Organization Monkey

when a researcher is in literature review mode, she is downloading tens of documents at a time to read later. the usual organizational scheme at the beginning of a research project -for me at least- is to save all those files into a folder titled, “to read.” i’m usually caffeinated enough to save the pdf of the articles with my standard file title schema: Author last name_First word of title.pdf. sometimes, if i’m sleepy, it’ll get saved to my downloads folder using the default file name given by the article provider. enter: a missed branding opportunity.

default file names

• elsevier: science.pdf
• routledge: 74848_751305302_903929832.pdf
• emerald: ViewContentServlet.pdf
• sage: 3.pdf
• wiley: fulltext.pdf

see where i’m going with this?  i wouldn’t have half a chance at figuring out what i had just downloaded if i didn’t make a conscious effort to rename my file upon saving.  if a provider really wanted to be marketing savvy, it would make the default file name “wiley” or “sage.”  even more awesome would be if they took the article metadata and named the file with the author last name.  ever hopeful!

for more about this, see http://atdotde.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-quality-journals-by-elsevier.html.

a wink and a nod to eagledawg for her advice on this comic.

what does one geek get another geek for a holiday gift?  a customized opml file.

an opml file is a bunch of rss feeds all crammed into one file.  you load an opml file into your blog feedreader and, bam, your reader is populated with a bunch of new things to read.

since i can’t give all of you librarian readers a smooch under the mistletoe i am giving you a gift from afar.  using the new ticTOCs service, i’ve put together a file of rss feeds of tables of contents from library periodicals that you can download from here (DIRECTIONS: click on link, save file to your desktop as .opml, import into your feedreader).  you will probably want to tweak the list of periodicals that i’ve included in the file, and in that case just head over to the ticTOCs site to pick and choose from the journals listed there and create your own opml file.  in the meantime, import this list into your feedreader, pour yourself another cup of eggnog and read what your colleagues are writing about.

these are the periodicals i’ve included in the linked opml file:

Advances in Data Analysis and Classification
Biomedical Digital Libraries
Building Research & Information
Collection Building
Ethics and Information Technology
Health Information and Libraries Journal
Information & Management
Information and Computation
Information and Organization
Information Processing & Management
Information Processing Letters
Information Retrieval
Information Sciences
International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics
International Journal of Information Management
International Journal of Information Systems and Change Management
Journal of Classification
Journal of Documentation
Journal of Librarianship and Information Science
Journal of Management Information Systems
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Library & Information Science Research
Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services
Library Hi Tech
Library Hi Tech News
Library Management
Library Review
Online Information Review
Performance Measurement and Metrics
Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems
Scientific and Technical Information Processing
Serials Review
Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community
Social Science Information
The Charleston Advisor
The Electronic Library
The International Information & Library Review
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
The Library Quarterly

to follow up on the blog post about becoming a manuscript reviewer for a journal i asked a couple of colleagues how they got to be reviewers: they volunteered!  granted, the people i asked are smartypants and have had their own articles published in popular journals, but they also took the steps to find a journal they liked and sought out the position of reviewer instead of waiting to be asked.

more cat pictures

somebody asked me recently how one gets to be a reviewer for a library-related journal. here’s how you can do it:

• to be a reviewer you have to have a publishing track record. what topics in librarianship do you care most about?  start writing about them and show your writing to as many people as can stand to look at it. this informal review process does great things for the quality of your manuscripts and also makes others aware of what you care about.  people remember these things.
• be an expert on a topic. it doesn’t matter what it is, but if you know a lot about x and have written about it, journal editors will think of you when they get a manuscript on that topic.
• find journals you care about. if you always dogear articles in a particular journal to read or think about later, this is a good sign.  do you agree with the journal’s mission?  as a reviewer you will be charged to evaluate manuscripts with that mission in mind, so it should jive with what you think is important.
• read up on who is on the editorial board for your favorite journals. do you know any of the members of the board? drop them a line and let them know you’d like to be considered as a reviewer, and specify in which areas you are competent.

the idea behind peer review is that your skill set or knowledge of a topic is broad enough that you can comment with ease on ideas broached in a manuscript.  it means that you keep up with literature in the area of your interest and will be able to discern high quality from low quality in this area.  the goal of the peer review process is to be able to further the body of literature in an area.

leave a comment if you’ve got other suggestions to share about how to position yourself to become a reviewer.

the chronicle of higher education has an intriguing post in yesterday’s edition, about fraudulent images used in scientific publications. the images discussed in the article were altered in a way that made it look like the results of the research were different than the actual results, but the researcher commented that she was simply, “trying to present it even better.”

if a researcher does alter an image, those changes should be noted in the caption, a footnote, or in the methods section. it is easy to note that “the contrast in this image was increased to demonstrate more clearly the difference between a and b.” if you think of an image as data, a researcher should be able to understand that he/she should disclose all changes to images just as he would note any statistical weighting to data.

how do we go about altering images in a way that maintains their integrity? i started a draft of do’s/don’ts at this wiki: http://orgmonkey.wetpaint.com/page/images+as+evidence. will you check it out and make changes or add new things to think about? i’d like to be able to hand a copy of this to researchers when i meet with them to assist in image preparation for publications.