This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Pamela Ronald writes both poetically and informatively about the experience of writing a grant proposal. “I am fascinated with something no one understands and only a few of us would care to. I am consumed with the desire to think through this mystery, to know it. As Thoreau said, “to gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it and gnaw at it still”. It is exhilarating to be drawn into the deep realm of the undiscovered and it is a challenge to harness the wild power of scientific ideas by writing about them. I want to explain our research results clearly to my colleagues, propose a model and ask them “don’t you see it too?” My intellect is engaged and my heart too, because I love this work.”
Bob O’Hara has been doing some calculations to see how citations vary across some journals. Bob describes the figure thus: “The points all lay along roughly the same line. Cell is lower, i.e. there is less variation than we would expect from the other journals: no doubt this is because it covers a smaller area of biology, so the slower-moving areas are excluded, and hence the mean is higher and the variance is lower. PLoS Biology is in the same area as PNAS (not a bad journal to be compared to). Proc. R. Soc. B is at the bottom: no doubt because it tends to publish more in the slower moving areas of biology.” For details of how the numbers were derived and the calculations performed, see Bob’s Nature Network post.
Marco Boscolo, a science communicator, is collecting educational videos for students who are about 14-18 years old on the topics of cosmology, astronomy, geology, hydrology, oceanography, and all the other Earth sciences. Various resources are provided in the comments to his post at the Visualization and science forum; further suggestions are welcome.
Massimo Pinto reminds readers that 30 September is the deadline for appications for fellowships to ENEA, the Italian Institute for Research in Alternative Energies and the Environment, with many laboratories across the country. And Matt Brown draws attention to an award of up to £2000 to help with public engagement for researchers funded by one of the seven UK Research Councils. The awards are to encourage outreach work during National Science and Engineering Week, from 6 to 15 March 2009.