This post is about metrics and specifically the H-index. It will probably be the first of several on this topic. I was re-reading a blog post by Alex Bateman on his affection for the H-index as a tool for evaluating up-and-coming scientists.

A great quote from a classic paper by J.B.S. Haldane “On Being The Right Size” (1926). You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. The paper is available here. — The post title is taken from ‘Falling and Landing’ by The Delgados from their LP ‘Domestiques’.

We have a new paper out! You can read it here. I thought I would write a post on how this paper came to be and also about our first proper experience with preprinting. Title of the paper: Non-specificity of Pitstop 2 in clathrin-mediated endocytosis. In a nutshell: we show that Pitstop 2, a supposedly selective clathrin inhibitor acts in a non-specific way to inhibit endocytosis.

A recent opinion piece published in eLife bemoaned the way that citations are used to judge academics because we are not even certain of the veracity of this information. The main complaint was that Google Scholar – a service that aggregates citations to articles using a computer program – may be less-than-reliable. There are three main sources of citation statistics: Scopus, Web of Knowledge/Science and Google Scholar;

How long does it take to publish a paper? The answer is – in our experience, at least – about 9 months. That’s right, it takes about the same amount of time to have a baby as it does to publish a scientific paper. Discussing how we can make the publication process quicker is for another day. Right now, let’s get into the numbers. The graphic shows the time taken from submission-to-publication for papers on which I am an author.

Fans of data visualisation will know the work of Edward Tufte well. His book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is a classic which covers the history and the principals of conveying data in a concise way, that is easy to interpret. He is also credited with two different dataviz techniques: sparklines and image quilts.

How long does it take to publish a paper? I posted the picture below on Twitter to show how long it takes for us to publish a paper. The answer is 235 days. This is the median time from submission at the first journal to publication online or in print. The data are from our last ten papers. The infographic proved popular with 40 retweets and 22 favourites. It was pointed out to me that the a few things would improve this visualisation: 1.