Scientists and citations

A few years ago, some less than scrupulous students got caught cheating at the university I attended. It was a multiple choice test, the kind Bush and the proponents of No Child Left Behind seem to think can measure anything other than the ability to take a multiple choice test...but I digress.
The students got who cheated took the test in the evening section of the class and go mostly wrong answers. The problem was nearly all of their wrong answers were the same. A little more investigating found that they had gotten ahold of the morning test, assumed it was the same as the evening test and used those answers, exposing their cheating.
A paper I ran across recently by M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury used similar logic to test if scientists actually read the papers they cite in their own articles, or just read reviews of subjects and cited the articles the reviewer used as if they had read the actual literature. Their method of catching the non-reading scientists is similar to catching the test cheaters... look for the same mistake repeated. M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury specifically looked at the errors in the citation of page numbers...a fairly easy mistake to make when manually entering a citation but one that is rarely exactly the same as someone else.
The practice was found to be rampant enough that mistakes have been copied multiple times. Simkin and Roychowdhury found one article, popularly cited but poorly read, was miscited a total of 78 times. Using the distribution of the repeated miscites they created a model that predicts the percent of people that cite the original paper is as low as 20%.
There are several caveats to this hypothesis however, such as the fact that some mistakes are more common than others, such as inverting numbers etc. These mistakes could be made more than once and that by different people and would be counted as a copy mistake.
This paper came out in 2002. Nowadays, with the used of bibliography programs like Endnote, which automatically download the correct citations from a database, these mistakes are much less common making it would be hard to repeat this test. In any case, read the paper for yourself and don't trust my review. Heres the (correct) citation:

M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury, "Read before you cite!", Complex Systems, 14 (2003) 269

Are We Individuals, Symbionts, or Communitys?

It's common knowledge that the number of microbes inside the human body exceeds the number of human cells by an order of magnitude. A growing body of research, such as that published by the Gordon Lab in Nature shows that we are not simply colonized by microbes but that they provide a substantial amount of our dietary energy from them. The types of microbes in our GI tract may have profound effects on our health, providing us with nutrients, signaling, and helping to ward off pathogens.

This suggests a picture of us being more of a mosaic or community of different life forms, rather than a discrete individual. And it's not just us, many organisms seem to be blends of creatures that have absorbed or been adsorbed by others to different degrees throughout history.

In a recent article in Nature the Stoecker Lab shows what may be an extreme example of this. The planktonic ciliate Mesodinium rubrum makes it's living by ingesting algae and using their chloroplasts to harvest energy from light. The problem with this is that the chloroplasts, themselves the remnants of an ancient cyanobacterium absorbed by the algae, have few of it's necessary genes in it's organelle. Most have moved to the nucleus of the algae. M. rubrum's answer? It engulfs and keeps both the alga's chloroplast and nucleus, expressing the necessary genes to keep the chloroplasts active. The nucleus is not replicated in the host and eventually degrades over time, requiring continual engulfment of new algae. These findings seem to blur the line between what is truly separate life forms. Are the nuclei of the algae still algal? What about the algae gene products produced from it by the ciliate?

In addition to publishing this very interesting article the authors got to do something I've always wanted to do...invent an new word- Karyoklepty: the stealing of a nuclei -from Greek karydi, kernel; kleftis, thief.

Paying twice for science

I've been thinking lately about my upcoming publication in Virology and the cost of viewing this paper for anyone who doesn't have access to the journal. The cost is $30 to download the article online, $666 for a personal subscription, and $5546 for library access.

My research, and the vast majority of research published in scientific journals, is funded at least in part from public sources ( NSF funds part of my research and about 20% of the nations non-medical research). Science works better when ideas are shared openly and it seems that particularly in the case of publicly funded research there is a responsibility to provide the results of the research the public has paid for. Several scholarly journals have switched to a partial open source or completely open source format, most notably in the latter category is PLoS. I hope to publish my future work in open source journals where more people will be able to access the research, especially those who have paied for it.

Yep,
It's my very first blog entry. Here's whats going on in my life now
Another first publication by me (and my P.I. Ken Stedman) is in the works, my manuscript to Virology, "SSV1 viral integrase is not essential" was accepted and will be published next month. This is my first peer reviewed publication and the result of part of the last few years research. Yipppie!

Less exciting news I broke my hand (the 4th metatarsal to be precise) while commuting home last month. It's healing nicely, but no biking for another three weeks...