Nature has a news article on 2 free alternatives to Web of Science, including your personal citation library. Another example of serendipity, because I created one a couple of days before the nature publication, and planned to wanted to dedicate a short blog to it, i.e., this one.
You can access mine here: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lL7RlhMAAAAJ. Below is a 2011 snapshot picture:For reference, here is screen capture of the “official” Web of Science summary:Very similar, if you ask me, although the Google Scholar obviously includes more items.
Since I started reading a lot of long-form articles on the internet, I have been exposed to a lot of great ideas, and great writing. The latest is an article by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, The Darwin Show. He synthesized 14 (fourteen!) books that appeared around the celebration of his 200th birthday in 2009. In it, he explores a lot of interesting themes, and one of the main ones revolves around why this is such a big deal.
Robin Sloan wrote abeautiful short story (The truth about the east wind), with a very interesting format. It looks at the tension between religion and science, from a Greek tragedy perspective (you should really read it).
“Zeus formed it into a girl and set her free to walk the earth. This was Athena. Pure curiosity. The spark made flesh. From the day she was formed, Athena was an omnivorous observer, a kind of super Galileo/Darwin long before either was born.
Ingrid and I had a discussion the other day about whether quantitative or qualitative data make a more lasting impression. As you might have guessed, I am more on the quantitative side, and Ingrid more on the qualitative side ;-) And me being me, I created a visual scenario about a result from Ingrid’s thesis (the importance of deep community in successful conservation) that was applied in 100 new conservation efforts (or replicate experiments, without controls, though).
My old lab space.
New lab space. Much more organized.
H.arcticus for my first LC50.
The box I constructed to control the light for my LC50.
Inside the box.
It is finally online, the first publication from the Brazilian side of the lab ;-). In this article, we made competing predictions about how common and rare species should behave in a metacommunity context. The, very surprising, result was that both common and rare species reacted very similarly to environmental gradients, which was very counterintuitive from both a metacommunity and macro-ecology point of view.
Another side effect of this study was our new definition for rareness, based on a slightly subjective but less arbitrary definition compared to other studies.
Recently, I found myself eavesdropping on two elderly fellows debating an age-old question: does size matter? Yes! declared one. Small ones have never satisfied anyone. It needs to be big!You’ve got it all wrong,countered the other. Proper use of a small one can be just as good as having a big one. And what good is a big one if you don’t use it properly?/o:pIn a nearby lecture theatre the Costa-Rican Mermaid was preaching the power of long distance swimming to promote big ones.
While I am aware of my tendency to discount anything older as 10 years as ancient in science terms, I do try to sketch a brief historical of each issue I discuss in (most of) my research articles. However, I am always surprised by the lack of “history” in quality reporting on scientific progress. A recent story in Nature, “Can conservation cut poverty”, investigated the link between preserving biodiversity and positive influences this might have on the local inhabitants.
Last year, I wrote a couple of posts about the importance of natural history in science:
http://www.cottenielab.org/2010/04/hypotheses-or-data-first.htmlhttp://www.cottenielab.org/2010/04/hypotheses-or-data-first-update.htmlhttp://www.cottenielab.org/2010/04/hypotheses-or-data-first-update-2.htmlI argued that natural history forms the basis of the scientific method, but I also acknowledged that the power of the scientific method came from the interaction between data and hypotheses, yadayada.
However, one important thing that I forgot to add in that discussion is that natural history does not only form the basis of the scientific method, but also the basis of our interest in science.
There are several ways to define “science”, but here is very basic one byEdzard Ernst, the first professor in Alternative Medicine, in an interview in Science:
“I was also convinced that scientists need to be critical and sceptical, and that if you apply science to any field you don’t want to prove that your ideas are correct, you want to test whether they are correct.”While I probably have to check his own summary of his scientific legacy (”I found that homeopathy is pretty useless.