During his first year as a graduate student, Nuruddeen Lewis at his Lab Daze blog was advised by a mentor to read at least one journal article every day. Reading a paper every day is tough, but keeping up to date with recent publications is an essential part of scientific research, writes Nuruddeen. Is the key to read as much as you can? Is there an optimal way to read the scientific literature? Nuruddeen would be interested to know your views, at Lab Daze blog.

The rENNISance woman, Cath Ennis, proposes that online networking tools such as Nature Network could be used for forge links with biologists "whose proteins of interest interact with our own". She cites a case of two people who met, discovered that one worked on an enzyme and the other on its substrate. They are now married.

Appealing to the emotion is a fundamental aspect of successful writing, says Brian Clegg at his blog PopSci. What he does not like, however, is the use of a term such as "pornography" as a substitute for this emotion. "When someone refers to a property show or a book on the impact of climate change as pornography, what they really are doing is demonstrating their own emotional insecurity, and diluting and corrupting the English language to boot", he writes. Thirty comments (at time of writing) follow, as the scientists on Nature Network respond to the concept.

Research integrity is a hotly debated topic this week, as the discussion of last week's Nature Commentary and Editorial continue at the News and Opinion forum. But "Photoshopped gels are nothing", writes Euan Adie , in a fascinating historical post about Sir John Herschel and a newspaper's stunt with bipedal beavers.

Martin Fenner continues his quest for his "paper-writing dream machine" by turning to reference management software and providing a useful brief review of what is available. "Not quite there yet", is the verdict of the post and the commenters.

Bob O'Hara describes how he is outdone by misprints. He investigates a classic paper in his field, and finds that the number of its mis-citations result in an h-index of 12, a level that the inventor of the metric, Hirsch, suggested might be a typical value for advancement to tenure.

The world's first internet balloon race is taking place, reported by Scott Keir at Mixed Miscellanies blog. In the competition, websites can be recommended by users and balloons representing subject areas race across a world map (disclaimer: I may have misunderstood the details). Scott points out that science, in the shape of Charles Darwin, is not doing very well, so nominations of science websites are required to assist. Charles Darwin himself, of course, is blogging at Nature Network, commenting on science as it is reported in the popular "prints". This week he is none too impressed at the latest genome sequencing project -- chocolate.

Finally, for those interested in how journal editors spend their days, here is an account by Henry Gee, A day in the life of a senior editor. It is impossible to summarise this eclectic account, but it is engrossing, as well as very funny, so do read it.

Previous Nature Network columns.

As stated in the retraction text, all nine of the paper's authors have agreed that the paper must be retracted. However, Tae Kook Kim, the principal investigator and corresponding author, did not agree to the retraction statement signed by the other authors and asserts that any scientific irregularities are limited to a subset of the paper's experiments. Although circumstances did not allow complete agreement among the paper's authors and the text does not list all of the scientific concerns that were raised in the initial inquiries, the published retraction statement and 'Editor's note' provide abundant explanation for why the paper must be removed from the scientific literature. We commend CGK scientists for raising the initial concerns with the Science and Nature Chemical Biology papers and the KAIST investigating committees for their efforts to date. It is reassuring that Korean institutions are taking a hard line on scientific misconduct. However, we do question the timing and content of the KAIST press release of February 29, 2008, which was made public without advance notice to the journal. It is not unusual for an institute to announce that an investigation is underway and to make another announcement at its conclusion. Ideally, though, investigating committees contact journals well in advance of making public statements, thereby ensuring that the information communicated is accurate at all stages. The potential negative impacts of scientific misconduct allegations on the accused and on the public perception of science cannot be underestimated. Statements to the press are useful, but first priorities should always be determining the facts quickly, giving due process to investigators under suspicion and correcting the literature.........As the KAIST committee completes its deliberations, we urge them to provide a full accounting of the case and make their findings widely available in English. This example would serve as a model for future investigations committed to maintaining the integrity of science and the scientific literature.

Many researchers would like to believe that scientific misconduct is very rare. But news reported in this issue (see page 969), and the survey results reported by Sandra Titus and her colleagues in the Commentary on page 980, challenge that comfortable assumption. Titus's team found that almost 9% of the respondents in their survey, mainly biomedical scientists, had witnessed some form of scientific misconduct in the past three years, and that 37% of those incidents went unreported.
The results suggest a research climate in which scientific misconduct, although uncommon, is certainly not an anomaly. Titus et al. outline a number of measures to address this situation, including better protection for whistleblowers, and promotion of a 'zero tolerance' culture in which scientists have just as much responsibility to report others' misconduct as they have for their own behaviour.

The Science Blogging 2008 conference, to be held in London on 30 August, is taking shape, not least in the form of this logo, created by Euan Adie. Further updates about the meeting can be seen in the forum; where you can sign up for poster sessions or talks, and book for a science walking tour of London with Nature Network London Editor Matt Brown on Friday 29 August.

Should laptops be banned from conferences during presentations, asks Andrew Hudson-Smith of Urban Nature blog? When presenting his work, he finds it disheartening to look up "only to view a sea of laptops and people typing", using their laptops to check email, surf the web or write blog posts rather than listen to the presentation.

As part of her job, scientist and rENNISance woman Cath Ennis is receiving more and more requests from colleagues to provide lay summaries of research projects for grant submissions and websites. What bothers her is the trend towards making nouns and adjectives into verbs, for example: “please can you lay this language for me”, and “if you could just laymanise this technical abstract”. She asks Network users to suggest a better term than "lay".

The latest paper for discussion in the Good Paper Journal Club is up: Dynamics of fat cell turnover in humans. Martin Fenner's view: "What I like about this paper? The authors try to address an important problem (obesity) by asking a number of simple questions. Instead of using the traditional IMRAD format (introduction, methods, results and discussion), the different structure of the paper allows the reader to easily follow the experiments. A lot of the experimental details are put into the supplementary information and don’t distract from the key research findings."

Karesh Narasimhan, in the structural biology group, suggests that the raw data underlying experiments reported in peer-reviewed work is published online by the authors, at their institution's or laboratory's website, allowing others to "reconstruct the pieces of experiments done by a lab – the biggest beneficiaries would be graduate students – who can learn many subtler aspects of data processing and manipulation that is of publication quality."

Previous Nature Network columns.

At Nature Publishing Group, which produces some of the world's leading science journals, image guidelines were developed in 2006, and last year the company's research journals began checking two randomly selected papers in each issue for image tampering, says Linda J. Miller, U.S. executive editor of Nature and the Nature Publishing Group's research journals. So far no article has been rejected as a result of the checking, she says. Ms. Miller and other editors say that in most cases of image tampering, scientists intend to beautify their figures rather than lie about their findings. In one case, an author notified the journal that a scientist working in his lab had gone too far in trying to make figures look clean. The journal determined that the conclusions were sound, but "they wound up having to print a huge correction, and this was quite embarrassing for the authors," she says. Ms. Miller wrote an editorial for Nature stressing that scientists should present their images without alterations, rather than thinking polished images will help them get published. Many images are of gels, which are ways to detect proteins or other molecules in a sample, and often they are blurry. No matter, says Ms. Miller. "We like dirt—not all gels run perfectly," she says. "Beautification is not necessary. If your data is solid, it shines through."

Nature journals' image guidelines can be found here. Also on this page are links to free-access editorials in the Nature journals about our policies and why we have them, together with an invitation to authors and other scientists to comment online.

Presenting your research to an auditorium of peers can be a daunting prospect, particularly for those at the start of their careers. But with a little thought and preparation, it needn't be.
We editors go to a lot of meetings, and have listened to a lot of talks. To hear a good talk can give you a reason for being. To hear a bad talk can make you wish you'd never left your hotel room. But even if your results won't earn you a trip to Stockholm (yet), there is no reason they shouldn't be the seeds for a lively discussion. And lively discussion is what it's all about. We've put together a collection of do's and don'ts to delivering a talk that will move your audience, not put them to sleep.
Once you've cut, tightened and improved the content, deliver it again, listen to it again, and fix any remaining weaknesses, again. Then again. And again. Until you are so familiar with its structure and content that you could give it in your sleep. Familiarity fosters confidence, and a confident talk is a compelling talk.
As it is with writing papers, so it is with giving conference talks — if your research is worth being presented to your colleagues, it's worth being presented to them well.

Read the rest of the Editorial at Nature Physics.