If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools: Rudyard Kipling … Read more
As you may or may not know Nature Protocols has a Discussion Forum where anyone having problems with their experiments can ask questions and hopefully receive helpful advice from other researchers with some experience in whatever is causing the problems. For the last several years this has been hosted on Nature Network but as of, well right about now, we are shifting its platform to a Google Group. Read more
It is that time of year again! A bit like Christmas, now is the time when journal editors wait expectantly to open their presents; or in this case present singular. I’m talking about the annual release of Impact Factors from ISI. I’m not going to go through all the reasons why Impact Factors may not be the best way to judge scientific research. Katharine made some comments about that last year and I haven’t changed my opinion much since I railed against their tyranny at another journal. But Impact Factors and the other citation metrics probably say something about a journal so I thought I’d give you the numbers for Nature Protocols and say what I’m taking from them. Read more
When we first launched “Nature Protocols “:https://www.nature.com/nprot I was keen to get our protocols indexed by all the big players. Whilst there was going to be a marketing campaign with ads in Nature and banner ads all over nature.com I knew we’d only get real users when people did their literature search and one of our protocols came top of the list. We wanted to be something researchers needed and found useful. However, alongside getting listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge came the news we’d also be eligible for an Impact Factor. It was clearly something scientists cared about. A lot of our early correspondence was about what our Impact Factor was. Read more
Five years ago today we launched Nature Protocols. It was the culmination of 6 months of hard work for the editorial team. Dot Clyde and myself had both started work at NPG at the start of January with a long list of things to sort out. First we had to decide on our scope, answering questions such as do physicists use protocols? Next we had to decide on a format. Although we had a rough guide from our colleagues on Nature Methods who had published some protocols, we had much more freedom. No page budgets and an online format. Dot had just left the lab, as had the rest of the editorial team we recruited (Bronwen, Alex, Andy, Baldo and Hannah), so there was much discussion of what scientists REALLY wanted to know about. Read more
Since Nature Protocols launched we’ve been having a shall-we-shan’t-we discussion about the relative merits of article series. On one hand they seem such a great idea – bringing together lots of protocols in a specific area to make life easier for researchers in that area. On the other hand we worry they’ll alienate researchers working on other things – why do the mass spectrometrists get special treatment and not us? And how do you decide what to include on such a page – anything vaguely connected or just the hard core of a particular topic? Then finally, as an Editor I just find myself wondering why I am making more work for myself… … Read more
It is with some excitement and nervousness that I write the first test post on this new blog. We decided that it might be fun and useful for us Nature Protocols editors to have a place to write news about our content, and other stuff that might be relevant to Nature Protocols readers, and of course stuff that we as editors of Nature Protocols think is fun. Read more
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Introducing a third article type – the Protocol Extension
Membrane protein protocols
Label-free proteomics – the protease matters