Shut it down

Umlaut Friday

Boicott Barilla

This is why I will never purchase Barilla pasta again.

Guido Barilla, who controls the fourth-generation Barilla Group family business with his two brothers, sparked outrage among activists, consumers and some politicians when he said he would not consider using a gay family to advertise Barilla pasta.

“For us the concept of the sacred family remains one of the basic values of the company,” he told Italian radio on Wednesday evening. “I would not do it but not out of a lack of respect for homosexuals who have the right to do what they want without bothering others … [but] I don’t see things like they do and I think the family that we speak to is a classic family.”

Asked what effect he thought his attitude would have on gay consumers of pasta, Barilla said: “Well, if they like our pasta and our message they will eat it; if they don’t like it and they don’t like what we say they will … eat another.”

A day later he apparently had been talked to by either the bean counters or lawyers (or both).

The Barilla chairman issued a statement saying that he was sorry if his remarks had caused offence and that he had only been trying to draw attention to the “central role” played by women within the family.

“I apologise if my words generated misunderstandings or arguments, or if they offended the sensibilities of some people,” he said.

So he’s a sexist anachronism too. Wonderful. Yeah, I’m the one in the household that is most likely to default to making a pasta dinner, genius.

And no, I’m not buying your retrenching because your words were exceptionally clear the first time, Guido. Walking it back now and pretending you didn’t mean what you said is what is even more insulting to me, your occasional previous customer.

[Guido] went on to discuss gay rights, saying that he “respected everyone” and was in favour of gay marriage, but against gay adoption.

Nice try. Clearly, you do not respect gay people. So you are totally full of stuff and nonsense on this one. Again, which makes for the additional charge of insulting my intelligence.

Sorry, but I have other pedestrian box-pasta to choose from at the market. And I will choose elsewhere.

Attention other competing pasta companies! My consumer dollars are now up for grabs to whichever of you launches the most touching and diverse Family Dinner styled ad campaign. Hint, the first one should probably be a gay couple. One of them obviously an ethnic Italian archetype of some sort would be bonus.

Why are US Government produced "works" on the Mars Curiosity Rover locked up behind a GlamourMag paywall?

or so asketh Mike Eisen:

There’s really no excuse for this. The people in charge of the rover project clearly know that the public are intensely interested in everything they do and find. So I find it completely unfathomable that they would forgo this opportunity to connect the public directly to their science. Shame on NASA.

This whole situation is even more absurd, because US copyright law explicitly says that all works of the federal government – of which these surely must be included – are not subject to copyright. So, in the interests of helping NASA and Science Magazine comply with US law, I am making copies of these papers freely available here:

FORWARD THE REVOLUTION, COMRADE!!!!!!!

Go Read, and download the papers.

h/t: bill

Big Mech Boondoggles in an Era of Tight NIH Budgets

oh, did I blow the lede on that title?

A letter to the blog points to the NIGMS FeedbackLoop blog and an entry from Jon Lorsch on their “Large Scale Research Initiatives and Centers:. One of these, the Protein Structure Initiative is being readied for decommissioning.

At last week’s National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council meeting, Council members and staff discussed the future of one existing large-scale program, the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI). The Council heard the results of a midpoint evaluation of the PSI’s third 5-year phase, PSI:Biology. The evaluators found that PSI investigators have determined an impressive number of high-quality protein structures and that some of the program’s accomplishments, including methodological ones, could not have been readily achieved through R01-type investigator-initiated grants.

The evaluators concluded that the PSI will reach a point that no longer justifies set-aside funding and, as a result, strongly recommended that NIGMS begin planning the sunset of the PSI, being careful to identify resources developed by the initiative that should be retained for use by the biomedical community.

The blog entry details how the NIGMS only got into Big Mech science during the doubling and generally questions the value of massive projects focused on one topic or theme.

The obvious debate item for this and all ICs that throw money at BigMech science (Centers and Program Projects, assuredly. Sometimes big cooperative agreement U-mechs and contracts as well) is that the more plebeian R01s, investigator initiated and solicited alike, must be sacrificed to pay for larger projects. They have to balance the relative value of a Center or P01 Program Project against the loss of 3-4 individual R01s. Maybe even more of them, depending on size.

First, my disclaimer. I’ve had benefits from BigMech science for a good number of my months of support from the NIH as a PI. Sometimes the bennies amounted to less than an R03s worth of funding and sometimes it has been as large as R21 or small R01 money. I am also at the stage of my career where I not only can be a semi-credible substantial participant in someone’s BigMech but I should be planning for a not-to-distant future in which I try to head one up. And by “should” I mean for the benefit of not just my own lab and career but in a more generational sense for the benefit of my scientific subfields of interest.

I occasionally wring my hands with observation that as the Baby Boomer contingent ages, there are not enough of the following generation to take over the large scale projects that we have at present. This is because both of broader demographic issues (I was born during a particularly low-ebb in total US births) but also because of the over-shadowing, squeezing of my generation of scientists out of academic jobs. So if the larger mechanisms of science funding are to continue, my tiny generation needs to step up.

There’s a final knock-on problem. Because the few of us who managed to transition did so later, and with less assurance of continual funding, we are not ready. Our labs are less stable at this stage of the process. We have not been in them as long at a given age of life, either. We’ve had less time to reach a stage of comfort and (slight) boredom with our own thing that might motivate us to think of the larger picture. Why bother captaining a P01 application that will eventually fund ourselves with R01 money and four of our colleagues when we could just write two or three new projects for our own labs?

I see these pressures. And I see it as a challenge to my generation. Which means a challenge to me personally.

But.

However.

Still.

This all hinges on the assumption and stipulation that Big Mech Projects are a GoodThing.

I am ambivalent.

If you can get one, they are a very GoodThing. That is the tragedy of the Commons answer that governs our existence under the NIH-funded extramural system. I see Big Mechs as barely living up to their promise in the best case scenario. The promise of “the whole is bigger than the parts and SYNERGY”. I’ve been around a BigMech or two and I’m not sure that I believe in the hype. As a general rule, I mean. What the BigMech does in my opinion is provide a very tasty carrot to pull together some investigators around one project. And let a subset (even just one) of those investigators herd the cats a little harder than would otherwise be possible. But there is nothing fancy about the unified project. A group of friendly, collaborating laboratories can do the same thing with individual R01 funding. The extra, add-on Cores that you get with a Center or Big Mech sound good in theory but in my experience may not be much in the way of value added.

And all the monthly Project Meetings and Advisory Board Lunches and other box-ticking stuff? It’s about 10% about the science and 90% about making the next competing renewal go well. IME.

So there is some waste to balance out the theoretical synergistic advantages.

Of course, what is sacrificed is unknown. The Big Mech has to be unified under a common set of Aims or it is dead in the water. So obviously it is throwing a lot of cheddar at one particularly topic or theoretical orientation. That might be wrong or less valuable compared with the hypotheses generated by two or three other groups.

Those other groups will either fail to seek (because those Big Swaaanging GreyBeards have the Center) or failing to secure (ditto) funding for their own, more modest, R01 projects. We know this. What we can never know, is who has the best approach. The funds have to be directed to one strategy or another.

I am a big believer in the underlying structure of a democratic competition of ideas from all comers that underlies the NIH system of funding. Lots of smart people offer their take on the world and collectively we make sure to cover our bases. Great ideas can be recognized no matter where they come from. This is the superior way to get the best of the best ideas at the table.

I am not naive. I know it doesn’t work exclusively this way in practice. But it is the ideal to which we should aspire.

Big Mech projects contradict this ideal. So I am reflexively against them.

Even if it would be in my present best interest to back an expansion of Big Mechs at the NIH ICs of my greatest interest.

BJP pulls a neat little self-citation trick

As far as I can tell, the British Journal of Pharmacology has taken to requiring that authors who use animal subjects conduct their studies in accordance with the “ARRIVE” (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) principles. These are conveniently detailed in their own editorial:

McGrath JC, Drummond GB, McLachlan EM, Kilkenny C, Wainwright CL.Guidelines for reporting experiments involving animals: the ARRIVE guidelines.Br J Pharmacol. 2010 Aug;160(7):1573-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1476-5381.2010.00873.x.

and paper on the guidelines:

Kilkenny C, Browne W, Cuthill IC, Emerson M, Altman DG; NC3Rs Reporting Guidelines Working Group.Animal research: reporting in vivo experiments: the ARRIVE guidelines. Br J Pharmacol. 2010 Aug;160(7):1577-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1476-5381.2010.00872.x.

The editorial has been cited 270 times. The guidelines paper has been cited 199 times so far and the vast, vast majority of these are in, you guessed it, the BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHARMACOLOGY.

One might almost suspect the journal now has a demand that authors indicate that they have followed these ARRIVE guidelines by citing the 3 page paper listing them. The journal IF is 5.067 so having an item cited 199 times since it was published in the August 2010 issue represents a considerable outlier. I don’t know if a “Guidelines” category of paper (as this is described on the pdf) goes into the ISI calculation. For all we know they had to exempt it. But why would they?

And I notice that some other journals seem to have published the guidelines under the byline of the self same authors! Self-Plagiarism!!!

Perhaps they likewise demand that authors cite the paper from their own journal?

Seems a neat little trick to run up an impact factor, doesn’t it? Given the JIT and publication rate of real articles in many journals, a couple of hundred extra cites in the sampling interval can have an effect on the JIT.

Stupid Grant Tricks: End of Year Funding

I don’t know about you but as we near the end of the Fiscal Year, I like to start looking at RePORTER and SILK to keep an eye on what is getting picked up for NIH funding. This is when the ICs have to allocate their total FY outlay so any conservativeness from the prior three rounds of regular funding policy gets adjusted with the leavings.

Look for big mega-mechs being picked up, Rs that clearly didn’t make the regular paylines and most fascinatingly of all, the R56 handouts.

Happy searching.

SfN 2013 Approaches: Notice to shutterbugs

Actually I’m just posting this because I can never find this policy on the SfN meeting site when I am looking to cite it. And I always remember seeing something like this during the registration process so, here’s the policy.

First, the funny bit. You have to assent to this in order to be registered for the meeting.

Photo and Video Release

By registering for Neuroscience 2013 or its associated events, you hereby understand that you may be photographed, videotaped, or digitally recorded, as may be your voice, and hereby waive any objection, condition, limit, or right you may have to the photographs or recordings.

By registering for Neuroscience 2013 or its associated events, you hereby authorize SfN to use any such photographs, videotapes or other recordings of yourself and your guests for any promotional purposes and to license other relevant people/organizations to use them. You hereby indemnify and hold the Society harmless for any such licensed or unlicensed use.

Don’t image us, we’ll image you. Heh.

Moving on, the actual policy of interest regarding taking photographs of the presentations.

Photography Policy during Scientific Sessions

Photography of scientific presentations, including posters presentations, is prohibited without the specific consent of the presenter(s)/author(s). Individuals who do not comply will be asked to leave the session. In addition, the use of cameras and recording devices (to include cell phones with camera capabilities) are prohibited in the Exhibit Hall. If you have any questions regarding this policy, please contact the annual meeting Press Room.

Personally I have yet to see someone asked to leave a slide session for taking photos, even when it is as egregious as standing up with a full-frame camera and snapping ever damn slide. So yeah. Of course, what do I know, maybe the presenters gave specific consent.

“prohibited in the Exhibit Hall”. That means the poster sessions. No snapping pictures of your friends or trainees at their very first poster. Nuh-uh. Can’t do it.

Welcome

related.

How the wealthier PIs submit way more grant applications than you could ever imagine

in a comment from Evelyn:

As a grant writer, who has to learn a whole new field every 2 weeks, a good review is a life-saver! It gives me an accurate, hopefully an up-to-date snapshot of the field, leads me to the original research that I can then pull, read, and cite. A bad review is a an awful waste of my time but at this point, I can tell a bad one by about third paragraph and I don’t bother reading the rest of it. When I can’t find a good review, my life gets a lot harder since I don’t have the time to read all of the junk research on every topic before I get to the good stuff. At that point, I hate to say it, but I search through glam-journals and usually, those original papers will have enough background to lead me to the important papers in the field.
So I don’t care if the review authors are in the field or are first-year grand students, as long as they do a good job. But in my experience, the ones that are in the field usually give a better overview of the topic.

I need a cold compress.

Apparently review articles make it easy for a professional grant writer, who has no prior knowledge of a field, to simulate the expertise of the PI. Who, in most cases, the study section members presume did most of the writing.

If this minor deception* works then some PIs can afford to hire a professional grant writer to, presumably, submit more grants to out-compete those of us who cannot afford such luxuries.

I do not have sources of money available in my professional budgets that can be used to hire grant writers to craft more applications than I can write myself.

This professional grant-writer thing does not hearten me.

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* There is absolutely nothing in the NIH grant rules that says that the people listed as participating Investigator staff need have anything whatsoever to do with the writing/crafting of the application.

Why we can't have nice things in NIH extramural research

From the Science Careers section, Michael Price reports on a recent National Academies of Science symposium on the NIH foofraw about Biomedical career trajectories. The NAS, you will recall, is a society of very elite and highly established scientists in the US. It will not surprise you one bit to learn that they cannot fathom making changes in our system of research labor to benefit the peons anymore than the NIH can:

First issued in June 2012, the working group’s report made a controversial proposal: that funding should gradually be moved away from R01 grants and toward new NIH training grants in an effort to decouple graduate student and postdoc stipends. But responses to this proposal were tepid at the June [Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)] meeting where the proposals were first presented. Such a move would reduce the number of graduate students and postdocs available to principal investigators (PIs), and make trainees more expensive to hire, some ACD members argued. That would reduce PIs’ autonomy and encumber the research enterprise. “One wants to be sure that the principal investigators, who are supposed to be doing the research, continue to have enough flexibility to be able to support the research they want to do,” offered biologist Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Reduce the number of easily exploitable laborers and/or make them more expensive. Presumably by forcing PIs to conduct more of their work with a more-permanent workforce (at any degree level). Permanent employees* which have that nasty tendency to gain seniority and consequently cost more money compared with the constantly turning-over grad student and postdoc labor pool.

And reduce our autonomy to hire foreign workers to further suppress wages and expectations for the domestic PhD pool. (Individual and Institutional postdoctoral and graduate “training” fellowships from the NIH currently only extend to US citizens. So I imagine PIs are assuming a shift to more fellowships would “reduce PIs’ autonomy” to hire foreign PhDs.)

the Price article continues:

When the ACD convened in December to discuss implementing the working group’s recommendations, this one had vanished from the agenda. The discussions at the December meeting avoided controversial issues, centering on whether, in an era in which only a small minority of scientists can realistically expect academic research careers, universities were adequately training students for a range of careers beyond the tenure track.

So it isn’t just the NAS Greybearded and BlueHaired contingent. This is the NIH response to their own working group.

Pass the buck.

Really strong work there, NIH.

Anything better from the NAS meeting?

In contrast to the measured discussion at December’s ACD meeting, the attendees of last week’s NAS meeting—mostly researchers who have studied the academic labor market—were critical of the status quo, arguing that keeping things the way they are would be disastrous for the scientific workforce.

m’kay…..and…..

There aren’t enough permanent jobs in academia for the vast majority of science graduates—and yet little has been done to curtail the production of doctorates, Ginther argues. “Employment has been stagnant, but Ph.D. production has been zooming,” Ginther said.

Ginther? Remember her? Wonder how NIH is coming along on the R01 funding disparity issue? HAAHA, I crack myself up.

Anyway…is anyone at NAS or the ACD discussing how we need to shut down the PhD firehose in addition to functionally restricting the import of foreign labor? hell no….

At December’s ACD meeting, the discussion focused on tweaking graduate programs to better prepare students for jobs outside academia, and several ACD members pointed to the relatively low unemployment numbers among science Ph.D.s as reassurance about trainees’ professional prospects.

Oh, but the scuttlebutt. That’s a brightspot, right?

None of the presenters at last week’s meeting put forth any radical suggestions for how to overhaul the academic training system, but the tenor of the discussions was far more critical of established practices than the discussions heard at NIH in December 2012. After Ginther’s presentation, this reporter overheard a chat between two meeting attendees. One suggested that science professors cannot in good conscience encourage their students to pursue a Ph.D.,

Sigh. No “radical suggestions”, eh? So basically there is no real difference from the ACD meeting. Ok, so one overheard conversation is snarky….but this does not a “tenor” make. How do you know the ACD folks didn’t also say such things outside of the formal presentations and the journalist just didn’t happen to be there to eavesdrop? Lots of people are saying this, they just aren’t saying it very loud, from a big platform or in large numbers. When you start seeing the premier graduate training programs in a subarea of science trumpeting their 30% or 50% reductions in admissions, instead of the record increases**, then we’ll be making some strides on the “tenor”.

Remember though, the NIH is taking all this stuff very, very seriously.

the ACD moved forward with most of the working group’s other recommendations, including proposals that would: establish a new funding program to explore how to better train grad students and postdocs for nonacademic careers; require trainees funded by NIH to have an individual development plan; encourage institutions to limit time-to-graduation for graduate students to 5 years; encourage institutions to track the career outcomes of their graduates; and encourage NIH study sections to look favorably upon grant proposals from teams that include staff scientists

Right.

1) Nonacademic careers in science are also drying up. This is the ultimate in buck-passing and feigned ignorance of what time it is on the street.
2) IDPs? Are you kidding? What good does it do to lay out specifically “I’d like to take these steps to become a tenure-track faculty” when there are STILL no jobs and no research funding for those who manage to land them? IDPs are the very definition of rearranging deck chairs.
3) I totally support faster time to PhD awards for the individual. However on a broad basis, this just accelerates the problem by letting local departments up their throughput of newly minted PhDs. Worthless goal if it is not combined with throttling back on the number of PhD students being trained overall.
4) Making training departments track outcomes is good but..to what end? So that prospective graduate students will somehow make better choices? Ha. And last I checked, when PhD programs are criticized for job outcome they start waving their hands furiously and shout about the intervening postdoctoral years and how it is in no way their fault or influence that determines tenure-track achievement of their graduates.
5) “encourage” study sections? Yeah, just like the NIH has been encouraging study sections to treat tenure-track traditional hire Assistant Professors better. Since the early 80s at the least and all to no avail. As we know, the only way the NIH could make any strides on that problem was with affirmative action style quotas for younger PIs.

Tilghman, who headed the working group and I think has been around the NIH for a few rodeos before, is not impressed:

Yet, the working group’s chair, former Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman, told Science Careers that she couldn’t “help but go back to [her] cynicism” so long as NIH merely “encouraged” many of these measures.

Where “cynicism” is code for “understanding that NIH has no intention whatsoever in changing and is merely engaging in their usual Kabuki theater to blunt the fangs of any Congressional staff that may happen to get a wild hair over any of this career stuff”.

Score me as “cynical” too.

[ h/t: DJMH ]
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*and yeah. It sucks to have a 5-year grant funding cycle and try to match that on to supporting permanent employees. I get that this is not easy. I deal with this myself, you know. My convenience doesn’t excuse systematic labor exploitation, though.

**Dude I can’t even. Bragging about record admits for several recent years now, followed finally this year by some attempt to figure out if the participating faculty can actually afford to take on graduate students. FFS.

Rules for writing review articles

There should be a rule that you can’t write a review unless you’ve published at least three original research papers in that topic/area of focus.

Also a rule that your total number of review articles cannot surpass your original research articles.

It was the methylone that killed him

The Daily Mail is reporting followup toxicity findings in the June 17 death of one Matthew Rybarczyk the after attending a rave party.

The Daily Mail:

There are fears that a string of fatal overdoses this summer have been caused by the toxic substance bath salts after it was pushed to young festival-goers as the party drug ‘Molly’, officials said today.

The substance had been sold to at least one young person as ‘molly’ – a potent form of ecstasy – but was in fact the meth-like street drug bath salts.

Officially known as methylone, it can have similar effects to ecstasy or MDMA on the user.

It has been confirmed as cause of death of a 20-year-old man and is suspected in the deaths of others.

As you can see in this structural diagram, methylone is the cathinone cousin of 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA) which is the canonical psychoactive of both Ecstasy and Molly.I am delighted to see some actual toxicity data followup reporting. Perhaps other sources will have more specifics with regard to the medical examiner’s findings and the various drugs found in the decedent’s blood. For now, however, at least we have something to go on.

And I covered one prior Case Report containing three methylone-related deaths. And as I noted there, we know perfectly well that MDMA itself is capable of killing people.

As we’ve also discussed, MDMA can result in significant medical emergency and death. Yes, really, it is the MDMA.

It would not be at all surprising if methylone deaths were via the same neuropharmacological triggers, see Baumann et al 2012 and Simmler et al, 2013. Certainly what one can glean from the symptoms is very familiar.

I take issue, however, with the Louise Boyle piece in the Daily Mail. We can start from the headline:

Did all these festival-goers die from taking BATH SALTS? One death confirmed as fears others were duped into buying toxic street drug while believing it was ‘molly’

See that? Nice trick. Methylone is a “toxic street drug” while apparently ‘molly’ is no such thing. Bzzzt, wrong. Methylone and MDMA are the same category of thing. Recreational drugs obtained from sources of dubious quality. Trying to distinguish one as a “toxic street drug” as different from the other is silly and nonsensical.

next we have this whopper:

but was in fact the meth-like street drug bath salts

Another report from the NY Post goes down the same path of underinformed sensationalism:

New York club kids who use the party drug Molly … are often being peddled deadly “bath salts” by ruthless dealers,…The dangerous narcotic — which causes a violent, meth-like high — has killed at least one reveler this year and is being eyed in the deaths of two partiers at the Electric Zoo festival on Randall’s Island two weeks ago…Known to drug regulators as methylone

The term “bath salts” is just a nickname. It is no different than Ecstasy, molly, crack, crystal, weed, smack. It has meaning in so far as there is a consensus use of it, but in the absence of consensus it is near meaningless. I would say that at this point in time “bath salts” in the US can mean any of the substituted cathinone drugs. There was a time when I might have said it was semi-uniquely referring to 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) but given the diversity in the market this is no longer correct.

The above referenced papers from Baumann and Simmler, and this additional one from Baumann, should tell the tale about the “meth-like” charge as well. While some of the substituted cathinones could be argued to be “meth-like”, methylone sure isn’t one of them. In fact the neuropharmacology suggests “MDMA-like” if anything. And really, given the most popular cathinones being used to date, it is silly to say that bath salts are meth-like. Mephedrone and methylone are MDMA-like in many ways and MDPV is turning out to be more like cocaine in activity. That’s neuropharmacology, for the most part. When we look at compulsive use and propensity for addiction it in fact looks like methylone (Watterson et al, 2012) and mephedrone (Hadlock et al, 2011; Aarde et al, 2013a; Motbey et al, 2013) might have more reinforcing effect in rodent models than would be expected for a MDMA-like drug (see Schenk 2009; de la Garza et al, 2007 for review). In some of these studies the authors show data suggesting* the “MDMA-like” cathinones might actually be more effective in self-administration than methamphetamine. MDPV appears to generate more compulsive use than does methamphetamine (Watterson et al, 2012; Aarde et al 2013b). So, I suppose if the journalists mean the compulsive-use or reinforcing value as indexed by rat self-administration studies then they might have some defense for the “meth-like” charge. Somehow I doubt they are so informed.

Nevertheless.

When we are talking the acute overdose profile, the symptoms sure sound like MDMA and the relative reinforcing properties are most likely not directly related.

Oh boy. As I was writing this, some tox reporting from the New York Electric Zoo overdoses (it also repeated the methylone finding for Mr. Rybarczyk). James C. McKinley Jr reports at an Arts Beat blog at the NYT:

Toxicology results showed Ms. Rotondo died from acute intoxication after taking pure MDMA, the euphoria-producing drug sold on the street in pill form as ecstasy and in powdered form as molly, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.

Mr. Russ had taken a fatal mix of MDMA and methylone, a closely related stimulant that is also often sold under the name molly.

Nice to see some confirmation since there are definitely other drugs to suspect, like PMA and PMMA, when it comes to rave-drug overdoses.

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*there are some methodological questions to be answered. I’d like to see a few more comparisons, myself.

Citing review articles robs the authors of original research articles. So stop it.

Someone or other on the Twitts, or possible a blog comment, made a remark about academic citation practices that keeps eating at me.

It boils down to this.

One of the most fundamental bits of academic credit that accrues to authors are the citations of their research papers. Citations form the ballyhooed h-index (X papers with at least X cites each) go into the “Highly Cited” measure of awesomeness and are generally viewed as an important indication of your impact on science.

Consequently, when you choose to cite a review article to underline a point you are making in your own article, you are taking the credit that rightfully goes to the people who did the actual work, and handing it over to some review author.

Review authors are extracting surplus value from the people who did the actual creating. Kind of like a distributor of widgets extracts value from those people who actually made them by providing the widgets in an easy/efficient location for use. Good for them but…..

So here’s the deal. If you are citing a review only as a sort of collected works, stop doing that. I can make an exception when you are citing the review for the unique theoretical or synthetic contribution made by the review authors. Fine. But when you are just doing it because you want to make a general “..it is well established that Bunnies make it to the hedgerow in 75% of baseline time when they are given amphetamine” type of point, don’t do that. Cite some of the original authors!

If you really need to, you can cite (Jo et al, 1954, Blow et al 1985, Moe et al 2005; see Pig and Dog, 2013 for recent review).

Look at it this way. Would you rather your papers were cited directly? Or are you okay with the citations for something to which you contributed fundamentally being meta-cites of some review article?

Thought of the Day

There seems to be a sub population of people who like to do research on the practice of research. Bjoern Brembs had a recent post on a paper showing that the slowdown in publication associated with having to resubmit to another journal after rejection cost a paper citations.

Citations of a specific paper are generally thought of as a decent measure of impact, particularly if you can relate it to a subfield size.

Citations to a paper come in various qualities, however, ranging from totally incorrect (the paper has no conceivable connection to the point for which it is cited) to the motivational (paper has a highly significant role in the entire purpose of the citing work).

I speculate that a large bulk of citations are to one, or perhaps two, sub experiments. Essentially a per-Figure citation.

If this is the case, then citations roughly scale with how big and diverse the offerings in a given paper are.

On the other side, fans of “complete story” arguments for high impact journal acceptances are suggesting that the bulk of citations are to this “story” rather than for the individual experiments.

I’d like to see some analysis of the type of citations won by papers. All the way across the foodchain, from dump journals to CNS.