Mine is larger than yours

Mine is larger than yours

A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this page, which shows the “h indices” of what the author of the page refers to the “best Spanish scientists”. The page is a bit difficult to navigate if you don’t know Spanish, but it doesn’t matter; I’m sure that if you have the time and inclination, you will find a similar page in your language and for the nationality of your choice.  Read more

No such thing as a free yogurt

You might have noted that the previous entry on this blog was written by Coco Ballantyne, who recently joined the journal as our News intern. I’m confident she will blog about far less frivolous things than the one I’m going to write about today, so please join me in giving her a warm welcome.  Read more

The jury’s (way) out

The jury's (way) out

When it’s not a trip, my day job gets in the way of my posting something to Spoonful. This week we closed the June issue of Nature Medicine, and right now I’m at the airport, about to start another ‘tour’. So, while I wait for the PA system to herd us to the plane, I thought I would blog about my day as a juror.  Read more

Barking at the wrong tree

Barking at the wrong tree

Time to return to the issue I brought up the other day regarding the open-access debate. Some people think that publishing firms rip people off by taking scientific information from the community and selling it back to the very providers of this information. This ignores, of course, that some journals such as the Nature titles, Science and the Cell Press stable add value to the content they publish by filtering scientific information in such a way that their imprimatur is (in most cases) guarantee of quality. Ironically, as these journals have professional editors, who are the public face of the titles, they tend to receive most of the negative feedback regarding our business model.  Read more