Vitek quotes a Polish proverb,
If you’re going to fall off a horse, make it a big one.
In that vein, take a look at this graph (don’t look too closely; it’s deliberately a tiny bit obscure):
What I’ve been doing this week is mostly hacking away in Perl at some of the information in our database. As you may know, each evaluation in f1000 has a score associated with it, based on the rating given an article by Faculty Members. We’ve redone the scoring and I’ve worked out a way of combining those scores, or ‘article factors’ as we’ve taken to calling them, for each journal that is represented at f1000. This gives us a ‘journal factor’, ffJ. It’s our answer to the journal Impact Factor, in fact; and the graph above is the top 250 journals according to our ratings (in blue) with the appropriate Impact Factor in red.
You’ll notice right away that there isn’t a one-to-one correlation, and of course we’d expect that (the Impact Factor has serious problems, which I’ve talked about previously). I’m currently analysing our data a bit more deeply, and I’ll be writing a paper with that analysis, as well as talking about it at the March ACS conference in San Francisco.
Last Friday evening I went down the Driver with a couple of the dev team and a bunch of people from places as varied as BioMed Central, Nature Publishing Group, Mendeley and Mekentosj. We talked about what we’re variously calling cross- or federate-commenting. On the whole we’ve decided it’s a good idea, and we simply have to figure out how to do it. What this implies of course is that we’re actually going to allow user comments at f1000—and indeed that’s the plan. I’m looking forward to rolling out this functionality to you, not least because when people want to raise questions about articles evaluated on f1000, they’ll be able to.
While we’re on the mythical new site, we asked another web designer what they could come up with for us. And for the first time, all of us who saw the design liked it. So hopefully we’ll be able to get that implemented real soon now and I’ll be able to start showing you what you’re going to get, you lucky people. (Rumours that someone said “It looks like a proper website!” are completely unfounded.)
Interesting reviews
A couple of things you may have missed.
First, the (possible) mechanism behind photophobia in migraines. Turns out that people who are functionally blind, but sensitive to circadian input and pupillary light reflexes are susceptible to photophobia. Work in rats published in Nature Neuroscience implicates a (previously uncharacterized) multisynaptic or heavily networked retinal path.
In Biology, the problem of de novo assembly of DNA sequence reads into sensible contigs from massively parallel sequencing technologies has been addressed. This, if it works, would bring exciting concepts such as personal genomics that little bit closer. The paper is in Genome Research (subscription required) and you can read the evaluation for free.
And finally
Faculty of 1000 is big in Italy—or at least on Facebook. My post on the recycling of integrins drew an excited response from one Grazia Tamma, who was then mocked mercilessly by her brother!
Hang in there, Grazia; science is great and the cytoskeleton rocks.
Callum Anderson
rpg
stevepog
Faculty of 1000 
On the run-29Jan10
Posted by rpg on 29 January, 2010
Vitek quotes a Polish proverb,
In that vein, take a look at this graph (don’t look too closely; it’s deliberately a tiny bit obscure):
What I’ve been doing this week is mostly hacking away in Perl at some of the information in our database. As you may know, each evaluation in f1000 has a score associated with it, based on the rating given an article by Faculty Members. We’ve redone the scoring and I’ve worked out a way of combining those scores, or ‘article factors’ as we’ve taken to calling them, for each journal that is represented at f1000. This gives us a ‘journal factor’, ffJ. It’s our answer to the journal Impact Factor, in fact; and the graph above is the top 250 journals according to our ratings (in blue) with the appropriate Impact Factor in red.
You’ll notice right away that there isn’t a one-to-one correlation, and of course we’d expect that (the Impact Factor has serious problems, which I’ve talked about previously). I’m currently analysing our data a bit more deeply, and I’ll be writing a paper with that analysis, as well as talking about it at the March ACS conference in San Francisco.
Last Friday evening I went down the Driver with a couple of the dev team and a bunch of people from places as varied as BioMed Central, Nature Publishing Group, Mendeley and Mekentosj. We talked about what we’re variously calling cross- or federate-commenting. On the whole we’ve decided it’s a good idea, and we simply have to figure out how to do it. What this implies of course is that we’re actually going to allow user comments at f1000—and indeed that’s the plan. I’m looking forward to rolling out this functionality to you, not least because when people want to raise questions about articles evaluated on f1000, they’ll be able to.
While we’re on the mythical new site, we asked another web designer what they could come up with for us. And for the first time, all of us who saw the design liked it. So hopefully we’ll be able to get that implemented real soon now and I’ll be able to start showing you what you’re going to get, you lucky people. (Rumours that someone said “It looks like a proper website!” are completely unfounded.)
Interesting reviews
A couple of things you may have missed.
First, the (possible) mechanism behind photophobia in migraines. Turns out that people who are functionally blind, but sensitive to circadian input and pupillary light reflexes are susceptible to photophobia. Work in rats published in Nature Neuroscience implicates a (previously uncharacterized) multisynaptic or heavily networked retinal path.
In Biology, the problem of de novo assembly of DNA sequence reads into sensible contigs from massively parallel sequencing technologies has been addressed. This, if it works, would bring exciting concepts such as personal genomics that little bit closer. The paper is in Genome Research (subscription required) and you can read the evaluation for free.
And finally
Faculty of 1000 is big in Italy—or at least on Facebook. My post on the recycling of integrins drew an excited response from one Grazia Tamma, who was then mocked mercilessly by her brother!
Hang in there, Grazia; science is great and the cytoskeleton rocks.
Posted in Friday afternoon, Indicators, Metrics | Tagged: comment, cytoskeleton, ffJ, impact factor, Website | 4 Comments »