Insights on Scholarly Publishing Opportunities
What do you do when you want to turn your research into a publishable piece of scholarship – either a book or a scholarly journal article? Perhaps your thesis was very well received by your dissertation committee and you were encouraged to seek a publisher for it; perhaps you have a research leave or are looking towards tenure or promotion as you progress in your academic career. How do you begin to get the results of your research published? What is the role of the editor, how do scholarly publishers acquire books, what do you need to do to...
Where to Submit an Article
Since we seem to be talking about scientific writing this month, the question of where to submit your article arises. Now the easiest thing to do is to look through the list of references you used and see which journal(s) you cited the most often, and then submit to that journal. You can also ask your colleagues or adviser who have read the paper for suggestions. But if you’ve narrowed the list down to two or three journals, how do you decide which is best? There are two things to consider: relevance and accessibility. By narrowing down your list...
Scientific Jargon
Following up on last week‘s post on the book Scientific English by Day and Sakaduski which has some useful lists of “Problem Words and Expressions” and “Words and Expressions to Avoid,” this week I present a list of terms that have different meanings to scientists and to the general public. I was first alerted to this list on a blog by the Eric Berger, science writer at the Houston Chronicle. This list originally came from an article in Physics Today which discussed how climate scientists can improve how the present their findings to a general audience (hence, the inclusion...
12th Century Manuscript on the Pilgrimage to St. James of Compostela
Perhaps you’ve seen the recent news articles (Spanish, English, and BoingBoing post) about the recovery of a “priceless” Spanish manuscript on the history of the pilgrimage of St. James? Don’t think you’ll get to Santiago de Compostela, Spain anytime soon to make the pilgrimage yourself? You can still see a facsimile of the Codex calixtinus here in the Baylor University Libraries. We have a beautifully re-created facsimile in our Special Collections and you can arrange to see it by contacting either : Susan_Bowlin@baylor.edu (254-710-4791) or Jennifer_Borderud@baylor.edu (254-710-6677). The manuscript and our facsimile include music for the Catholic mass for...
Book Review: Scientific English
On occasion I plan to review books on the blog. Some will be of professional interest; others will be of general science interest. I doubt if too many of them will be for fun (unless I find a really good mystery novel set in a science department of a university). Today I will review Scientific Writing by Robert Day and Nancy Sakaduski. I was first introduced to this book by the writing center at my last institution. We called it the dancing pencil book because that was what was on the cover of the second edition. As you can...
Reading Library E-Books
So, finally after last week‘s e-book explanation, this week we will actually read library e-books on the Nook (I feel I should give the Nook a name). We will download books from OverDrive, EbscoBooks, and Ebrary. After trying, I am happy that I got a Nook instead of a Kindle because a Nook can read many more e-books especially those that have DRM. I started by downloading Adobe Digital Editions on both my work PC and my home Mac. This is a fairly simple process but does require registering a username with Adobe and authorizing each computer to access the...
E-Books and DRM and E-Book Distributors
Last week, I said we’d look into downloading books onto the Nook, but I realized that before I could do that I should do some research on e-books and especially library e-books. The standard format for e-books is ePub (except for Kindles which use Mobi) although some ebooks use pdf. There are many desktop, iOS, Android, and even Blackberry apps that read ePubs. You can even find plugins so that you can read ePubs on your browser. In general, any ePub reader will also be able to read a pdf. ePub e-books are nice because they repaginate when you...
Email and Web on the Nook
As I mentioned last time, I wanted to be able to use my new Nook to check email. The Nook comes with an email program. I wasn’t able to connect easily to my Baylor email account so I gave up. I’m not sure whether it was something on the Nook side or the Baylor side, but I think it’s because my Baylor account is an Exchange account and that was not an option in the email settings as it would be in regular Android (if I interpreted the Baylor help page correctly). However, connecting to my Yahoo account was...
My New Nook Tablet
For my birthday, my husband who blogs here, bought me a Nook tablet. Now you have to understand that we are not a smartphone family so a tablet was rather exciting. I’ve been looking for something to bring on vacation with me that I can use to check and triage email, but only respond if absolutely necessary since typing is not as easy as it would be on a computer. I also wanted an e-reader so I wouldn’t have to haul books around when traveling (I usually bring alumni magazines and newsletters to read and then just chuck them...
Journal Citations and Impact Factor
Last week, I talked about H-Index which is a metric for measuring the impact an author has in his field. This week, I will discuss Impact Factor (IF) which is one way to measure the impact a journal has in a field. Impact Factors for a journal are available through Journal Citation Reports which is produced by the same company that produces Web of Knowledge. The simple impact factor for a journal in any given year is the average number of citations in that year of articles from the previous two years. So if a journal has an impact...