News just reached me that we have lost a dear colleague and one of the people responsible for introducing the…
For better or worse, APA is one of the most widely used citation styles in the cognitive sciences. One aspect…
I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this rant my notes for that occasion.
With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science. On that note, consider this: Team science is (often) slow science.
Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. The web is about to be engulfed in unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation. This builds a feedback loop of uninformation feeding on uninformation. Counterintuitively, there was never a better time to be a scholar.
Almost 13 years ago, in 2007, this blog started as a sub-site on my personal web page. It soon took…
NWO introduces a narrative CV, and I have some thoughts. Sounds like a convoluted cultural evolution experiment: a high stakes…
We’re convening a panel at the 16th International Pragmatics Conference in Hong Kong next week. This doubles as the inaugural…
After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research.
Every time I learn new name signs —e.g. during my UCL visit hosted by @gab_hodge— I’m struck by how they…
Linguists will know John Benjamins as one of the nicer academic publishing houses, not quite so terrible as Elsevier or…
One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research. Zotero automates the tasks of managing bibliographic data, storing and renaming PDFs, and formatting references. It also integrates with widely used text processors, and can synchronize your library across devices. There is no more need to search through disorganized file folders full of inscrutably named PDF files, to copy and paste references across documents, or to manually deal with pointless differences in citation styles. Ultimately, the point of using a reference manager is to free more time for real research.
TL;DR: every other day. Read on for details. Many scientists use Google Scholar to find papers, get alerts about new…
Here are some insights from J.R. Firth in 1935 that offer an interesting early outlook on language use in social…
Een hele eer: de redactie van New Scientist heeft me geselecteerd voor hun top 25 van talentvolle jonge wetenschappers. Er…
Here’s the abstract for the keynote lecture I’ll be giving at the 11th Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature in…
Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?
PLOS ONE notoriously and astonishingly does not have a proofs stage: authors do not get to see how their work is typeset until the very day it appears. Worse, they have a policy of only correcting formatting errors that they themselves introduce by issuing a formal correction notice — a heavyhanded method that most other journals use only for serious errors of fact or process. Unnecessary corrections hurt authors. By not exercising due diligence in the journal production process, PLOS ONE is hurting its authors and ultimately damaging its own reputation.
Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof. Et Al and Dr. A. Author, whose profiles I created following Scholar’s recommended settings (and a bit of manual embellishment). If you have a Scholar profile, make sure you don’t let Scholar update the publication list automatically. If you’re looking at somebody else’s profile, take it with a big pinch of salt, especially when they have a reasonably common name or when messy entries or weird citation distributions indicate that it is being automatically updated.
Together with Giovanni Rossi I’ve organised an invited panel at the 14th International Pragmatic Conference in Antwerp, July 2015. Contributors…