How can we teach “R for cell biologists” rather than teaching R to cell biologists? I’ve noticed that many R training courses will teach R – regardless of who is taking the course – and leave it to the participants to figure out how they can use R in their own ...

One of the joys of posting a preprint is seeing that people are viewing, downloading and (hopefully) reading your paper. On bioRxiv you can check out the statistics for your paper in the metrics tab. We posted a preprint recently and it clocked up over 1,000 views in the first day ...

One of the best features of Strava is the battle to be King (or Queen) of the Mountain. Originally, in cycling, segments were typically climbs or difficult sections of road, and the simple idea, is who can complete the segment in the quickest time. Hence they would be KOM/QOM, ...

Previously, I took advantage of a dataset that linked preprints to their published counterparts to look at the fraction of papers in a journal that are preprinted. This linkage can be used to answer other interesting questions. Such as: when do authors preprint their papers relative to submission? And does ...

This is a rather niche post, but the method can likely be adapted for other use cases. In the lab we have many different cell lines stored in liquid nitrogen. The arrangement is: Ideally, to retrieve the correct vial from the cell store requires a map. We have a FileMaker ...

Answering the question of what fraction of a journal’s papers were previously available as a preprint is quite difficult to do. The tricky part is matching preprints (from a number of different servers) with the published output from a journal. The easy matches are those that are directly linked ...

In the spirit of “if it took you a while to find out how to do something, write about it”, I will detail a method to approximate the surface area of a 3D shape. Our application here was finding the surface area of a cell but it can be used ...

In a previous post, I looked at how Google Scholar ranks co-authors. While I had the data available I wondered whether paper authorship could be used in other ways. A few months back, John Cook posted about using Jaccard index and jazz albums. The idea is to look at the ...

On a scientist’s Google Scholar page, there is a list of co-authors in the sidebar. I’ve often wondered how Google determines in what order these co-authors appear. The list of co-authors on a primary author’s page is not exhaustive. It only lists co-authors who also have a ...

I migrated my personal Mastodon account from mastodon.social to biologists.social recently. If you’d like to do the same, I found this guide very useful. Note that, once you move, all your previous posts are left behind on the old instance. Before I migrated, I downloaded all of ...