106 books of pretension meme

A list of books read entirely or in part by me (hattip: the silverback). A comment to his post puts us on the track of Live Granades on 106 books and gives the source motivation for the list:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.

Freeware Impact Factorin’ on Google Scholar

There’s a nifty little application called Publish or Perish available from Harzing.com which calculates impact factors and other related metrics including:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch’s h-index and related parameters
• Egghe’s g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The trick? It uses GoogleScholar meaning your results are certain to vary from an ISI metric. In theory it should incorporate more journals since ISI doesn’t index everything. My numbers were lower so go figure. Anyway, fun to play around with, especially if you don’t have ISI access or publish frequently in non-ISI-indexed journals.

Hattip: Jake.

Job Search Research Plans

We have been discussing junior faculty job searches here, and one of the topics that has come up is the applicant’s research plan, the document that search committees use to get a sense of what she might do in her new lab, and her ability to argue coherently for the importance and feasibility of her work.