We’re going into a new year, and of course that means it’s time for New Years resolutions. They’ve never really been my thing, but I am going to try to get back to writing more regularly. But I am going to take a moment to suggest some New Years resolutions for scientists. Which I promise is not entirely “Make sure you’re doing things that give me material for my blog.”
Be Honest About Acronyms
New Years resolutions should be achievable. So I’m not going to suggest that NMR people should give up silly acronyms. That would be like asking a musical theatre kid to give up snapping whenever a standoff is occurring. It’s just not going to happen.
So I’ll I’m asking is a little honesty. When you’re selecting a pulse sequence name because you really wanted the initials to spell SHIELD, just admit that. Everyone is going to guess it anyway from the sequence name containing such a weird phrasing. If the people who came up with WURST can own it, you can too.
Leave Hamlet Alone
This one is directed at the Angewandte Chemie subtitles. We have had quite enough of the “To be or not to be” jokes in the table of contents. Shakespeare did write other plays! For that matter, Hamlet alone contains seven soliloquies!
So let’s change it up with the subtitles for 2019. The Scottish Play has some great ones! Theory papers could have some real fun with the “Is that a dagger I see before me?” speech. And I’m sure something with an interesting leaving group could make use of “Out damn spot”. Let’s find a new question. And on that note…
Read More
Scientists who read give things more interesting names. When you need to name a bunch of beetles or just really like to mutate fruit flies, that’s more important. Every name has to be distinctive, so you can’t just go around naming everything Bob. So read, go obscure with the names! We’ve probably done enough Quasimodo.
Stop Worrying About Impact Factors
There are myriad reasons not to put much stock in impact factors. There’s never going to be a tidy way to put a number on the importance of a particular study. It’s just not a quantifiable measure. And putting the number on a journal definitely doesn’t tell you anything about a particular paper.
Most importantly, surely we all should have stopped giving impact factors any weight after that time Acta Crystallographica broke the entire system by attaining the second highest impact factor in all the literature. It’s a fascinating example of the effect of outliers on statistics, but nothing about the research published in the journal changed in the two years that it was “high impact”. It was still crystallography work mostly of interest to dedicated crystallographers. Plus one paper about ShellX.
Be Silly
The whole point of this blog is to prove scientists know how to do this one. So let’s all resolve to keep doing it because science can be so much fun. And as a wise man once said in a no longer canonical Star Wars story: You can’t look dignified when you’re having fun.