okay, so it took a year and a half for this to come to my attention: bloggers are dangerous.
you’ve probably seen me flash a sign for the west side, the area in LA in which i live. i see in this graphic that the sign is also used for wordpress. i use wordpress so i won’t quibble over who used the sign first. 🙂 
if mla has official conference bloggers next year i think you can expect to see this sign demonstrated in person:
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.
note to self
to examine: http://network.nature.com/
has anybody played with this yet? leave a comment and tell me what you think.
PubsHub is a “strategic publication planning tool,” a database to help you choose to which medical journal or meeting to submit your manuscript or present your data.
i saw a demo of this in the exhibits hall at the medical library association meeting and enjoyed the clean, easy interface with a series of drop-down boxes from which you choose your criteria. rank medical journals by 50 fields of information, like impact factor, circulation, or amount of time (in days) from acceptance to publication. they don’t yet have in the database whether or not you need to negotiate with the publisher to have your nih-funded manuscript made available, but the representative said they would be adding that information soon. you can store searches and get email alerts (no rss?) of deadlines. a free trial is available.
i learned of desk tracker, libstats, and wufoo while reviewing a wiki (http://whywufoo.pbwiki.com) i saw referenced at the recent medical library association conference. my library is still collecting data about reference desk transactions using paper forms, but an online form would be much easier for the staff member that compiles all those hash marks.
thanks for directing my attention to this new (to me) tool, martha hardy and lisa mcguire!
