Category Archives: Research and Academia
A new list of predatory (blacklist) journals is available…for a fee
Beall’s list of predatory journals has found a “commercial” replacement. Let’s see how much it will cost to access.
Source: U.S. company launches a new blacklist of deceptive academic journals | University Affairs
Naylor Report on Fundamental Science in Canada released!
Report home can be found here: Canada’s Fundamental Science Review. The download link for the report itself is prominently displayed.
We have received 439 000$ from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation JR Evans Leader Funds Program
“Luc Beaulieu, du même département, disposera de près de 440 000$ pour réaliser son projet Development of Novel Optic-based Dose Sensors and Dose-based Treatment Guidance. ”
Source: 17 projets financés par le Fonds des leaders – Journal Le Fil
Money to acquire new state-of-the-art equipment. Will expand our research program and enable new graduate student projects.
Exciting!
New publication by our group on Quantum Dots as radiation nano-dosimeters.
Systematic characterization of semiconductor colloidal quantum dots (cQDs) response to ionizing radiation must be performed to use them in radiation detection. In this study, the robustness of multi-shell (MS) and core/shell (CS) cQDs was investigated under irradiation. Radioluminescence (RL) measurements with kV and MV photon beams revealed a better resistance of MS cQDs to ionizing radiation, with their spectra fluctuating by barely ∼ 1 nm. A systematic signal recovery between subsequent irradiations was noticed for MS cQDs only. A beam energy dependence of the RL stability was detected between kV and MV energies. At the same point of dose cumulated, the RL signal loss for the kV beams was observed to be ∼6-7% smaller than that of the MV beam, for both types of cQDs. These results demonstrate that MS cQDs are better candidates as ionizing radiation sensors than CS cQDs, especially in the kV energy range.
Source: Robust shell passivation of CdSe colloidal quantum dots to stabilize radioluminescence emission
PLOS ONE: How Many Is Too Many? On the Relationship between Research Productivity and Impact
Clearly if you do not published, you can never be cited…However, interesting to see that the Natural sciences field seems to taper-off more quickly than the life science field.
Source: PLOS ONE: How Many Is Too Many? On the Relationship between Research Productivity and Impact
Luc Beaulieu on brachytherapy research!
Here is a BrachyTalk interview I gave during the 2016 ESTRO meeting in Torino, Italy. Get to know what I am working on and my (physics and biomedical technology) vision of the field.
Thanks to the peoples at BrachyAcademy for making me look good during that interview 😉
How much time does it really take?
To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.– Max Born
When a graduate student come to me with the big news that its abstract has been selected for an oral presentation, my first reaction is a big congratulations and the second is to already set a deadline for a first version of the talk. Because of the abstract, you already know the content, what needs to be presented. But crafting an effective 7, 8 or 10 minutes presentation is a complete new game.
Read the rest of this entry
Scintillation Dosimetry Book is now available!
It has been a few years in the making (from the first conceptual idea to publication) but the baby has been delivered and is now available at CRC Press.
Cool 😉
To “Google Scholar” or not…
The reality is simple, even if you do not want it, as a researcher you are something of a public figure. You are probably using public funds to do your research, you most probably train peoples (from undergrads to research assistants) and, sometimes, more than you think actually, you will be googled.
For all kinds of reasons you might not want to tell the world openly what kind of research you are doing (which is actually a shame) or even keep people for knowing your “at bat” scores (e.g. is your work actually being cited at all). Let me tell you a secret, unless you have never published anything, Google Scholar will find you… even if you do not want to.
So do not be shy and make your Google Scholar page public!
The new lazy: non-field specific meeting and journal invitations
We came across your contribution entitled <name of your paper here> published in <journal name here> and thought your expertise would be an excellent fit for <name of this unrelated – to your specialty – congress>.
We invite you as speaker at <full name of congress with dates>.
It is becoming a new form of either spamming or phishing (I still haven’t decided yet) or actually maybe a combination of both, especially that most seem to come from meeting organizers on topics that are completely unrelated to my field of expertise for the said meeting. I now received 7-10 of such invitations per week.
An interesting resource for PhDs, postdocs and early career researchers
I recently came across the following document by Professor Alan M Johnson, which appears to be distributed freely by Elsevier and entitled “Charting a Course for a Successful Research Career: A Guide for Early Career Researchers – 2nd edition“.
How many citations are actually a lot of citations?
In a previous blog post, I suggested to my younger colleagues that while they should not care so much about the impact factor of the journals they published in (as long as these journals are well-read in their respective fields of research), they should care quite a lot about these papers being cited, and cited by others not self-cited!
A few months ago, I was listening to the introductory talk of for a prestigious award from our national organization when one statement hit me: a physicist with 2000 or more citations is part of the 1% most cited physicists worldwide. There might have been a bit more to that statement but let’s work with it.
Semantic Scholar
A new search engine, Semantic Scholar, is being proposed to the scientific community and it uses artificial intelligence. Right now it is limited to computer science papers according to the website.
Let see how this one evolves!
Business management meet student mentoring
There is Nothing so Unequal as the Equal Treatment of Unequals
– Leadership and the One Minute Manager
If someone would have told me 15 years ago that I would write about a blog post on the link between some business management principals and student supervision, I would probably have reply “are you crazy, science is pure, untainted (yeah!). Business is all about money and nothing about peoples”.
