nodalpoint.org

Sometimes I wonder what what the point of blogging is and just how much time people (myself included) waste reading and writing them. Let's face it, most leading scientists are too damn busy to pay much attention to the blogosphere, especially when it descends (as it frequently does) into "uncontrollable verbal discharge". This unfortunate medical condition is also known as Blogorrhoea. A free-flowing blog is unlikely to directly increase a scientists productivity (as approximated by the infamous h-index), and might even decrease it. Now, we all know that powerpoint can be PowerPointless, so is blogging also a pointless activity? Or to put it another way: Nodalpoint or Nodalpointless?

A crude score for benchmarking scientists

Have you ever wanted to compare different scientists by their publication record? It's not always an easy task, but here is a crude and handy way to benchmark people by their journal publications in Nature, Science or PNAS using PubMed. Let's call it the NSPNAS score, it's not the h-index and it's far from perfect, but it can be useful.

There are all sorts of flaws with using impact factors for judging the quality of biomedical research. Love them or hate them, just getting hold of impact factors for journals in bioinformatics and related fields is much harder than it should be, so I thought I'd reproduce some statistics I gathered here. The rankings, which you should use with caution [1,2], are the latest as of June 2006 (and apply to citations in 2005) courtesy of Journal Citation Reports®, part of Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge. JCR has a pretty horrible clunky web interface when compared to some of its rivals [3,4], maybe one day they'll make it better. Anyway, this is not a comprehensive list, just a fairly random selection of bioinformatics and computer science journals that publish articles I've been reading the last few years.