For articles from the current issue, please see the Editors' WebWatch page.

May 2008 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 34, no. 2)

CrossRef again
http://sourceforge.net/projects/crossref-cite/

CrossRef now has a lookup plugin for Wordpress. This is a blogging tool, so why should anyone who is not a blogger be interested? The answer is that a decent blogging platform is simply a content management system that makes it easy to manage short chunks of text that don’t merit pages of their own, and sort them by date or topic. There’s no reason why you couldn’t use Wordpress or Movable Type, or whatever, for a traditional website, and plenty of people do.

As far as I know, there’s no CrossRef plugin for MediaWiki, the code on which Wikipedia runs, but there could well be by the time this issue reaches your hands.


OpenSearch
www.opensearch.org

This has been around for two years or so, but it’s useful only if you have it built into your browser. Now that browsers like Firefox (version 2 onwards) and Internet Explorer (version 7 onwards) support it, in the search bar in the top right-hand corner of the screen, I find myself using Google surprisingly seldom. I can directly search PubMed and, if I must, Wikipedia, without remembering the URL or rummaging for a bookmark. They’re now part of the browser.

Resources that are less obviously literature-based, biological classifications like IntEnz, frequently support openSearch, as does the handy German–English–German dictionary at dict.leo.org.

One of the best things about OpenSearch is auto-discovery, which means that if you go to an OpenSearch-enabled site and click on the dropdown, you find out straight away whether the site supports OpenSearch and can add it to your list.

Bad news for users of Mac-specific browsers, though: Safari doesn’t support OpenSearch at present, and Camino users will have to wait for version 1.6.


Sending large files, or HTTP instead of FTP
www.yousendit.com

YouSendIt allows you to send large files without using an ftp site. You can register for a free account, which would serve most people’s needs, or pay for one that allows you to send huge amounts. When someone sends you something from YouSendIt, you receive an email notification that contains a link to their website, from where you download the files. The recipient does not need to be registered. “Someone sent me something through this service recently,” says Emma Campbell, “and it was very simple and fast (depending, of course, on internet connection speed) to use.”


Mapping science
www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/index.html

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. Interesting to see are the science research maps, where more than three times as many publications come from the USA as from the second highest publishing population, Japan. The science growth map is also interesting for us editors, showing the growth in scientific research: territories without an increase in scientific publications are not on the map. The 366 maps are also available as PDF posters.


More bibliometrics
www.scimagojr.com/

A collaboration between Scopus and some Spanish universities has put together a new citation-based number that they intend to compete with Eugene Garfield/ISI’s impact factor.

Colin Batchelor (compiler)
BatchelorC@rsc.org

Thanks to Emma Campbell, Richard Hurley, Paola de Castro, Margaret Cooter.

February 2008 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 34, no. 1)

Check your citations here
http://www.crossref.org/Simple TextQuery/
http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/

CrossRef (all of us who are publishers are members of CrossRef, aren’t we?) has a pair of pages for looking up its database of journal articles.

The simple text query web page lets you paste in a reference from a manuscript and fetch the DOI, but the guestquery page is possibly more reliable and is lets you specify data like journal title, author names or article title from an otherwise vague citation.


“Vancouver style” updated
http://www.icmje.org/index.html

The “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication” of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors were updated in October 2007, with new considerations on publication ethics.


Reporting guidelines for medical research
http://www.consort-statement.org/index.aspx?o=1011
http://www.strobe-statement.org/Checklist.html
http://www.consort-statement.org/Initiatives/MOOSE/moose.pdf
http://www.equator-network.org/

The new “Vancouver” standards document mentions some domain-specific initiatives for reporting guidelines: CONSORT is for randomized controlled trials; STROBE is for STrengthening the Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology; and MOOSE is for Meta-analyses Of Observational Studies in Epidemiology.

Emerging from all of this work is the EQUATOR network, which is based at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford, which is intended to promote transparent and accurate reporting of health research, mainly by raising awareness.


Reporting guidelines for biological research
http://mibbi.sourceforge.net/

Outside clinical medicine, reporting guidelines are catching on. To make sure that they’re not being duplicated, the Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) project has been set up.

My favourite acronym for a set of guidelines is the not-at-all-contrived MISFISHIE, which stands for Minimum Information Specification For In-Situ Hybridization and Immunohistochemistry Experiments.


Integrity of chemical data
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ReSourCe/AuthorGuidelines/AuthoringTools/ExperimentalDataChecker/index.asp
http://sourceforge.net/projects/checkcml/

Formal guidelines for reporting data are less common in the physical sciences: the perception among researchers is that a well-conducted experiment or computation will speak for itself.  Nevertheless, specific fields have their own conventions for reporting data, and one of the most formulaic is chemical synthesis.

The idea of the Experimental Data Checker, developed at the University of Cambridge and sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry, is that you can paste in the data sections from an organic or inorganic chemistry paper and it will look through them for errors. Referees find this particularly useful. If you’re feeling brave enough to look at the source code to see how it’s done, or indeed to use it for something else, it’s on sourceforge.net.


From data integrity to research integrity
http://ori.hhs.gov/education/products /syracuse/index.shtml

The United States Office of Research Integrity, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services has made available a set of 10 short videos from Syracuse University (funded by the ORI). Says the blurb: “When is it appropriate to share data? Are you allowed to share the research protocol with other universities? Under what circumstances is it appropriate to remove lab books from the lab? After viewing each 10 second video, the learners are presented with a question to see what action they would take in response to the situation. Consequences for each action are given to allow users immediate feedback about their decision making process.”


Short URLs you can keep an eye on
http://qurl.com/

In the November issue we mentioned tinyurl as a way of shortening long URLs. There’s also qurl.com, which allows you to track who’s clicking on the short URLs you’ve created.


Nature: 138 years of science publication
http://www.nature.com/nature/history/index.html

Nature has published a web feature about its own history. The interactive part, where people can vote for their favourite or most outrageous article (the infamous “memory of water” paper is listed here) is something of a damp squib – the leading paper had just eight votes as of 14 December.

Colin Batchelor (compiler)
Thanks to Paola De Castro, Penny Hubbard, Eleonora Lacorte, Margaret Cooter.

November 2007 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 33, no. 4)

New global science gateway
www.worldwidescience.org

A new online global gateway to science information has now been opened by the US Department of Energy, the British Library, and eight other participating countries. WorldWideScience.org uses federated search technology to give citizens, researchers, and anyone interested in science the capability to search science portals that are not easily accessible through popular search technology. It will use existing technology to search vast collections of science information distributed across the globe, enabling much-needed access to smaller, less well-known sources of science. As WorldWideScience.org grows, it will give access to the research results of any nation in any language.


European academy for scientific explainers
http://ease.infm.it/index.html

We all know what EASE is, but did you know that there is another EASE on the web?? It is the European Academy of Scientific Explainers, representing a project based in Genoa, Italy, involving many and various scientific centres throughout Europe. The Science Festival of Genoa (www.festivalscienza.it/it/home.php) proposes a training programme for graduates and researchers with the core skills and personal awareness development inherent in the new professional figure of Scientific Explainer.


Most-cited geology papers
www.thomson.com/content/pr/sci/229867

Thomson Scientific has analysed 10 years of geology research and found that larger institutions generally tend to have higher total citations since they publish more articles. Among the top 10 most highly cited institutions (each cited more than 11,000 times), six are located in the United States – first is the US Geological Survey with 23,172 citations; the others are in China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom.Geology is the most cited journal, with 116,069 citations.


All-in-one search engine debuts in UK
www.webfetch.com

Infospace launched an all-in-one search engine called WebFetch, hailed as searching the entire web Using just one engine leaves a huge amount of relevant content unseen, but combining results from various engines increases the likelihood of relevant search results. WebFetch provides the top results from the biggest and best search engines including Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live search, and Ask.com, along with smaller and more specialist engines like blinkx and Kelkoo. WebFetch also allows users to personalise their search using advanced tools and settings.


Fishing for words on the net
http://term-minator.it/

Search definitions, proverbs, abbreviations, acronyms, portals, literary texts, bibliographies, museums ... and much more – in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.


Full open-access with Springer Open Choice
www.springer.com/italy/home/open+choice

Springer Open Choice offers to make authors’ articles made available with full open access for a basic fee, or “article processing charge”. Authors who choose open access in Springer’s programme will not be required to transfer their copyright to Springer. All articles will be peer-reviewed, professionally produced, and available both in print and in electronic versions on SpringerLink. In addition, every article will be registered in CrossRef and included in the appropriate Abstracting and Indexing services.


EBSCO Launches Data-Rich E-Journal Reference Tool
www.support.epnet.com/support_news/detail.php?id=394&page=

To assist editors and librarians in tracking e-journal changes, EBSCO has launched its data-rich E-Journal Updates feature within EBSCONET. The tool allows librarians to review titles where format or pricing options have changed, view an archived history of changes made via E-Journal Updates, receive notification when an online version of a current print subscription becomes available, identify journals that have changed publisher, view new open access titles, and identify titles that have been added to or removed from e-journal packages.


Fitting urls
www.tinyurl.com or http://www.tiny.cc/

TinyURL can be used to shorten long urls that break in emails and oblige readers to cut and paste them into the address bar, or that need to be painstakingly retyped when they are found in printed publications. By entering a long URL in this software, you will get a tiny URL (usually about 20 characters in total) that will not break in emails or postings and never expires.

August 2007 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 33, no. 3)

Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenXML
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/
http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/

Buying a new computer? Should you upgrade to Windows Vista and Office 2007? The answer at the moment, at least for people copy-editing scientific manuscripts, seems to be “not yet”. This has even made it to the national press, with the news that neither Nature nor Science will accept papers in Microsoft’s new .docx format: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/insideit/story/0,,2096779,00.html

At first glance this is surprising. The new format is based on XML (http://www.w3.org/XML/ - described by the World Wide Web Consortium as “designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing”), and big scientific publishers use XML for at least some of their workflow. But what Microsoft had in mind was an XML format that would faithfully represent the innards of Word documents, certainly not one that would work easily with familiar XML technology like MathML (which, as the name suggests, represents mathematics)—hence the trouble that NPG and AAAS are having.

Murray Sargent, a developer at Microsoft, gives Microsoft’s side of the story on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/archive/2007/06/05/science-and-nature-have-difficulties-with-word-2007-mathematics.aspx

If you’re working on the technical side of publishing, this blog and Brian Jones’s blog (see above) are two you will have to follow.

Finally, Howard Ratner, the chief technology officer at NPG, explains “why Word 2007 is not being actively endorsed by STM publishers”: http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2007/06/word_2007_and_the_stm_publishe.html


Blogs and aggregation
Remaining in the blogosphere, I’ve had Matt Hodgkinson Barrett of BMC’s Journalology (http://journalology.blogspot.com/) drawn to my attention. Like the original, and most comprehensive, Peter Suber’s Open Access News (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html), Journalology is one of the many open access advocacy blogs, all picking over the same items of news.

Faced with the profusion of blogs that are saying similar things, one of the most exciting developments in the blogosphere is aggregators, especially in the life and chemical sciences. Postgenomic (http://www.postgenomic.com/), developed by Nature Publishing Group, collects its posts from hundreds of science blogs and puts them in order by subject.

An intriguing spinoff has been developed by chemist Egon Willighagen. It’s called Chemical Blogspace (http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/cb/).

There are all sorts of ways of mining chemical blogs through this website, but the most interesting is sorting posts by molecule (see illustration). This relies on some clever HTML trickery which is probably beyond the typical blogger. They need a better blogging tool for chemists.


A scholarly electronic publishing bibliography
http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepb.html

Rather more low-tech is the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography compiled by Charles W Bailey, Jr, which is rather like our Editor’s Bookshelf and concentrates on the “changing system of academic scientific communication”.


Open access in medical publishing
http://www.openmedicine.ca/

Finally, I should mention a new peer reviewed open access journal from Canada, Open Medicine. It describes its mission as “to facilitate the equitable dissemination of high-quality health research; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care.”

It’s interesting to see a medical journal that doesn’t accept advertising from for-profit pharmaceutical or medical device companies. (See also p 86.)

Thanks to Liz Wager and Paola de Castro.

May 2007 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 33, no. 2)

Creating a discipline-specific search engine to guide editing
http://www.rollyo.com

Copyeditors with doubts about how to handle the language surrounding scientific terms have been harnessing the power of Google and Google Scholar gratefully. Even better would be a single-purpose search engine to guarantee highly relevant examples from a limited set of topic-and-register-specific websites.

A service called Rollyo lets anyone open a free account and set up such a "searchroll", tailored to a particular client in a few minutes. All you do is give your searchroll a name and then specify the URLs of sites you trust to give you good guidance on terms, usage, and style for that job. It's also possible to import searchrolls constructed by others onto your interface.

Although language in medical disciplines overlaps, the high level of specificity of microsearch engines helps sort out usage preferences, turning up some curious patterns. I've found, for example that the frequency of utility is higher than that of usefulness for the same sense and contexts on the anesthesiology searchroll, whereas usefulness seems to be preferred by the pneumologists.

The name Rollyo derives from the phrase roll your own , an unfortunate allusion to smoking and apparently an expression denoting independent thinking in some circles! Another small quirk to overlook is that the user interface is called a dashboard (figure). Such imagery may reflect who the developers and users of this service are, as an ongoing survey on the website suggests that 60% of users are under 24 years old, none at all are aged between 40 and 54 years, and only 20% of us are 55 years old or over. Based on the smoking and driving imagery, one suspects there might be gender differences too!

A real shortcoming is that searching is slower than on Google. The specificity makes up for everything, however, as it's particularly useful on projects where the usage of several editors or translators needs to converge quickly.

Guidelines for grey literature
www.glisc.info

The Grey Literature International Steering Committee (GLISC) has launched its website, writes Paola De Castro. The "Nancy style", named after the site of the group's 2005 meeting, fills a gap for authors and issuers of documents circulated in limited editions. Many useful sections will seem familiar to readers of other guidelines, but a novel one that caught my eye was on "revision editing". It gives advice on what to pay attention to when editing at three different speeds - a rush edit, a standard edit, and a professional edit. I can imagine the steering committee ruminating over what to call the highest level, which addresses improvements in comprehensibility for the intended audience, appropriate balance of content on different subtopics, and the logical hierarchy of sections.

The rationale for this section was interesting too: that grey literature is often unsupported by professional publishing services, meaning that more responsibility falls on the authors to provide polished, ready copy. Editors of smaller scientific journals might also find that section useful, as publishers' routine provision of "professional edits" for journals has been gradually curtailed over the past 25 years or so. Therefore, authors submitting to scientific journals might also benefit from hints on how to make their manuscripts closer to photo-ready before submission.

Open post-publication review
www.biowizard.com and www.journalreview.org

PubMed Central started the "wizard" site to host post-publication responses to articles and discussion has begun to appear. A posting on the World Association of Medical Editors' listserve (www.wame.com) noted that an earlier virtual journal club exists at JournalReview.org. These sites have the potential to provide forums for critical peer review of articles in journals that don't include rapid response forums on-line. They're free to join and serve as a place to post letters to the editor that may have been rejected. The WAME posting recommended the following dialogue by way of example: http://journalreview.org/view_pubmed_article.php?pmid=15787813&specialty_id.

When I visited the Journal Review site independently, however, I saw that one criticism needs to be registered against it. Anonymous postings are allowed, and it seems unwise to me to encourage unreviewed discussion among reviewers unwilling to sign their names. After all, authors have gone public with theirs. The posts can be refreshingly informal ("Cauliflower allergy??? Proof by a prick test??? Does anyone else think this is bunk?"). But such off-hand comments leave the door open to hiding motives for criticism, and unlike the exemplary posting (link above), they don't seem to elicit dialogue anyway.

Toward clearer prose, writing worth citing, and better writing instruction

Raise your awareness of how yesterday's buzzwords become today's irritating jargon by visiting Jargon Finder (http://www.comnetwork.org/jargonmain.htm) by the Communications Network, a group dedicated to improving the capabilities of non-profit organizations. Terry Clayton sent word of this site, and when I visited it I found two layers of information. First comes a list of words to think twice about using. There may be nothing intrinsically wrong with paradigm, maximize, empowerment, or engagement in general, but prose or speeches stuffed with them make one sleepy. Clicking on a link to new additions brings up a discussion between Tony Proscio - author of three essays about the words in the basic list - and others about new irksome turns of phrase. I learned that baseline has been transformed into a verb that means send a project back to square one. I also learned that out of pocket is being used to mean out of the loop - surely a malapropism in its new use.

One of the best advice guides to scientific writing I've seen in a long time calls itself an "unofficial guide" on writing articles worth citing. Sponsored by the European Union's Joint Research Center, it was posted in 2006 as a printable pdf file at: http://eusoils.jrc.it/ESDB_Archive/eusoils_docs/other/EUR22191.pdf. Authors Tomislav Hengl and Mike Gould's prose is crisp, and they've brought their ideas together in fresh ways implied by the "worth citing" part of their title. This guide of only 66 pages is frank about its "make an impact or perish" message (p 6). But the authors clearly admire the underlying scientific enterprise, and the guide isn't cynical. It leaves me feeling that science is worth writing well about - and editing well too. I can imagine its use in journal clubs or scientific writing workshops.

I learned about Hengl and Gould's guide from a post on the listserve of the EATAW - the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (http://www.eataw.org/). Joy Burrough-Boenisch first spread the word about EATAW, which is free to join. Ostensibly started to disseminate information about resources for writing teachers and students, the listserve has recently included excellent postings by some of today's most important researchers on the nature of writing. Activity has been stimulated by the Bologna accords to promote mobility in European higher education.

Language fun

Two suggestions on the lighter side came from Terry Clayton in Thailand:

www.langaugelog.com

This blog is written by a bunch of top-notch linguists who comment, usually hilariously and with elegant turns of phrase as well as actual evidence, on silly language stories in the news. If it's bunk, they debunk it.

www.doubletongued.org

Lexicographer Grant Barrett finds the words that dictionaries have overlooked, such as "hump strap" and "briffit", and posts them on Double-Tongued, with full citations. These are words that are actually in use, not ones made up by teens for cheap thrills.

Thanks to EASE members Terry Clayton, Paola De Castro, and Joy Burrough-Boenisch - and to the many fine posters on the EATAW and WAME listserves who have guided my googling toward new directions.

February 2007 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 33, no. 1)

Phoning free over your broadband connection—Skype and similar VoIP service providers
http://www.skype.com/intl/es/helloagain.html
Voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) phoning, talked about for some time, is now easy to set up, free, and a boon to editors who deal with international authors or suppliers. Ease of use has increased over the past year as the service has moved beyond the “early adopter” phase of information technology spread. The proof is that the name of widely-used provider, Skype, has become an English verb even faster than google did before it. There’s no need to capitalize it when you email a client in Turkey or Brazil to ask, “When can I skype – your time tomorrow – to talk about your manuscript?”

Still just getting used to the idea?
I’ll focus on applications any editor can set up quickly and benefit from right away. Four services stand out:

-completely free phoning to another user whose computer is switched on
-easy transfer of very large files directly through the web rather than an email server
-easy conference calls, and
-deeply discounted PC-to-land-or-cell phone connection.

To start, I recommend buying a headset with a microphone from any computer shop. A headset to plug into speaker ports will cost less than €10 but an upgrade to a USB headset recently has given me better sound and lets me listen to music or take calls without toggling from one interface to another. Other hardware options are traditional-looking USB phones or separate microphones (for use with a computer’s built-in speakers). But for editors and anyone else working a keyboard with a collaborator or client while speaking, hands-free skyping with a headset is a blessing. Warning – cordless Bluetooth technology does not seem to work well at this time. Against advice on usergroups, I tried it: I needed help with installation and finally uninstalled it because of discouraging complications during many calls.

The second step takes minutes. Download the latest version of the software from the Skype homepage. Never has installation of software been so intuitive, so I won’t waste column space on it. If you’ve persuaded a far-off friend or relative to set up at the same time, you’ll be talking within minutes and soon be confident about skyping clients and colleagues too.

Worried about privacy?
My simple firewall built into Windows XP and my Skype setting to admit only calls from people on my list of contacts has kept intruders away. Before callers can reach me, I have to admit them to my contact list. Occasionally strangers have asked to be added – about nine in a year – but I’ve clicked to block future contact from them and heard no more.

Wondering if there are advantages you’ll use right away? Conference calls for virtual teams are easy to set up with a single click for each invited speaker, and additional ones can be added during a call. Sending files that are too large for email servers is also easy and can be done in the middle of a call. Finally, it’s possible to reach fixed phones at half the usual rates or cell phones (by voice or message) at a sharp discount by buying “credit” first. A little goes a very long way. The PC-to-land-line option is still the easiest way to call authors and colleagues around the world as I write, but I’m finding that if I ask if someone has a Skype username, the answer is sometimes yes. More and more people are skyping, and usernames are starting to pop up in email signatures and on business cards.

For brave hearts and hardware lovers moving beyond basics, Skype works with camera, and one early adopter I know is looking into Skype WiFi phones.

Is Skype the only VoIP service provider? For a while, start-ups focused on selling PC-to-land-line services, especially in the US market. Skype took a different approach. They drew users to the free PC-to-PC option, explained and supported it well, and offer the land-line service only on a second plane. Though Google (http://www.google.com/talk/), Yahoo (http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/help/voicechat.html) and others have offered the same service, Skype’s single-minded dedication brought in the necessary critical mass of satisfied users. From there, the news spread by word of mouth – and that’s how skype became an English verb in 2006.

Writing for websites
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
Skype’s website is among the most usable I’ve seen and it’s a model of plain English writing. That brings me to EASE member Terry Clayton’s recommendation for WebWatch – a study posted by John Morkes and Jakob Nielson on how users read online. The implications of their work for designers and writers are clearly illustrated in heatmaps of computer screens showing where readers’ eyes focus most often – anyone who’s ever looked at scintigraphic or thermographic images will interpret them easily.

From Morkes and Nielson’s work I learned about the F viewing pattern – a tendency we have to scan in a couple of horizontal bars across the top and then down the left. I read about their confirmation that lower literacy readers plow through text linearly, the equivalent of reading with a finger tracking the words. Nielson advises on how to write for either type of reader, noting that what helps weaker readers helps us all.

I recommend scanning the site’s many titles – following links to well-focused, cross-referenced pages. It’s a delightful intertextual experience. The look of Nielson’s homepage and the web writing tab (URL above) is retro. He explains that no graphics means fast loading and easy handling of high traffic. The bulletin-board esthetic didn’t keep me from clicking and reading away, finding food for thought at many turns.

Ways to handle scholarship on the web – writers are finding hybrid formats
How Nielson’s research is presented to readers on the web is worth savouring. The chunks are short and snappy, but IMRaD information is present.

The environment is Nielson’s own, not peer reviewed, so though there are links to proper peer-reviewed conferences, it’s Nielson’s own status as a leader in the field of information usability that stands behind what he posts. That’s the case with science blogs in general.

Still, Nielson’s website is more studied than a blog: it was interesting to see how he organizes a text to build up my confidence as I read. Information comes in a researcher’s version of the journalist’s inverted pyramid structure. Each page starts with a headline message and an ultra-short summary. That’s followed by enough methods information to persuade a reader to take the message seriously, followed by more detailed data and a brief discussion of implications. At the bottom of the page, links lead to further information and respectable venues where the data have been presented to peers.

Iain Patten also reports signs that the internet is inspiring some journalists to create closer ties between their writing for the general public and more scholarly writing for critical peers. Iain sent a link to the web page of Guardian writer George Monbiot (www.monbiot.com). Monbiot’s newspaper articles end with direction to the URL of his website and sometimes a note saying that references can be found there. On Monbiot’s site, critical readers accustomed to scholarly articles find the same text with reference numbers in their familiar positions so that the knowledge base can be tracked.

Ethics guidelines for editors
Karen Shashok reports that autumn 2006 saw the release of guidelines for journal editors by two rival STM publishers and the Council of Science Editors. All three guidelines are freely available on the internet – no login, no password, no tolls.

The CSE’s White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications is an imposing 75-page opus (September 2006) by D Scott-Lichter and the Editorial Policy Committee. It’s available at http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/editorial_policies/white_paper.cfm.
In November, Blackwell Publishing made their “best practice guidelines” on publication ethics available at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/press/pressitem.asp?ref=988. That paper – by Chris Graf, Elizabeth Wager, Alyson Bowman, Suzan Fiack, Diane Scott-Lichter and Andrew Robinson – is “only” 26 pages long in its PDF version (see From The Literature, page 17 this issue).

Elsevier has enlarged its already hefty collection of online resources for editors at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/editorshome.editors. Karen writes that this site now has links to several interesting documents, including Ethical Guidelines for Journal Publication (6 pages in PDF format, version 1.0 dated October 2006) and Legal Guide for Editors Concerning Ethics Issues (5 pages, dated November 2006).

Thanks to EASE members Terry Clayton, Iain Patten, and Karen Shashok for their contributions and to Ann King for a critical view of VoIP hardware and software.

November 2006 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 32, no. 4)

Hot topics on the internet: following the virtual news trail in the Paraxel International phase 1 trial scandal
Readers are often cautioned to beware of the democratic and unfettered World Wide Web as a source of news or interpretation. Yet careful cross-checking of facts plus critical reading of rapidly posted sources can give a deeper or broader picture of events than traditional media can offer.

How the 2006 story of the phase 1 trial that nearly killed six men unfolded on the internet was analysed in a recent article by EASE member Karen Shashok in The Write Stuff — the journal of the European Medical Writers Association (Shashok K. 2006. On the net . . . drug testing, adverse reactions, and the TGN1412 disaster. The Write Stuff 15(2);63–66). The analysis led to interesting insights into the dissemination of news through web postings, some on sites unfiltered by journalists or other hired writers. Shashok found that information about patients’ progress was available on blogs authored by individuals after the mainstream press had moved on to other aspects of the story. Such self-archiving instruments provided a window onto the critical thinking of a wide range of expert commentators and policy makers.

Conclusions were that the internet allowed the manufacturer and institutions to present news more directly than would have been possible through traditional media. Discussion progressed more quickly, Shashok wrote, as manufacturing errors were investigated and ruled out and debate could switch to ethics and scientific background.

For readers without a subscription for accessing The Write Stuff article easily and who want to see how the story was handled on the web firsthand, Shashok recommends the following web sites: http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2006/03/window-on-human-research-done-by.html, a collection by the Alliance for Human Health Research Protection, and www.blacktriangle.org/blog, by Anthony Cox, who is also the author of the Wikipedia entry for TGN1412, the drug in the trial. My googling finds Cox to be a pharmacist with the West Midlands Centre for Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting in the UK—a good example of a scientific author for the 21st century.

Plagiarism: a new journal
www.plagiary.org/index.htm
A new open-access scholarly journal on the growing problem of plagiarism has appeared: Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. The journal’s interdisciplinary approach refers to differences in how plagiarism is perceived from different fields. The scope extends to any form of misconduct involving documents in any medium. The journal is also open to discussion of legitimate means of derivative expression — such as mimicry, parody and pastiche — as a start towards distinguishing real plagiarism from acceptable borrowing and inspiration.

The project was launched in January 2006 and the first 10 articles, a book review and an editorial had been posted by early September. Abstracts are posted as they are accepted and full articles as they are revised.

Plagiarism again: an updated web site resource
http://facpub.stjohns.edu/%7Eroigm/plagiarism
The first article published in Plagiary was a review of cases handled by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — reminding me that the ORI-sponsored instructional resource on plagiarism by Miguel Roig of St John’s University in New York was updated in August 2006. Those who looked at those very complete lessons and exercises when they were first mentioned in this column in August 2005 (ESE 31(3):95) know that the discussion, examples and exercises are highly appropriate for developing writers in the sciences.

Journal backfiles digitization
http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node280.html
Three partners — the Wellcome Trust, the Joint Informations Systems Committee, and the US National Library of Medicine — in a project to digitize historical journal backfiles have published the details on a web site. The site outlines objectives and lists the journals that have been selected. The oldest is the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, first published in 1809.

A practical freeware tool — work faster and better
Make your e-mail discussion of manuscripts with authors and colleagues go much faster with a simple tool to select, copy and paste partial screen shots of what you want to show them or query. Screen shots are pictures of what you see on your screen.

Most of us are familiar with keystrokes that will paste what we see on the screen onto the computer’s virtual clipboard, for later pasting to MS Power Point slides, documents or e-mails. (If not, try holding down the Control and Alt keys, then pressing the Print Screen key, and then going to any MS Word document before pasting the picture there.) Rarely do you want to show an author the entire screen, however, and you don’t want to bother cropping it in Paint or other software. So wouldn’t it be nice to download a tool that lets you draw a box around exactly the part of a screen that interests you? The little camera tool on the Acrobat Reader toolbar works like that, but what about other environments on your computer?

With freeware Screenshot Captor you can paste equations into an e-mail to focus an author’s attention for a quick question. You could show a typesetter which part of a figure is flawed and use fewer words to explain what needs to be done. In short you can work faster and communicate more effectively — especially with authors whose native language may not be English and for whom a picture is better than dozens of words.
Screenshot Captor is freeware, from many download sites — just use your favorite downloader or google the words freeware screenshot captor. Here are two sites that make it available: www.snapfiles.com/get/screenshotcator.html or www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/screenshotcaptor/index.html

For fun
www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
Author Michael Quinion, who writes about English words and the grammatical, social and literary company they’ve kept over the centuries, has collected his short essays, stories and items from a question-and-answer column on this well-organized web page: World Wide Words. Quinion’s subject is international English from a British point of view, and he’s best when writing about words — new or old — and their history rather than structures.

The site is searchable for those who know what they’re looking for. It’s also fun to roam from tab to tab, and the titles of short essays (articles, he calls them) convey their content immediately. I clicked on the question–answer entry for eggplant expecting to learn why US Americans abandoned aubergine and took up the more prosaic word. Instead, I learned that eggplant is the older name and that aubergine came from al-Andalusian Arabic (al-badinjan) after filtering through Catalan and French.

If you need to exercise discipline when engaging with a web site like this, between editing jobs you can allow yourself a specific number of clicks per day on Quinion’s Surprise me! tab. That gives you a random pick from the question–answer collection.

Quinion is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of New Words and the author of books published by the Oxford and Cambridge University presses and other houses. Those books are lightly promoted on the web site — not obtrusively so.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Moira Vekony, Karen Shashok, Paula de Castro and Ann King for their suggestions for this issue.

August 2006 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 32, no. 3)

Live Academic Search
www.live.com
Microsoft has released the beta version of Live Academic Search, a search engine for students, researchers and scholars that takes into account scientific and academic publications. Try it with your name — and see what comes back. It could be a more “focused” alternative to Google. A review at www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb0604171.shtml makes interesting reading.

Compare the above with:
Scopus
http://info.scopus.com
“Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources. It’s designed to find the information scientists need. Quick, easy and comprehensive, Scopus provides superior support of the literature research process. Updated daily.”

A rival of Live Academic Search, Scopus makes almost identical claims. When will the citation war end, we ask ourselves? On the other hand, competition should be beneficial to us all, so why don’t you do the fair thing and look at both of these options?
You can send your opinions to ESE too — we may publish a selection in the next issue.

Look smart: FindArticles
www.findarticles.com
Not a contender for “best of the web” (sorry, that comes later). Here there are five million full-text and free articles to peruse from magazines and journals dating back to 1998 (back? — when you reach my age you think that 1998 is “recent”). Some items require payment, but then it’s still cheaper to buy them article-by- article than to go the whole subscription hog. But try entering something fairly bland, such as “cat”. Don’t blame me if you waste your day!

Amazon A9
www.a9.com
At first glance this looks good. It offers to search a number of different categories, but on closer inspection not all of them seem to work. For example, I wanted to investigate “editorial blogs” (there must be some out there) but was told that the “blog search facility is unavailable”. When I looked for books, however, I got a whole heap of hits, some of which were new for me. So, give it a go. And if anyone wants to write an article on “editorial blogs” for publication in the next issue of ESE, please let me know.

Connotea
www.conotea.org
Connotea is a Nature-owned web site that works a bit like an online card index (remember those?). It’s a place to keep links to the articles you read and the web sites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and web sites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user’s links are visible to visitors and to every other user, and different users‘ libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks. This site has a lot of neat features, and it appears to be free to use. However, using it could lead to serious information overload. Give it a try, and let us know how you fare.

Common errors in English
www.wsu.edu/~brians/index.html
OK, I absolutely take off my hat to anyone who puts a link on his (or her) web site with the title: “If you feel tempted to argue with me, click here first”. This is a person clearly in charge of his own destiny. Awesome site: although US English biased, it’s no less useful for the detail. We will all find something of interest here.

Just for fun
Bad Stuff
http://askbobrankin.com/bad_stuff.html
“The Web is just brimming with `best of’ sites. But what about the bad, the ugly and the truly awful? In the spirit of admiring the atrocious, displaying the deplorable, and highlighting the heinous, let me present you with some Really Bad Stuff. Nothing dirty or illegal of course, but stuff so bad it’ll make you laugh.”

OK, the foregoing paragraph is unashamed plagiarism (from Bob Rankin of Tourbus) — because no-one could say it better (and I’m relieved to see that neither of my web sites feature here — for now).

Smiley Central
http://smiley.smileycentral.com
A whole new world of walking talking smileys for you to enjoy or get frustrated with. “No Registration Required. No Spyware. No Adware. Just Fun!” [No Comment.— Ed.].

Contributions for this issue came from Paola de Castro, Liz Wager and Moira Johnson-Vekony.

February 2005 issue of European Science Editing (vol. 31, no. 1)

The Scientist: news journal for the life scientist
www.the-scientist.com
The Scientist has been around for some 17 years, with a presence on the internet for a number of those. I was pleasantly surprised on returning to the site recently by the new design and feel of the home page. Useful dropdown menus make it easy to navigate, and the category names are meaningful. Articles are organized into sections such as Research, BioBusiness, and so on, and you can see the title of each article before deciding whether to load up another page. The content looks good -- up-to-date research and topical issues. The drawback (it seems there is always one with any web site worth its server space) is that to see the full text of most titles (classified as "premium content") you need to subscribe, and at USD 25 for the online version you may not judge this worthwhile. Take a look and decide.

GoogleScholar
http://scholar.google.com
This new and very useful offering from the Google team allows you to search "specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." This should reduce the number of irrelevant hits one gets and (almost) do away with the need for nested searches. Google Scholar supports many of Google's regular query modifiers, and also introduces a new one -- author:authorname. (Query modifiers are terms used as prefixes to the search keywords that allow you, for example, to get results only for files of a certain type or to exclude whole domains, and a whole host of other variations. Patrick Crispen of Tourbus has a very useful two-page PDF, free from http://tinyurl.com/4hhn9, which explains modifiers and shows you how to use them.)

Medic8
www.medic8.com
For searching drug or medical information try this specific search engine in preference to one based on full text. Medic8 claims to be a leading UK medical portal for health-care professions and consumers around the world. All of the content "has been reviewed by a qualified UK medical doctor prior to loading, and all the sites indexed have been chosen based on the trustworthiness of their content."

The board of Medic8 consists of 10 medics from different disciplines, mostly highly qualified. You can search for textbooks (both online and in print), clinical guidelines, drugs, even jobs, and there is also a section on the latest health-related news.

Vivisimo Clustering -- automatic categorization and metasearch
www.vivisimo.com
This metasearch engine categorizes search results to make them more meaningful and useful. Results are automatically organized into folders based on topic and subtopic. Too good to be true? Not quite -- it does seem to work and offers a useful way of homing in on the information you want without the need to scan hundreds of irrelevant or even ridiculous search results. Of course, you do need to know exactly what you are seeking before you begin.

The WWW Library Directory
www.webpan.com.msauers/libdir
"Currently indexing over 8800 libraries and library-related web sites in 130 countries. This site contains no ads, and is not built from a database that will only allow you to view one listing at a time." To actually borrow anything from the libraries you need to be there and have a user card, or be prepared to pay for the photocopies and postage. But for those hard-to-find journal articles and reference books, or just for interest, this site is worth a look. (As it says, no ads . . . ).

The best of everything
www.tourbus.com/best.html
This site, mainly because it is the work of one person (Patrick Crispen of Tourbus again), is based on opinion, but nevertheless it is a useful collection of good stuff, divided into around 100 easy-to-scan categories, with a description of each resource. Some are computer-related, for example "The Best ANTI-SPAM resources online" (tourbus.com/best_anti-spam.html) while others are of more general interest, such as "The Best ASTRONOMY resources online" (tourbus.com/best_astronomy.html) or "The Best of GAMES on the internet" (tourbus.com/best_kids_stuff.html). It has the promise of being very useful for almost any aspect of life -- work or leisure. Try it out and let me know what you think.

BookBrowse
www.bookbrowse.com
This site lists excerpts, information from book jackets, reviews and interviews with authors. Although the overwhelming majority of the featured titles are fiction, there is a smattering of non-fiction, so it may be worth a visit if you are planning a major reference book purchase.

Just for fun
http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~jbritton/jbsymteslk.htm#TOP
This site is part of the Camosun College web site (in Victoria, BC), and is a fascinating place to spend coffee breaks or those difficult times when deadlines should have been met yesterday. The subject material (mathematics of symmetry) is serious and is aimed at school-age students, but the exercises are fascinating and colourful (and if you like butterflies, you will love this: http:// butterflywebsite.com/).

WordCount
www.fabrica.it/wordcount
WordCount(TM) is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is. Enjoy.

Cricklers
www.crickler.com
If you like crossword puzzles, give this one a try; it's an interesting spin on the standard crossword.

Contributions for this issue came from Margaret Cooter, Alison Clayson, Marie-Louise Desbarats-Schönbaum and Moira Vekony.