Author Archives: Luc Beaulieu

Analysis of publication impact in predatory-journal – Nature

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In case you’ve missed this one, an interesting analysis was recently published in Nature on citations of manuscripts published in predatory journal. If you contrast with a previous post of mine (here), when considering all journals about 24% of publications get 10 or more citations. This falls dramatically for predatory journal. More importantly no paper get over 32 citations in those journals while 1.8% of all published manuscripts get over 100 citations in general.

 

Source: Predatory-journal papers have little scientific impact

Étudiant et auteur: pourquoi, quand et comment!

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A rare post in French on a conference I gave last year on the status of author taken by students, mainly in the context of sciences and engineering (my field) but pointers given are quite general.

Le titre de cet article est celui d’une présentation que j’ai donnée l’an dernier dans le cadre de la Semaine sur la conduite responsable en recherche 2019 organisée par l’Université Laval.

Cette présentation vient d’être mis en ligne et est disponible ici: https://youtu.be/7MEplFlwW30!

 

 

 

Warning, may contain…a PhD

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[This post was originally published over 6 years ago. It is still extremely relevant!]

Recently saw a comment by a student about not being advised before hand that doing a PhD had many difficulties and challenges. However, my first reaction reading that text was to start laughing. Of course, all that was said was true. But the first thing that came to my mind was the famous warning when you ask for a sundae with nuts at a McDonald : you received (at least in North America) the nuts in a small, sealed separate bag (think allergies); this bag has a warning that reads (seriously): may contain nuts!

Doh!

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The Power of the Yearly Review

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GTD methodology call of frequent review of projects and associated task lists. In fact, the whole system crumbles if this critical operation is not performed regularly; you need to trust that it contains everything in order to make the right decision at the right time with regard to which task(s) to take on at any given moment and not miss anything. However to enable you to make these daily decisions that move you toward a larger goal, the latter needs to be established up front and also revised on a regular basis. Enter the yearly review! Continue reading →

Systematically reject requests to review: a shameful behaviour?

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I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions – and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
– Bill Vaughan

Every time you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, you mobilize anywhere from 3 to 5 persons who will work absolutely for free on your manuscript. Minimally, you will have two reviewers and an associate editor, all who will take the time to read and critics your work. On the top of that, the editor will also spend times on it. If needed, a third reviewer will also be requested. 

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USB-C : One Port to Rule Them All!

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One of the great thing I liked about Apple lighting port (when it came out) was the versatility and reversibility of the connector. As I replaced my MacBook pro last year, the computer came with 4 ports, all USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 compatible. This has some drawbacks vs. legacy hardware but at the same time it is fairly easy to have USB-A to USB-C cables or adapters.

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