’d solidify those hazy arguments into a blog post.

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I’m by no means the most burdened academic when it comes to student load. We tend to be very picky in our lab when engaging post-graduate student prospects, and even pickier when hiring post-doctoral fellows (because the latter require little things like salaries that unfortunately, do not grow on trees). We also endeavour to share the load – most of our post-docs have at least one primary PhD student responsibility which reduces some of my burden and gives the post-doc in question the requisite experience in supervising. In my opinion, it’s a good way to run a lab, and allows for a high number of productive students, yet is not overly onerous for any one person.

That said, I make sure I read EVERYTHING my students produce, and I take a certain amount of pride in providing as much of my intellectual input as possible: from study design right through to proof correction. If my name is going to be on a paper, I had better bloody well earn my co-authorship. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: Education, grammar, science
Categories : conservation, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

2010 ISI Impact Factors out now (with some surprises)

29 06 2011

It’s been another year of citations and now the latest list of ISI Impact Factors (2010) has come out. Regardless of how much stock you put in these (see here for a damning review), you cannot ignore their influence on publishing trends and author journal choices.

As I’ve done for 2008 and 2009, I’ve taken the liberty of providing the new IFs for some prominent conservation and ecology journals, and a few other journals occasionally publishing conservation-related material.

One particular journal deserves special attention here. Many of you might know that I was Senior Editor with Conservation Letters from 2008-2010, and I (with other editorial staff) made some predictions about where the journal’s first impact factor might be on the scale (see also here). Well, I have to say the result exceeded my expectations (although Hugh Possingham was closer to the truth in the end – bugger!). So the journal’s first 2010 impact factor (for which I take a modicum of credit ;-) is a whopping… 4.694 (3^rd among all ‘conservation’ journals). Well done to all and sundry who have edited and published in the journal. My best wishes to the team that has to deal with the inevitable rush of submissions this will likely bring!

So here are the rest of the 2010 Impact Factors with the 2009 values for comparison: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 20 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, ecology, environment, impact factor, Scientific journal
Categories : conservation, impact, scientific publishing

Demise of the Australian ERA journal rankings

3 06 2011

Earlier this week Australian Senator Kim Carr (Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) announced the removal of the somewhat controversial ERA rankings for scientific journals.

Early last year I posted about the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) journal rankings for ecology and conservation journals. To remind you, the ERA has ranked > 20,000 unique peer-reviewed journals, with each given a single quality rating – and they are careful to say that “A journal’s quality rating represents the overall quality of the journal. This is defined in terms of how it compares with other journals and should not be confused with its relevance or importance to a particular discipline.”.

Now, after much to-ing and fro-ing about what the four rankings actually mean (A*, A, B & C), Senator Carr has announced that he’s dumping them under the advice of the Australian Research Council. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Academic publishing, Australian Research Council, ERA, Excellence in Research for Australia, impact factor, Journal Citation Reports, journals, Kim Carr, Scientific journal
Categories : Australia, conservation, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Leaving Conservation Letters

21 12 2010

It is with both sighs of relief and some sentimentality that I announce my departure from the Senior Editor’s position at Conservation Letters.

After 3 volumes and 17 issues, and a very good prospect for an ISI Impact Factor > 3.0 coming out in June 2011, I feel that I’ve contributed sufficiently for the journal to persist in the conservation publication space for the coming decades.

Now I need a beer. ;-)

The road to Senior Editor certainly involved a steep learning curve for me, and I sincerely thank the four Editors-in-Chief (Hugh Possingham, Bill Sutherland, Richard Cowling & Mike Mascia) for their faith in my abilities and the flexibility to allow me to make important decisions. But most importantly, I thank our highly professional and rigorous editorial board who really did all the hard work (voluntarily, I might add). The full list of editors can be found here, but I want to pass on some extra gratitude to a few specific people here:

In a word, you lot were brilliant. Thank you for going well beyond expectations and handling some very difficult manuscripts. Your expertise, professionalism and generosity will not go unnoticed, I can guarantee that.

I also thank Jennifer Mahar for keeping me (mostly) on the ball and for making the whole thing come together. Marjorie Spencer, whose brainchild this journal was, was a breath of fresh air and enthusiasm. Thanks for stepping up for me (oh, and thanks too for the many drinks courtesy of Uncle Wiley).

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: conservation letters, Hugh Possingham, Michael Mascia, Richard Cowling, Scientific Editing, Wiley-Blackwell, William Sutherland
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Supercharge your science: Blogito ergo sum

22 09 2010

Alas, I didn’t make up that wonderful expression (can anyone tell me who did?), but it was a very appropriate title for the presentation I gave today at the Supercharge Your Science workshop held at the JCU Cairns campus. For those of you who have never read any Descartes (I will forgive you – boring as philosophy gets), it comes from his well-known Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am/exist) statement. Someone cleverly adapted it to blogging.

So this post really just focuses on my component of the 5-presentation workshop extravaganza. Bill Laurance gave his two popular Interacting with the media and How to write a paper presentations (podcasted here), Mike Seyfang gave a great look at the current and future applications of social media to science, Jennifer Lappin showed how her organisation, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, really blitzed the world with top-notch media engagement, and I gave my advice on science blogging (why, what, how, do, don’t, where). The full webinar is reproduced below via Slideshare.

Where taking the show on the road and will be giving the workshop again in Townsville on Friday. I dare say too that we’ll be giving it at many other venues in Australia and perhaps overseas over the coming months. The interest seems massive.

Don’t forget to follow and engage using the associated Twitter hashtag #4ss.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: blog, James Cook University, Jennifer Lappin, journalism, media, Mike Seyfang, publication, René Descartes, science communication, scientific writing, social media, William Laurance
Categories : Australia, blog, conservation, journalism, media, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing, The University of Adelaide

Supercharge Your Science

10 09 2010

In a little under two weeks I’ll be co-running a workshop of the same name at James Cook University at both the Cairns and Townsville campuses.

With me will be super-scientist, media-guru and anti-deforestation advocate, Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance (who you might remember came to Adelaide earlier this year and gave some great talk), ex-Microsoft man and social media guru (and self-entitled ‘geezer’), Mike Seyfang, and the Media Coordinator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Jennifer Lappin.

Should be heaps of fun (and hopefully highly educational). Basically we’ll be preaching to aspiring and well-established researchers in many areas about how they can maximise the impact of their scientific research, in terms of media, education, outreach and policy.

I’ll be talking about science blogging (and blogging science!), other social media uses in science, and some of my personal experiences with ConservationBytes.com. I haven’t yet finalised my presentation, but I think it’ll be insightful.

Here’s the official blurb for the 1-day workshop: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: blogging, James Cook University, media, policy, science, social media
Categories : blog, conservation, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

August issue of Conservation Letters and more citation statistics

3 08 2010

Trash fish © A. Lobo

The latest issue (Volume 3, Issue 4 – August 2010) of Conservation Letters is now available free-of-charge online. This issue’s papers include 1 Mini-Review, 2 Policy Perspectives, 6 Letters, 1 Correspondence and 1 Response:

Don Driscoll et al. – Resolving conflicts in fire management using decision theory: asset-protection versus biodiversity conservation
Mark Colyvan et al. – The natural environment is valuable but not infinitely valuable
William Sutherland et al. – Standards for documenting and monitoring bird reintroduction projects
David Edwards et al. – Wildlife-friendly oil palm plantations fail to protect biodiversity effectively
Kelly Haisfield et al. – An ounce of prevention: cost-effectiveness of coral reef rehabilitation relative to enforcement Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, Biodiversity and Conservation, Biological Conservation, conservation, conservation biology, conservation letters, journal, publication, science
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, research, scientific publishing

Conservation research rarely equals conservation

21 07 2010

I am currently attending the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in Sanur, Bali (Indonesia). As I did a few weeks ago at the ICCB in Canada, I’m tweeting and blogging my way through.

–

Yesterday I attended a talk by my good friend Trish Shanley (formerly of CIFOR) where she highlighted the disconnect between conservation research and actual conservation. I’ve posted about this before (see Out of touch, impractical and irrelevant & Make your conservation PhD relevant), but this was a sobering reminder of how conservation research can be a self-perpetuating phenomenon and often not touch the people who need it most.

Presenting the highlights of her paper published earlier this year in Biotropica entitled Out of the loop: why research rarely reaches policy makers and the public and what can be done, one comment she made during the talk that really caught my attention was the following (I’m paraphrasing, of course).

Most of the world’s poor living off the land are unconcerned about biodiversity per se. As conservationists we should not therefore adopt the typical preamble that biodiversity (e.g., forests) represent the “lungs of our planet” – what people (and especially women) need to know is how biodiversity loss affects “food for my children”.

The paper itself was an interview 268 researchers from 29 countries (of which I was one) about their views on the relevance of their work. Not surprisingly (but amazingly that we were so honest), most respondents stated that their principal target was other scientists, with policy makers and other marginalised groups/local people holding a distant second place. Corporate targets were also pretty rare – I guess we feel as a group that that’s generallly a lost cause.

Neither a surprise was that we generally view peer-reviewed scientific publications as the main vehicle for the dissemination of our results. What was a bit of a surprise though is that we fully admit papers aren’t the best way to trickle down the information (again, more of that brutal honesty); apparently we mainly believe ‘stakeholder meetings’

are more effective (I have my doubts).

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 30 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, policy makers, relevance
Categories : bushmeat, conference, conservation, conservation biology, ecological literacy, ecosystem services, environmental policy, harvest, implementation, management, science communication, scientific publishing

ISI 2009 Impact Factors now out

18 06 2010

Last year I reported the 2008 ISI Impact Factors for some prominent conservation journals and a few other journals occasionally publishing conservation-related material. ISI just released the 2009 Impact Factors, so I’ll do the same again this year, and add some general ecology journals as well. For all you Australians, I also recently reported the ERA Journal Rankings.

So here are the 2009 Impact Factors for the journals listed on this site’s Journals page and their 2008 values for comparison: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 36 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, impact factor, ISI, journals, scientific publishing, Web of Science
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing

June 2010 Issue of Conservation Letters

9 06 2010

The third issue of Conservation Letters Volume 3 is now out. A good line-up of papers, indeed. Note that we’ve gone up to 9 papers in this issue, so keep the good submissions coming. Conservation Letters will most likely be listed on ISI Web of Science this year, and receive its first Impact Factor in 2011.

Thanks for the support.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, conservation letters, journal, science
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, scientific publishing

Most accessed Conservation Letters articles

3 06 2010

Not a big post, but I thought Conservation Bytes readers would appreciate knowing the most accessed papers in the journal Conservation Letters in 2008 and 2009:

2009

Critical need for new definitions of “forest” and “forest degradation” in global climate change agreements Nophea Sasaki & Francis E. Putz
Global priority areas for incorporating land–sea connections in marine conservation Benjamin S. Halpern, Colin M. Ebert, Carrie V. Kappel, Elizabeth M.P. Madin, Fiorenza Micheli, Matthew Perry, Kimberly A. Selkoe & Shaun Walbridge
Hitting the target and missing the point: target-based conservation planning in context Josie Carwardine, Carissa J. Klein, Kerrie A. Wilson, Robert L. Pressey & Hugh P. Possingham
Mapping cumulative human impacts to California Current marine ecosystems Benjamin S. Halpern, Carrie V. Kappel, Kimberly A. Selkoe, Fiorenza Micheli, Colin M. Ebert, Caitlin Kontgis, Caitlin M. Crain, Rebecca G. Martone, Christine Sheare & Sarah J. Teck
Ecosystem services and conservation strategy: beware the silver bullet Bhaskar Vira & William M. Adams

2008

Is oil palm agriculture really destroying tropical biodiversity? Lian Pin Koh & David S. Wilcove
Native wildlife on rangelands to minimize methane and produce lower-emission meat: kangaroos versus livestock George R. Wilson & Melanie J. Edwards
Conservation action in a changing climate T.R. McClanahan, J.E. Cinner, J. Maina, N.A.J. Graham, T.M. Daw, S.M. Stead, A. Wamukota, K. Brown, M. Ateweberhan, V. Venus & N.V.C. Polunin
Quiet, Nonconsumptive Recreation Reduces Protected Area Effectiveness Sarah E. Reed & Adina M. Merenlender
Calibrating conservation: new tools for measuring success Valerie Kapos, Andrew Balmford, Rosalind Aveling, Philip Bubb, Peter Carey, Abigail Entwistle, John Hopkins, Teresa Mulliken, Roger Safford, Alison Stattersfield, Matt Walpole & Andrea Manica

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, conservation letters, journals, science
Categories : conservation, scientific publishing

Nothing’s changed – scientific peer review

7 12 2009

Couldn’t resist posting this – a gem for anyone who has ever had their paper go through the peer-review crunch.

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: peer review, publication, science
Categories : science, scientific publishing

New Impact Factors for conservation journals

23 06 2009

For those of you who follow the ISI Impact Factors for journals (the ratio of the number of total citations i+3 for the papers published in years i and i+1 divided by the total number of citable papers published in years i and i+1), you might know that the 2008 IFs have just been published. Now, whether you put stock or not in these is somewhat irrelevant – enough people do to make it relevant to who publishes what where, and who cites or does not cite scientific papers. It’s also in our scientific culture – pretty much everyone in a field will have a rough idea of the range of IFs their specific discipline’s journals span, and so it acts as a kind of target for varying qualities of science. Far from perfect, but it’s what we have to deal with.

So, I thought I’d publish the 2008 Impact Factors for the journals listed on this site’s Journals page and compare them to the 2007 values:

Animal Conservation: 2.587 (2008) versus 2.495 (2007)
Biodiversity and Conservation: 1.473 (2008) versus 1.421 (2007)
Biological Conservation: 3.566 (2008) versus 3.296 (2007)
Conservation Biology: 4.705 (2008) versus 3.934 (2007)
Conservation Evidence: no Impact Factor yet
Conservation Letters: not yet old enough to obtain an impact factor, but one should be ascribed within the next year or so
Conservation Genetics: 2.408 (2008) versus 1.733 (2007)
Diversity and Distributions: 3.466 (2008) versus 2.965 (2007)
Environmental Conservation: 1.875 (2008) versus 1.143 (2007)
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: 5.065 (2008) versus 4.269 (2007)
Global Change Biology: 5.876 (2008) versus 4.786 (2007)
Journal for Nature Conservation: 0.940 (2008) versus 0.837 (2007)
Oryx: 1.381 (2008) versus 1.381 (2009)

and for some more general journals that occasionally publish conservation papers:

Nature: 31.434 (2008) versus 28.571 (2007)
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA: 9.380 (2008) versus 9.598 (2007)
Science: 28.103 (2008) versus 26.372 (2007)
Trends in Ecology and Evolution: 11.904 (2008) versus 14.797 (2007)

Almost across the board, conservation journals have seen an increase in their Impact Factors. There are many other good conservation papers published in other journals, but this list probably represents the main outlets. I hope we continue to focus more on conservation outcomes rather than scientific kudos per se, although I’m certainly cognisant of the hand that feeds. Good luck with your publishing.

CJA Bradshaw