100 papers that every ecologist should read

14 11 2017

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If you’re a regular reader of CB.com, you’ll be used to my year-end summaries of the influential conservation papers of that calendar year (e.g., 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013), as somewhat subjectively assessed by F1000 Prime experts. You might also recall that I wrote a post with the slightly provocative title Essential papers you’ve probably never read back in 2015 where I talked about papers that I believe at least my own students should read and appreciate by the time they’ve finished the thesis.

But this raised a much broader question — of all the thousands of papers out there that I should have read/be reading, is there a way to limit the scope and identify the really important ones with at least a hint of objectivity? And I’m certainly not referring to the essential methods papers that you have to read and understand in order to implement their recommended analysis into your own work — these are often specific to the paper you happen to be writing at the moment.

The reason this is important is that there is absolutely no way I can keep on top of my scientific reading, and not only because there are now over 1.5 million papers published across the sciences each year. If you have even the slightest interest in working across sub-disciplines or other disciplines, the challenge becomes more insurmountable. Finding the most pertinent and relevant papers to read, especially when introducing students or young researchers to the concepts, is turning into an increasingly nightmarish task. So, how do we sift through the mountain of articles out there?

It was this question that drove the genesis of our paper that came out only today in Nature Ecology and Evolution entitled ‘100 articles every ecologist should read‘. ‘Our’ in this case means me and my very good friend and brilliant colleague, Dr Franck Courchamp of Université Paris-Sud and the CNRS, with whom I spent a 6-month sabbatical back in 2015. Read the rest of this entry »





Lomborg: a detailed citation analysis

24 04 2015

There’s been quite a bit of palaver recently about the invasion of Lomborg’s ‘Consensus’ Centre to the University of Western Australia, including inter alia that there was no competitive process for the award of $4 million of taxpayer money from the Commonwealth Government, that Lomborg is a charlatan with a not-terribly-well-hidden anti-climate change agenda, and that he his not an academic and possesses no credibility, so he should have no right to be given an academic appointment at one of Australia’s leading research universities.

On that last point, there’s been much confusion among non-academics about what it means to have no credible academic track record. In my previous post, I reproduced a letter from the Head of UWA’s School of Animal Biology, Professor Sarah Dunlop where she stated that Lomborg had a laughably low h-index of only 3. The Australian, in all their brilliant capacity to report the unvarnished truth, claimed that a certain Professor Ian Hall of Griffith University had instead determined that Lomborg’s h-index was 21 based on Harzing’s Publish or Perish software tool. As I show below, if Professor Hall did indeed conclude this, it shows he knows next to nothing about citation indices.

What is a ‘h-index’ and why does it matter? Below I provide an explainer as well as some rigorous analysis of Lomborg’s track record.

Read the rest of this entry »





Scientists should blog

27 05 2014
© Bill Porter

© Bill Porter

As ConservationBytes.com is about to tick over 1 million hits since its inception in mid-2008, I thought I’d share why I think more scientists should blog about their work and interests.

As many of you know, I regularly give talks and short courses on the value of social and other media for scientists; in fact, my next planned ‘workshop’ (Make Your Science Matter) on this and related subjects will be held at the Ecological Society of Australia‘s Annual Conference in Alice Springs later this year.

I’ve written before about the importance of having a vibrant, attractive and up-to-date online profile (along with plenty of other tips), but I don’t think I’ve ever put down my thoughts on blogging in particular. So here goes.

  1. The main reasons scientists should consider blogging is the hard, cold fact that not nearly enough people read scientific papers. Most scientists are lucky if a few of their papers ever top 100 citations, and I’d wager that most are read by only a handful of specialists (there are exceptions, of course, but these are rare). If you’re a scientist, I don’t have to tell you the disappointment of realising that the blood, sweat and tears shed over each and every paper is largely for nought considering just how few people will ever read our hard-won results. It’s simply too depressing to contemplate, especially considering that the sum of human knowledge is so vast and expanding that this trend will only ever get worse. For those reasons alone, blogging about your own work widens the readership by orders of magnitude. More people read my blog every day than will probably ever read the majority of my papers. Read the rest of this entry »