Author Archives: Frank Norman

About Frank Norman

I am a retired librarian. I spent 40 years working in biomedical research libraries.

Candles and rings

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Frank Norman

Today, 2 February, is Candlemas day, halfway between the shortest day and the spring equinox. It is officially the end of the Christmas season, though I suspect most people would be surprised to learn this. I only know it because … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Ludwig Guttmann

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Frank Norman

This is mainly a plug for my first foray onto Occam’s Corner, plus a place to list some of the sources of information that I used, and to tell the story of the chase for a missing document. I feel quite … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogology, History | 2 Comments

Solo Hackday

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Frank Norman

Once upon a time I might have described myself as a techie. My career was founded on my willingness to install hgopher and Trumpet Winsock and fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys. This gave people access to the wonders of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Research tools, Scientific literature | 4 Comments

Customer relations

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Frank Norman

Journal publishers are more interested in librarians than they ever used to be. The move to e-journals and big deals has changed the balance between individual and institutional  subscriptions, making libraries more important to publishers than, say, fifteen years ago. … Continue reading →

Posted in Journal publishing, Libraries and librarians | Comments Off on Customer relations

Library Camp UK 2012

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Frank Norman

The creative energy unleashed by an unconference is a wonderful thing. I attended LibCamp2012 recently and was surprised that a disparate bunch of people can self-assemble such a varied and interesting programme, all in one day. I went to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Libraries and librarians | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The joys of a Wikipedia edit-a-thon

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Frank Norman

Last week the Royal Society held a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to try and help redress the gender imbalance in Wikipedia’s coverage of biographies of scientists. Twenty volunteers gathered in the library of the Royal Society for a few hours to learn … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Writing | Tagged | 4 Comments

Authorship

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Frank Norman

From time to time I have to go into our store to hunt through old (pre-war) reprints of medical research articles and I am always struck by the prevalence of single authorship in articles of that period. Single authorship in … Continue reading →

Posted in Authorship | 7 Comments

In defence of reviews

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Frank Norman

Doug Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, published an enormous review article in 2009 on iron chelation and disease. The review had 2,469 references. (D. B. Kell BMC Med. Genom. 2, 2; 2009). I’m not sure what the record for a single article is, … Continue reading →

Posted in Journal publishing | Tagged | 4 Comments

Not quite a book prize

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Frank Norman

It is the season for scientific prizes – this month already we have had the K. J. Zülch Prize, the Perkin medal, the Keio medical science prize, the Balzan prizes, the Golden Goose awards and the Lasker prizes. Science writing … Continue reading →

Posted in Books | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Another way to measure your research impact

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Frank Norman

The h-index attempts to reduce a researcher’s output to a single number: your h-index is the number of papers you’ve published, N, that have been cited at least N times. It seems like a broader measure than pure citation counts but is … Continue reading →

Posted in Bibliometrics etc | 4 Comments