Miguel Ponce de Leon

I recently finished an intriguing book with the history of the pencil ... yes the pencil.

Maybe it doesn't sound too exciting but really the story touches on the pencil as it emerges as a new writing technology, to the over-mining of plumbago and over-cutting of cedar trees its base components.
The need for research, development and innovation in the creation of new writing lead, the centuries of secrecy around that combination of graphite & clay mixture in the lead (Conte).
How the industrial revolution created a situation were there was 10 pencils for everyone on earth, the subsequent price fixing, international trade wars, standardisation (of lead grading), regulations and industrial consolidation.
To the threat of the mechanical pencil and ink pens, then typewriters, computers and many others and yet 4 centuries later I look at my desk at work and see 5 pencils, I've no idea were they have come from, who made them or how, but I know why they are there, I'll continue to use them for scribbling transient notes and now at least I have a little more insight on the pencils history.

Posted by Miguel Ponce de Leon at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

.... Agricultural Sciences.

And that's according to Thomson Reuters National Science Indicators, 1981-2007.

This is were Thomson Reuters have taken

Ireland's world share of science and social-science papers over a recent five-year period, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 21 fields in the Thomson Reuters database.

Ireland's citation impact compared to the world average in each field, is also highlighted were

Ireland exceeded the world average by 15% (3.38 citations per paper for Ireland versus a world mark of 2.93 citations) [in Agricultural Sciences]. Ireland also scored well in relative impact in immunology (26% above the world mark), physics (23% above), materials science (+22%), and chemistry (+15%).

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Looks like Ireland will have to pull its socks up when it comes to Computer Science and Mathematics and when it comes to Economics & Business, well it looks like this report came too late!

But when I look at this topic of impact factors, citations and the h-index a little closer, things are not so clear cut, to a point of being fairly questionable.

Which has lead me to this very interesting paper by Allen L, Jones C, Dolby K, Lynn D, Walport M (2009) Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs. PLoS ONE 4(6): e5910. were the authors were looking

To compare expert assessment with bibliometric indicators as tools to assess the quality and importance of scientific research papers.

And they found that

When attempting to assess the quality and importance of research papers, we found that sole reliance on bibliometric indicators would have led us to miss papers containing important results as judged by expert review. In particular, some papers that were highly rated by experts were not highly cited during the first three years after publication. Tools that link expert peer reviews of research paper quality and importance to more quantitative indicators, such as citation analysis would be valuable additions to the field of research assessment and evaluation.

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After all of that I'm left wondering, have you got the h-Factor?

Posted by Miguel Ponce de Leon at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)