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.
How optimally to scan the new literature for pertinent information is discussed at Katherine Haxton’s Nature Network blog – whether scanning the contents listings from journal emails, or automatic RSS keyword searches. There are perspectives and suggestions in the discussion following the post.
It’s all a mystery, writes Linda Lin at her Nature Network blog, how reading the literature to answer a question raises “several more questions all leading in different directions”. What follows is a refreshing contrast to “scientifically proven” approaches to the communication of scientific research to the general public, as Frank Norman points out in a comment to Linda’s post.
Deanne Taylor makes a welcome return to Nature Network with news of her leap into “an exotic metaworld of informatics”. What is the best word for it? Medbioinformatics? Help to resolve the question at Deanne’s Nature Network blog.
The effect of impact factors on our reading and writing about science is a question raised by William Burns in the Good Paper Journal Club forum in the light of the decision by the European Science Foundation to develop impact-factor measurements of the quality of journals covering the history and philosophy of science. Many of the arguments for and (mainly) against impact-factor metrics have been discussed and archived at the Citation in Science forum, and a pertinent question is how many of these will translate into journals in these other fields. Martin Fenner adds a further question: “Does the (over)use of impact factors change the readability of papers? Do authors cut a research project into smaller pieces that may increase your science metrics but make the project more difficult to understand? In what other ways could the reliance on impact factors change the readability for the worse (or the better)?”
Reported elsewhere on nature.com blogs and even in the journal Nature itself, but I think not logged by this column, Shirley Wu and Russ Altman have won the science blogging challenge issued at the Science Blogging conference in London last August. Congratulations to both winners: read all about it in this post by Nature Network’s Editor, Corie Lok.
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Nature.com’s science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network’s many blogs and forums