Nature's Journal Club
As devotees of Nature's print edition know, one of its treasures is the Research HIghlights spread at the beginning of every issue, put together with great care and flair by my colleague Jenny Hogan. Most of the spread consists of little comptes rendus of papers elsewhere about which we find ourselves enthused, but there's also a little micro-column at the end called Journal Club. In this column Jenny invites a scientist of note to recommend a paper from the recent literature and explain why she or he is enthused about it.
A while back it struck us that these journal club pieces would be enhanced if they were easily discussable -- discussion being the point of a journal club, really. So we decided to load them up on a blog, one entry per post, and let them find their interactive audience. Voila. So far we have all 2007's offerings posted, and we'll be filling up the archives with 2006's entries over the next few weeks, as well of course as adding a brand new entry every Wednesday evening.
For climate relevant stuff, of which there's a nice amount, try the Earth and Environment category. It boasts Peter Liss on the links between phytopankton and clouds, Andrew Watson on the circulation of the southern ocean and its importance in ice ages, and Eric Wolff on phase-locking and Milankovitch cycles. And there's plenty more for the broad of interest -- try Axel Kleidon on the emergent properties of life and climate, David Wilkinson on what it means to be putrid or Daniel Pauly on pirates, bio-oceanography and short collective memories.
Go -- enrich their comment threads with your insight and speculation.
[Update 31/v/07: The journal club blog was asking visitors for passwords over the weekend. We've made it stop doing that now. Oliver.]
Comments
I got an eTOC fron Nature China today and thought it worth a mention that they also cover climate-relevant Research Highlights from time to time. The highlight at http://www.nature.com/nchina/2007/070530/full/nchina.2007.92.html, focuses on a paper by Wang et al in Geomorphology on the reversal of desertification in northern China over the past twenty years resulting from climatic change.
Posted by: Olive Heffernan | May 30, 2007 01:52 PM