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 when I was an undergraduate at Bristol I sang in a church choir and we sang on most religious feast days. I recall that we took part in a Candlemas service and processed around the church with candles. The day after Candlemas is the feast of St Blaise, when there is a tradition of blessing throats. At the end of our Candlemas service all the choir went up to receive St Blaise’sblessing of throats. It all sounds very odd, but I’ve been singing happily ever since so don’t knock it! (I think of it like drinking a toast, essentially saying “Well done, chaps”). Anyway, the date of Candlemas stuck in my mind ever since. This year I have an additional reason to remember the date, but more of that later.

I studied chemistry at Bristol. I had enjoyed the subject at school, seeing how substances combined and why. We talk colloquially about “chemistry” between people, referring to how well two people combine.

The School of Chemistry at Bristol back then had a good reputation for organometallic chemistry. This seemed a fascinating area – it was not quite organic chemistry and not quite inorganic chemistry, but a mixture of both, a middle ground. I seem to be drawn to the land in the middle. Organometallic chemistry seemed closer to inorganic chemistry, at any rate most of the inorganic lecturers were devoted to organometallic research. One of the authors of the inorganic chemistry textbook we used (Cotton and Wilkinson) was Geoffrey Wilkinson, who had received a Nobel prize not long before for his work on organometallic sandwich compounds. I recall learning about nickel carbonyls, and ferrocene.

Ferrocene is an extraordinary substance, a sandwich of two organic ring molecules with an iron atom in the middle of the sandwich. The standard representation of its structure is quite striking. We also heard about various more exotic metals. Our professor of inorganic chemistry was another prominent organometallic chemist, Gordon Stone. I remember him telling us about his favourite metal, ruthenium (Ru), and there was also rhodium (Rh) and rhenium (Re) .. And palladium (Pd). These metals are all useful as catalysts in the petrochemicals industry, so this field was important industrially as well as being fascinating.

I haven’t given it much thought since leaving chemistry behind in favour of librarianship, but I found myself recalling some of this a few months ago as I went on a shopping trip to buy some palladium. Well, I didn’t plan to buy palladium especially, but that’s how it turned out. If I tell you that we were shopping in London’s Hatton Garden then you can probably guess why. We bought two rings, not the molecular kind, but rings to go on fingers. To go on our ring fingers. They are made of palladium and I think they look quite attractive, and are a bit cheaper than gold or platinum. And it seemed appropriate for an ex-chemist.They are catalysing a new combination.

Since then the rings have been secreted away in a cupboard. We got busy with making further plans. We had to register our intention to have a Civil Partnership, book the registrars and a room in the local Civic Centre, book the local pub/Thai restaurant, send out invitations, buy new outfits for the day, order a cake, order some flowers, decide on music, write a short speech, booked a holiday, and a dozen or two other little jobs.

Today, 2 Feb, all the planning is at an end. The rings are coming out into the open and by lunchtime we will be Civil Partners. Official! And I will be walking round with a lump of a really powerful catalyst on my finger.

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 excited about getting something published on OC, on the Guardian website.  Several of my fellow Occams Typewriter bloggers are old hands at it by now, but it has taken me a while to summon up the courage. I am very grateful to Jenny for her editorial advice – she suggested some ways to liven it up a little and give it a stronger beginning and end.

For my debut I have written something about Ludwig Guttmann. I should say at this point – do not read further until you have read the Occam’s Corner piece! What follows here is additional to that, not a repeat of it.

OK, so you’re back here now having read the main piece? Let’s continue.

Guttmann was the man who founded the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville hospital, and later helped give birth to the Paralympic Games. I became interested in him this year, with all the publicity about the Paralympics, and started reading up about him. Two books were particularly valuable:

John Silver’s book was interesting as he had worked with Guttmann at Stoke Mandeville, so had direct insights into the man. John Silver has published a number of other interesting historical articles in the area too.

Another valuable source was Ludwig Guttmann’s own account of the history of the Stoke Mandeville centre.  Though just ten pages, it has some detail I didn’t find elsewhere. The Royal Society Biographical Memoir for Guttmann was another mine of useful facts. Those Royal Society memoirs are such a great resource!

If you want to read absolutely everything about the man and his work you will need quite a bit of time. A bibliography, compiled by Jeremy Tynedal, Frank Stahnisch and Gregor Wolbring, and called Life and Work of Sir Ludwig Guttmann: A Bibliography, contains 117 items (books and articles). I’m afraid I have not read all, or even most, of those. The bibliography was published in Jan 2012 so will not include anything published this year, which I suspect is quite a lot given the Paralympics connection. I found that once I started putting my blogpost together more and more questions popped into my head and my reading list got longer and longer. I looked at the background to spinal injuries, the background to the various people mentioned along the way, and some of Guttmann’s publications on the subject. I really needed to find a focus.

What first piqued my interest in Guttmann was discovering that he had compiled a review for the MRC, and I set about looking for it.  We have a wonderfully rich collection of reprints covering that period, all lovingly catalogued, and I hoped it might be in there. Confusingly I found some reprints by “L Guttmann” and some by “E Gutmann”, and some by the two of them jointly. In the dim light of our store I didn’t spot the slightly different spelling at first and I thought maybe he used two different first names. It transpired that there was an Ernest Gutmann and a Ludwig Guttmann, and they had both worked in Oxford at about the same time. But they were quite unrelated. Figuring all that out took me a little while.

Anyway, it proved impossible to track down the review, despite my best efforts and help from the MRC archivist and the library of the Royal College of Surgeons. This was really frustrating but John Silver’s book mentions that he worked through a number of archives and he too failed to find this report. The MRC archives indicate that there was certainly an intention to publish it and there is some correspondence during 1943 from Guttmann apologising repeatedly for not having submitted the review for publication. I wonder if there is a copy lurking somewhere in another archive.

Once I started writing the piece for Occam’s Corner I realised that this one missing document didn’t really affect the main story I wanted to tell. And if you have been very naughty and read this far without following the instruction above, then NOW is the time to hop over to Occam’s Corner!

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 internet back in 1992.

But then things got complicated and I realised I wasn’t a real techie. Sure I could edit raw html using notepad and I could do basic CSS, but I couldn’t write a Perl script to save my life. So I lost my techie badge and moved onto negotiating journal licences, managing staff and budgets, and other simple tasks like that. Part of me still yearns to be one of those ‘can do’ techies though.

Thus I could not resist the invitation to go along to the SoLo Hackday (I still think of the event as Science Online London, or SoLo, but it is properly called SpotOn now). The advance publicity said they didn’t just want coders but a mix of people so I thought I’d give it a whirl. There were about a dozen people at the Hackday. Each of us expounded our ideas for projects that we would like to work on and we divided into three groups. I was paired with Mark Woodbridge, a bioinformatician from Imperial College.

I have felt for some years that current awareness (finding out new stuff that you want to read) is a mess. It should be possible to have a sophisticated service that ‘knows’ your interests and brings things of interest to you, allowing you to save them or bat them away, rather like Twitter does. We talked about this for a bit and realised that we would probably need six months and an enormous development team to produce something worthwhile, so I scaled back my ambitions a little.

People clearly want to find new stuff that is directly relevant to their research interests, but I think it is important for people also to have a view of what is happening out in the suburbs of their subject. Some might say this is a luxury and no-one has time to read outside a narrow core, but I still maintain that breadth is necessary, especially in an Institute founded on an multidisciplinary approach. I want to find ways to produce a regularly updated reading list of potentially interesting papers. A very simple way is to use other people’s judgements. Certain journals – e.g. the Nature-branded titles – have a “News and Views” section in each issue with commentaries by experts on a small selection of papers from that issue. An editor has selected some papers as being of particular interest, and commissioned knowledgeable experts to write about them.

I thought it would be good to aggregate all those news and views type pieces into an RSS feed.

Step forward Research Views. We nearly stumbled at the first hurdle as we needed to give our project a name. “Research Views” is not a perfect name but we didn’t want to waste time agonising over it. Hackdays are all about compromise – getting something done in a short space of time.

In principle we could achieve what we wanted by filtering and merging the journals’ RSS feeds, but they are not all sufficiently rich in detail (i.e. they do not all indicate which articles are in the News and Views section). It might also be possible via PubMed, since they have an article type ‘Comment’ which includes these articles. But there is a delay of a few days to weeks getting into PubMed, and longer still before articles are all fully tagged. Further, the ‘Comment’ article type seems to include other kinds of comments, not just the “here is an interesting article” kind of comment. So we needed to build an app.

Mark recommended using Google Appspot to host the app since he had used it successfully for other projects. It took a little while getting things aligned between his Linux box and appspot but then we were ready.

First off we looked at Nature Publishing Group as I suspected their data would be good quality. I know they have done a lot of work to bring all their primary branded journals up to the same standard. It turned out that their RSS feeds are pretty good and it was relatively straightforward to extract what we needed. Mark used something called XOM to do this. There were some minor inconsistencies, and a couple of the journals caused problems so we excluded them for the time being. Before too long we had a web page with a list of Nature-branded journal titles each with a tick box. Choosing some journals and pressing “Submit” generated an RSS feed of News and Views articles.

Next we looked at the Cell Press journals. The RSS feeds here were very thin, and did not reveal which were commentary articles. However, the journal issue contents pages had a good deal of structure. Using Jsoup, with a good dose of persistence and trying out, Mark was able to fish out the relevant information. We found that the journals were not all quite consistent, and since we were running out of time by that point we only included four journals from this publisher initially.

We had spent not quite four hours on the task and had an app that could splice together commentary articles across two publishers, using different techniques. Later on, Mark added three journals from AAAS, the publishers of Science. I hope we can sort out a few more Cell Press titles, and add commentaries published in the PLOS journals too. Maybe even eLife.

I learnt something from the exercise. Looking at the XML and spotting the structure is something I can learn to do, but building a set of commands to carry out a task is still a mystery to me. It was (mildly!) exciting to work on something and see it actually take shape and even work as intended! I am very grateful to Mark for sharing his skill and for his persistence.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we present – Research Views.

Once you have made your selection of journals and clicked “Submit” the resultant RSS feed will automatically fetch any updates whenever you open the feed. In some web browsers the RSS feed does not display nicely, so you may need to fiddle around to add it to your RSS reader.

We identified all kinds of improvements that might be made. But I am not even sure whether it is remotely useful or not. Maybe it is easier doing it through PubMed. Maybe publishers will enhance their RSS feeds to show commentaries. Maybe people don’t need to know about these commentaries.

One other thought we had is that being the subject of a commentary is in effect a badge of honour for an article. I don’t think this is reflected anywhere in article level metrics.

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. Publishers are keen now to understand how librarians make spending decisions and what affects the decision-making process.   Many publishers have some kind of library advisory board or group, and invite librarians to junkets  executive briefings  focus groups to brief them and hear their thoughts. Mostly they target high-powered University Librarians but sometimes they make a mistake and invite me instead.

I went to one the other week organised by one of the big publishers, and it was a bit different. It was explicitly targeted at “government libraries”.  They took a fairly broad definition of that term, as being any publicly-funded organisation that was not in education or healthcare. Thus there were some central Government department libraries, some quangos’ libraries, some police and legal libraries, and some research institute libraries represented. We probably all felt initially that we had little in common with the other attendees, but by the end we’d made connections and all felt that the event had been useful and should be repeated.

Part of the success of the day was its interactive nature, encouraged by an expert facilitator. There were two main breakout sessions, where we split into smaller groups and discussed

  1. Our e-content strategy
  2. What we wanted in a business model for e-content

These certainly got us talking, and I hope gave the publisher some insight into what our world is like. Most of the librarians agreed that we didn’t have one, at least not one formally expressed. I found it difficult to understand even the questions that we were set about e-content strategy – they just did not relate to the environment that I work in. It was encouraging to hear that most of the others in the room had a similar experience. As for business models, it was probably unwise to ask us!  We agreed that we wanted as much as possible, as flexibly as possible, for as low a price as possible.

There were a couple of presentations.  One was an attempt at an overview of e-content strategy.  It was marred by too much emphasis on one particular rather large, unrepresentative and (dare I say?) arrogant library.  The speaker did make some good points:

  • Moving from print to electronic resources will entail losing some control over your collection
  • Publishers’ packages are not always helpful as they include unwanted material along with useful material
  • User surveys and feedback can be valuable but don’t represent the full picture
  • Benchmarking against other libraries and broad surveys of the market are of limited value if they don’t reflect local circumstances
  • The knowledge and experience of the librarian are crucial

The last three points in particular I found encouraging, reminding me that there is a place for professional judgement, to say “It is important that we do XYZ”.

The other presentation was about the publisher’s approach to Open Access. I had thought I was well-informed about OA developments, but I learned a few things I hadn’t known before, e.g. they publish a mega-journal that I had never heard of.

I thought it was interesting that Open Access was brought up in the context of e-content strategy. I can see that right now there is a strong link between journal subscriptions and open access, and libraries are managing both.  But if we move forward several years I would expect that link to be weakened.  I think Open Access will be seen as part of an organisation’s research strategy rather than part of its content strategy.

I would have liked it if we had spent more time discussing ebooks. Some other delegates said they saw books and journals all as one continuum of e-content, but I still think of them as rather different kinds of beasts, hunted and devoured differently. I am much less clear about the way forward for books than I am for journals.

So, a good time was had by all (and not just because the event was followed by cocktails in the hotel bar!).  I think it could have been more interesting still if there had been two or three other major publishers there.  Perhaps we should suggest that UKSG organise an event for the “Government libraries” sector, or organise our own event and invite several publishers along.

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 first LibCamp last year. It grew out of something called GovCamp, a local government unconference. The public librarians who had attended GovCamp thought that a library version might work well, so they organised LibCamp2011 in Birmingham. That went very well and inspired several local libcamps (I went to the Brunel libcamp in January). The 2012 event, also in Birmingham, attracted a similar mix of people from public, academic and other libraries – about 200 attendees.

The energy comes from the immediacy, the informality and the level of participation in discussion, cross-fertilised by the broad cross-section of types of libraries represented. The sessions are interactive. Rather than a long lecture followed by a few questions, the sessions I attended comprised a short exposition followed by an extensive round-table discussion, where we shared our experiences. I think the unconference is second cousin to the blog: a home for half-baked ideas (in the nicest possible way) and lively comments.  Talking of baking, LibCamp also has a fully-baked component in the shape of cakes brought along by delegates.

The programme was eclectic, assembled by means of a pitching session at the beginning of the day (and a wiki for idea-sharing in advance of the event). I didn’t hear most of the pitches as one of the organisers thrust a camera into my hands and instructed me to take photos. I didn’t cope very well with the unfamiliar camera and I suspect they all came out poorly composed and blurry. Luckily the battery ran out so I was able to hand the camera back after a few minutes.

This is the post-it note version of the programme:

And this was a readable (but incomplete) version circulated later:

With five parallel sessions at any one time there was a good deal of choice. One session on how to cope with swearing attracted some interest and there was apparently some disagreement in the session on What is a Library for? The five sessions I attended were less dramatic, but thought-provoking nevertheless.

The session on Living libraries, as pioneered by Malmo public library in Sweden, was fascinating. It was led by someone Anna Brynolf, who had lived for some years in Sweden.  The idea of “lending” living people was envisaged as a way to lessen differences between cultures – you  could confront your prejudice about a particular group by “borrowing” and talking to someone from that group for 45 minutes. For instance, you could meet with someone who was an animal rights activist, or a Muslim, or a vegan, and talk to them about their beliefs or experiences. The idea started at a music festival in Denmark but it developed further in Sweden and has since spread elsewhere. One person at the session told us she had worked in a library in Dublin that had a similar project.  Someone tweeting about the session discovered that in the UK it had also been done at the WOMAD festival, and at Anglia Ruskin University. The Human Library website has more background about the idea and mentions projects in various countries around the world:

The Human Library enables groups to break stereotypes by challenging the most common prejudices in a positive and humorous manner. It is a concrete, easily transferable and affordable way of promoting tolerance and understanding.

Another unusual library was described in a session by someone hoping to establish the UK’s first tool library. He explained that there are several of these in the USA and a handful elsewhere. One of the earliest established is in Berkeley, which is where he had come across the concept. Now living in Dudley he decided to set up a tool library there. He has funding and some space and we gave him a few more ideas about how the library might be set up.

My favourite session was on roaming libraries, presented by the remarkable and brilliant Itinerant Poetry Librarian, aka Sara Wingate Gray. I think she was keen to encourage us to discuss roaming libraries more broadly. She mentioned the Mile High Ref Desk, which provides library services to passengers on airline flights, and Radical Reference, which is “dedicated to information activism to foster a more egalitarian society”. However I found her descriptions of her own project much more interesting and was happy just to hear her talk about that.  Sara has taken The Itinerant Poetry Library (TIPL) to more than 20 cities in the USA and Europe. She sets it up in bars or coffee shops, registers readers and then lets them borrow poetry books. If you want to know more about TIPL, there is a nice article about it in Varsity. There is an element of performance to TIPL which gave me food for thought. I have been doing some background reading on science busking which also involves a significant degree of performance, and attention-grabbing. Perhaps we need a new breed of librarian to grab people’s attention and thrust books under their noses.

The most hard-core session I attended was on classification. The session leader set out the dichotomy between the philosophical approach (the right class mark) and the pragmatic approach (the right classmark for my library) to classification. I always assume that most libraries use sensible classification schemes – the major schemes like Library of Congress or Dewey. A quick survey of the room revealed a wide range of schemes in use, from major global schemes, to very old (obsolete) schemes, hybrid schemes, multiple schemes, and weird local schemes. Someone commented that library users did not all understand what classification was for and were pleasantly surprised to find that books on a similar subject were all in the same place on the shelf.  But some academics complained vociferously if ‘their’ books were (as they saw it) classified wrongly. On the plus side, we heard reports that reclassification could be effective, increasing the number of library users who could find books.

The most interesting question raised was whether classification was necessary at all for electronic resources. The answer must surely be “No”, since classification is all about physical books on the shelf. That set me thinking about the benefits of browsing at the shelf, and wondering whether there could be a way to create a life-size electronic shelf search/browse that combined the advantages of the old and new technologies. It would be a giant vertical touch-sensitive screen in the Library that allowed you to search and view full-text content, and mark items that you wanted to read later.

I will draw a modest veil over the session on iPads in libraries that I co-facilitated with Sarah Barker but I think it went down well. There was less sharing of experiences than I had hoped for, perhaps because it is still not that common for libraries to lend iPads.

The session on mental health in libraries was remarkable for the way that people shared their experiences, good and bad, very openly.  Not much of the discussion was specific to libraries, but applied to the workplace more generally. The most useful thing I learned was that an organisation called Mental Health First Aid offers free training in “how to recognise the signs and symptoms of common mental health issues, provide help on a first aid basis and effectively signpost towards support services”. A number of people in the session said the courses were very good.

So, that was my Library Camp UK 2012. I enjoyed the day – it went very quickly.  I would have liked to have gone to more sessions, but I enjoyed those I did attend. It was a shame that the venue’s wifi was not up to scratch but that meant I listened and talked more freely instead of trying to tweet all the time so perhaps it was for the best.  For me the benefit was in hearing a wide range of ideas from well outside my comfort zone, from people I wouldn’t otherwise meet as we are in different parts of the library world.

Note: thanks to Andrew Preater for giving me Anna Brynolf’s namE, as the leader of the living libraries session.

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 how to create Wikipedia articles and then to research and write brief entries for a number of women scientists. Some people also took part online. The organisers had prepared a list of scientists who needed articles to be created, or expanded.

I attended a workshop last year to learn the basics of Wikipedia editing, but I did not follow through, despite my good intentions. The Edit-a-thon was a good prompt to have another go. I was unable to attend the event, so I thought I would participate remotely and have a go at creating a few entries. But, as usual, things got busy at work and I ended up with just over an hour to devote to the task, late on Friday afternoon. I had identified a few women scientists from the Institute who were not in Wikipedia and proposed to work on them. I had previously written something about them for internal consumption, but I quickly realised that was not good enough for Wikipedia – I needed sourced, verifiable statements and that was going to take a bit longer.

In the end I managed to start one short entry, for Janet Niven, and I made an addition to the entry for Rosalind Pitt-Rivers. I am aiming to cover some more of the Institute’s women scientists over the next few months, as I prepare for an internal poster exhibition about them in March 2013 (for International Women’s Day). Another participant in the event helpfully created an article about Rosa Beddington, who was also on my list.

Someone commented on Twitter that the great thing about Wikipedia is that other people help out and improve the articles that you write. I know my effort was very small, and needs a good deal more work. Someone helped by tidying up my references a little.  Also, the Wikipedia system reminded me to insert inline citations properly. The editing system seems more sophisticated than I remembered, and there is a useful tool for adding references now.

I probably should have done some revision before starting.  The organisers recommended reading a background article published two years ago in PLOS Computational Biology, and Wikipedia’s own tutorial. But my time ran out and I wanted to get in and do something, so I took the risk of plunging in and relying on what I remembered from the workshop last year. The article wizard was helpful too, reminding me of the need to establish ‘notability’.

Overall it was a bit of an ordeal – trying to do something well but in a short space of time. I think my next attempt will be better and I am assured that it does get easier as you get used to the ways of Wikipedia.

Nature News has a couple of items about the Edit-a-thon:

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 research articles is a rarity these days, and even review articles may have three or four authors. According to the National Library of Medicine, in 1950 the average number of authors per paper in Medline was 1.5; in 2011 it was 5. Pre-1975 the maximum number of authors on a paper in Medline was 37; by 2011 the maximum number was 3,172.

I think this is partly because research support staff have higher status (and probably more skills) nowadays than they did 60 years ago.  They are more likely to assert their rights when it comes to authorship credit. But it also reflects the fact that research has become more of a team effort, and those teams are getting larger.

What does it mean to be in the author list, or to put it another way, how do you qualify to be listed as an author? This is something I have been pondering as I have taken part in a working group charged with drawing up local guidelines, to try and ensure consistent practice across all labs at the Institute.

My contribution was to review what other guidelines say. The MRC recently published an updated version of its Good research practice: Principles and guidelines.  On authorship, it says:

Authorship should include all individuals who have made a substantial intellectual contribution and all authors are expected to take public responsibility for their contribution to the work. The MRC endorses the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The MRC endorses the ICMJE guidelines on authorship and contributorship; the practice of ‘honorary authorship’ is not acceptable. All contributions to the research must be clearly acknowledged and appropriate permissions sought for the use of the work of others. No person who fulfils the criteria for authorship should be excluded.

As I worked through guidelines from other bodies and from various journals I found that pretty well all of them also refer to the ICMJE guidelines.  These seem to encapsulate all that needs to be said on authorship. This was a relief as it meant I didn’t need to digest 94 different sets of guidelines, just one or two. (Wikipedia lists some authorship guidelines in other disciplines).

The ICMJE first drew up its “Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals” in 1978. Editors representing 19 medical journals drew up the guidelines, largely concerned with the structure and appearance of the articles, and practical issues (e.g. “Mail manuscripts in a heavy paper envelope, enclosing the manuscript and figures in cardboard, if necessary, to prevent bending of photographs during mail handling.”).  These guidelines (called the URM for short) were revised every few years. Their rules on formatting of bibliographies were very useful as we moved into the era of citation software in the 1980s and 1990s. The guidelines are now followed by a large number of journals.

Authorship was barely mentioned in the 1978 guidelines. In their history of the first 25 years of the URM, Edward Huth and Kathleen Case say:

The first and second editions of the URM mentioned authorship only briefly: “Acknowledge only persons who have made substantive contributions to the study.” By the third edition (1988) enough scandals had surfaced to lead the committee to define legitimate authorship in more detail. The key statement was, “Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content”, a criterion based on the view of Richard Hewitt, director of the Section of Publications of Mayo Clinic. This key statement was followed by more-specific criteria. In 1991, a statement was issued to cover
order of authorship.

The essence of the current ICMJE authorship guidelines are straightforward:

  • Authorship credit should be based on
    1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
    2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
    3. Final approval of the version to be published.

    Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

  • All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
  • Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

In practice there is a good deal of subjective judgement involved in assessing who should or should not be listed as an author, so our local working group came up with a series of examples to aid the decision making process, listing the kinds of contributions that would or would not qualify for authorship, or acknowledgement.

These local guidelines have been endorsed by the Institute Director and have been disseminated to all staff. No doubt, just like the ICMJE guidelines, it will be necessary to keep them under review as research changes and author lists become still longer.

One area that we didn’t touch on is the issue that Jenny highlighted recently about the criteria for inclusion of the lab head, and their position as senior author.  I have seen examples of papers where the lab head does not appear in the author list, but on most papers that I see the lab head is listed as an author and is the corresponding author, taking responsibility for the programme of research that they have devised and continue to direct.

Jenny’s post appeared after we had finalised our guidelines, but we may consider that issue in a later revision, if it turns out that things are not as cosy here as I naively assume.

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, but that is certainly a large number of references to have read and digested for a review.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find Doug Kell speaking up in favour of review articles in a brief letter in this week’s Nature. He highlights a comment in a recent news piece in Nature which was critical of a new bibliometric tool because it included review articles:

Review articles, which may not add much to the research, count the same as original research papers, which contribute a great deal.

Well, you can understand what they are saying.  A typical review article may be a useful round-up, but it does not usually report new knowledge. Kell’s mega-review is in a different league, and it is not surprising that he should defend the role of the review article in research. He points out that reviews turn facts into understanding:

A research paper usually provides just one or two new facts, whereas reviews synthesize our understanding more broadly and make it more concrete… some reviews summarize thousands of papers.

Open Access policies (at least, those of MRC and Wellcome) also seem to regard review articles as less valuable than original research articles.  While MRC-funded and Wellcome-funded authors must deposit all primary research articles into PubMedCentral within six months of publication, they are not obliged to do the same for review articles. I think such a requirement might cause some problems as often reviews are commissioned specifically. But I wonder whether we will at some point want to extend the OA umbrella to review articles?

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 honours are underway too – the Max Perutz essay prize was awarded this week, with the Wellcome science writing prize due next week and the Wellcome science book prize next month.

I was interested to see that one of this year’s Lasker prizewinners was Tom Maniatis, and that the citation explicitly mentions his hugely influential book Molecular Cloning.

Maniatis created the quintessential Molecular Cloning manual—based on his own pioneering work—and thus spread revolutionary technologies into a multitude of laboratories across the world.

Of course this is a different kind of writing from that recognised by the award of essay or book prizes.  Writing a laboratory manual is more like writing a scientific paper than writing a textbook or popular science book, I suspect. It is a task requiring clarity and distillation rather than creative inspiration. Still, a book is a book, and it is good to see a major science prize being awarded at least in part for the effort put into the creation of a book.  The Lasker citation relates the history of the book’s creation:

In 1979, James Watson asked Maniatis to bring his techniques to the community by teaching a course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory—and Maniatis generously agreed. Its tremendous success spurred Maniatis and postdoctoral fellow Edward Fritsch to turn the course manual into a book. With Joseph Sambrook, they did so. … Their Molecular Cloning manual, first published in 1982, sold 62,000 copies and that number jumped to 95,000 in the second edition.

David Crotty a wrote nice appreciation of the influence of Maniatis (as the book became known) on the 25th anniversary of its publication, in 2007:

It opened a door for many researchers into the world of recombinant DNA technology and played a significant role in spreading these approaches through the scientific community.

He mentions a couple of early reviews of the work:

George McCorkle happily proclaims in American Scientist, “In our laboratory, mirabile dictu, the procedures in this manual nearly always work.”  In TIBS, Hugh Pelham went so far as to title his TIBS review “Cloning Without Tears.”

Crotty also refers to the book’s nickname – “The Bible“, and reports that this was used as far back as 1984, just two years after the book was first published. Achieving that kind of classic status in just two years is not bad going.

As the book went through successive editions the author order was changed to put Joe Sambrook as first author, reflecting the extent of his input. Recently the book has gone into a fourth edition, with Michael Green as the first-named author and Sambrook as co-author. I daresay people will still refer to it as Maniatis though.

I recently ordered a copy and am not looking forward to cataloguing it – all those names and nicknames and past authors make it a bit of a nightmare.

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 by no means a perfect measure. It is seen as mostly confirming past successes and it is variable between different subjects. Much has been written about it since it was first devised in 2005, and various attempts have been made to improve it.

A paper in this week’s Nature announces a new variant – the future h-index. This is designed to predict what your h-index will be a few years in the future, taking into account some additional factors. It seems interesting but still flawed.

Appearing in such a high-profile venue as Nature has given this new metric some prominence, and there has been much comment already (e.g. see this piece in The Scientist). On Twitter Noah Fierer commented:

In case you were wondering – secret to high H-index = lots of papers in high profile journals.

Hardly a surprising finding. The Chronicle of Higher Education has some further thoughtful comments on the new tool.

Konrad Kording, one of the authors of the paper in Nature, said that their future h-index has “proved more than twice as accurate as the h-index for predicting the future success of researchers in the life sciences”.

But Jorge Hirsch, the inventor of the original h-index is not impressed. The Chronicle reports

he said the factors added to his h-index appeared to have little meaningful effect. He suggested the additional factors had been devised by “optimizing the coefficients” for a particular set of authors covered by the paper. He said the predictive powers would not hold up for a wider set of test cases.

That echoes my thought.  Publication patterns and citation practices vary between fields, so basing a general formula on researchers in one particular field is not realistic. The article mentions factors such as the quality of training and the standing of one’s PhD adviser (and I would add one’s postdoc supervisor and later mentors) but none of these factors are included in the new index as they apparently have only a small effect.

But, hey, everyone knows that these magic numbers are basically just that – a data reduction too far. As Stephen Curry said on Twitter:

scientists invent a new way to screw themselves over

So I think Wired magazine has the best idea:

while neither one’s h-index nor the predictions of this equation are destiny, playing with this formula certainly is fun.

You can try the formula for yourself.

Posted in Bibliometrics etc | 4 Comments