Monthly Archives: February 2012

A rearward look at rewards: celebrations and celebrities

Last autumn I had the pleasure of attending the awards ceremonies for two science writing prizes. They are similar competitions but have individual characteristics and constraints: the Max Perutz prize is sponsored by the MRC, which is a taxpayer-funded organisation … Continue reading

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments

“Facebook for scientists”

Soon after Nature Network launched in 2007 it was being touted as the “Facebook for scientists”. Other sites that had been around longer, such as FriendFeed and LabSpaces, occasionally got that moniker too (and indeed Facebook bought out FriendFeed later on).  … Continue reading

Posted in Research tools, Social networking | 19 Comments

Answering searching questions

For twenty years we have had some sort of desktop access to the scientific literature. At first we only had abstracts of articles, and accessed them through fairly clunky interfaces (anyone remember BIDS?). The introduction of PubMed in 1997 improved … Continue reading

Posted in Searching | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Library Day in the Life – weekly round up

Last year I took part in Library Day in the Life (#libday7). For one week I wrote a daily post on Google+ about what I had done during the day, and an end-of-week round-up. I enjoyed the experience and the … Continue reading

Posted in Libraries and librarians | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Science policy – my favourite sites

In a comment on a recent post, Jamie Christie asked me to list my top ten sites on research policy.  I thought this would be a difficult task; the best sites will vary depending on your particular interests, and some … Continue reading

Posted in Research management | 3 Comments