Posts Tagged ‘CrossRef’

500 chemical twists: a (chalk and cheese) comparison of the impacts of blog posts and journal articles.

Friday, June 3rd, 2016

The title might give it away; this is my 500th blog post, the first having come some eight years ago. Very little online activity nowadays is excluded from measurement and so it is no surprise that this blog and another of my "other" scholarly endeavours, viz publishing in traditional journals, attract such "metrics" or statistics. The h-index is a well-known but somewhat controversial measure of the impact of journal articles; here I thought I might instead take a look at three less familiar ones – one relating to blogging, one specific to journal publishing and one to research data.

(more…)

Data-free research data management? Not an oxymoron.

Tuesday, May 24th, 2016

I occasionally post about "RDM" (research data management), an activity that has recently become a formalised essential part of the research processes. I say recently formalised, since researchers have of course kept research notebooks recording their activities and their data since the dawn of science, but not always in an open and transparent manner. The desirability of doing so was revealed by the 2009 "Climategate" events. In the UK, Climategate was apparently the catalyst which persuaded the funding councils (such as the EPSRC, the Royal Society, etc) to formulate policies which required all their funded researchers to adopt the principles of RDM by May 2015 and in their future researches. An early career researcher here, anxious to conform to the funding body instructions, sent me an email a few days ago asking about one aspect of RDM which got me thinking.

(more…)