In defense of indiscreet emails

The saga of the climate emails just never seems to end, and one of the things that amuses me most is the shock regularly expressed by journalists that scientists occasionally stray from objective and impartial assessments of the work of their rivals. The response from many scientists and science publications has been contrite. Well, I object to this hand wringing. I want to defend the role of the private email in academia, and our right to be indiscreet. A couple of years ago the publication of a contentious paper in a leading ecological journal resulted in a flurry of incredulous emails passing through my inbox:

…have a look at this, the latest ramblings from X…; …knowing the authors there must be a bad statistical error; It might be a good exercise for students to read this and then to list the 100 biggest errors in order of magnitude (although it might be tough to narrow it down to 100…)

A few of us decided to go a step further, and put together a response to the paper in question. The tactics of publication were again discussed frankly:

in the submission letter you could… say that we are extremely surprised that this has made publication given the highly dubious nature of their results; I would just submit it today… as you say, it would be unbelievable if no one else spotted how crap that paper is!

Yes, I admit it. I regularly try to suppress the publication and dissemination of work that I do not rate. Interpret this, if you like, as a shady conspiracy of unscrupulous scientists to undermine the peer-review process and push a specific agenda (probably in cahoots with world leaders and funding bodies). But in fact, I was simply doing what university scientists have done for years: using email to bitch, gossip and whinge when the person with whom I wished to bitch, gossip or whinge happened to be in a different building, city or time zone. I have absolutely no qualms about this, because I am satisfied that any criticism that I choose to place into the public domain, in publications, peer reviews, and so on, will be thoroughly professional and well-reasoned.

Here’s another thing: I use tricks too. Not that I’ve used the word in an email – I was once a student at UEA, so cannot be too careful – but it would be entirely appropriate to do so. In a recent piece of work, we were looking for the perfect ‘trick’ to bring graphical order out of the chaos of 7 million data points, including everything down to the scaling of axes and choice of colour scheme. It is ludicrous to suppose that we shouldn’t manipulate and statistically interrogate complex datasets in order to better reveal patterns. That is a large part of my job. Presumably the realisation that it is easier to deny global warming if time begins in 2001 also dawned following similar private conversations among colleagues. The difference is that I’m comfortable enough with the tricks we used to have documented them all in the R code associated with the paper ( still in press – I’ll blog about the science when it’s finally published!).

I have friends working in government science who won’t write in an email anything they wouldn’t want to see published. Paul Ehrlich recently made the same point, claiming that there is now no such thing as a private email. I just think it would be a damn shame if this attitude spreads throughout academia. As I have previously commented, science requires a thick skin. Sometimes we crack, and take all the criticism personally, and then email offers an outlet for us express to our mates our annoyance and distress, before we take some deep breaths, and get on with the business of being professional and dispassionate about it all.

After all, the forceful criticism of substandard work is essential to the progress of science. Are we not allowed to have a little fun along the way?

Still more on bibliometrics

Impact Factors have hit the NN blogs this week, and my intended comments on these interesting posts unintentionally swelled to this… Some of the below is reworked from an article I wrote as part of a feature on publications in the British Ecological Society Bulletin. Can we state often enough and clearly enough how lazy it is to use journal Impact Factors to measure individual performace? First, in the super-high IF multidisciplinary journals (e.g. Nature, IF = 34.5, Science, IF = 29.7), different disciplines do not contribute equally. As a specific example, the ‘impact’ of evolutionary papers appearing in these journals is lower than the journal IF would suggest (although still pretty high for the discipline). So, Nature papers in my field (ecology) are piggy-backing on the IF generated by papers in more highly-cited fields. (Although of course, IFs do become self-fulfilling: I must cite a Nature paper in order to make my work sound important.)

In probably the best summary I’ve read of the use and misuse of bibliometrics, Brian Cameron puts it nicely:

Publication… in a high-impact factor journal does not mean that an article will be highly cited, influential, or high quality

Given that it’s as easy to find out the number of citations to an individual paper as it is to obtain a journal’s IF, it seems odd to judge a paper on the journal-level figure which it may possibly exceed (although it probably will not). As a (humbling?) exercise, should we maybe highlight which of our papers exceed (or do not) the citation pattern predicted by the IF of the journal in which they appear?

Inevitably, we turn to the (in)famous h index. You’ve got to admire the succinctness of this index, with the entire text of the abstract of Hirsch’s orignal paper reading:

I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥ h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher

It also led to my favourite Nature headline, sometime in 2007:

Hirsch index valuable, says Hirsch

And it probably is, despite problems with irregular citation patterns. For instance, when I checked the citation record of Hubbell’s Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, one of the most influential ecological works of the last decade (and published, would you believe, as an old-fashioned book!), I found that that incorrect spellings and permutations of name, title etc. have resulted in this single work being cited in more than 60 different ways over the course of its >1100 citations!

Anyway, I’ve not kept up with the bibliometrics literature, but wonder if anyone has proposed the following modification of h: what is your h score per paper published? In other words, have you achieved an h of 20 due to 20 brilliant papers, or 200 mostly mediocre ones?

Finally, a quick note on game playing: if you haven’t seen it, check out Andy Purvis’s cheeky demonstration of how preferentially citing those of your papers that hover just below the h threshold can be beneficial…

Sciency Fiction

I’ve been thinking about science in fiction recently. Prompted by Jennifer Rohn’s recent piece in Nature, I checked out her excellent LabLit site. Cath Ennis has also been blogging here about books, but most enticingly I have a stack of novels ready for my holiday next month. Time, then, for a personal selection of some science-themed fiction I’ve enjoyed in the last ten or so years… Although I was a science fiction nut as a boy, and still enjoy the odd foray into epic space operas – Iain M. Banks, principally – most of what I read these days comes of the general fiction shelves. And I’ll be honest, often I read fiction to escape from the day job, so I’m not really a massive consumer of LabLit. In fact, interpreting the genre (overly) literally, I can think of only two books I’ve read that actually feature a laboratory – Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and Atomised by Michel Houellebecq.

These two novels demonstrate nicely though that even when science and scientific ideas are important in a book, it is their qualities as works of fiction that are most important to me. Chief among these are character and style (possibly one of the reasons I didn’t get on with Ian McEwan’s Saturday was my intense dislike of the charmless Henry Perowne – although neither Michel nor Bruno in Atomised are exactly sympathetic and I loved that…) I’m less fussed about plot. Indeed some of my favourite books, by the likes of David Mitchell, Haruki Murukami, or Geoff Dyer, either leave large chunks of plot unresolved, or (in the case of Dyer especially) simply have little of much consequence happen in them.

I perhaps don’t tend to go for classic LabLit then, but I do like a book with a scientific sensibility, ‘sciency fiction’, if you will. Specifically, as an ecologist I like to read good authors writing about the natural world. Sometimes this is overtly scientific – Hope Clearwater, protagonist in William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach, is a professional ecologist, and distilled through Boyd’s literary eye, her descriptions of field work in Dorset and Africa are especially vivid.

More often though, the science is more subtle. I loved Being Dead by Jim Crace, for example: the story of an elderly couple, murdered amid remote sand dunes, and slowly decomposing, it sounds horribly morbid but the tiny ecological details make it strangely beautiful. Given that I’m writing as Mola mola, I should probably mention Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flannagan too, although the focus is less on fish biology than on the grotesque deprivations of life in the penal colonies of Tasmania. There’s a nice fishy theme in Luis Fernando Verissimo’s wonderful The Club of Angels too, specifically the joys of eating the deadly fugu – more gastronomy than science, but a diversion well worth taking!

I’m a sucker for geekiness, and I like authors who assume of their readers a certain facility with numbers. Many writers think nothing of inserting, untranslated, phrases in Latin or Greek, German or Spanish. Why not then credit readers with knowledge of calculus or t-tests? So, while some may think it indulgent, I was rather charmed by the pages of pi reproduced in Douglas Coupland’s JPod, and the mathematical ‘calcae’ (appendices) at the end of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Neal Stephenson is an interesting case, the only author above who remains confined to the Science Fiction and Fantasy shelves in my local bookshop – a barrier sufficient to deter many potential readers. I maintain however that his sprawling Baroque Cycle is as effective an evocation of time and place (17th and early 18th Century Europe and beyond) as any I’ve read, encompassing wars and disease as well as the foundations of modern economics and natural scientific enquiry – in short, it is a work of historical fiction, albeit one with a scientific bent. I’m not claiming his works are worthy of the major literary prizes (indeed I’ve often felt that some of his tomes might benefit from losing a hundred pages here and there), but it has become something of a mission for me to convince those friends and family who loved, for instance, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall that they would find something to enjoy in Stephenson’s epic. That my missionary zeal has yet to catch on only makes me more determined!