The Paleo Paper Challenge: Roll Call!

The Paleo Paper Challenge, sponsored by Dave Hone of Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings and me, is nearly a month in. At last count, we have 22 23 participants! That's a lot of science going on.

Of course, what's the point of having a challenge without being challenged just a little bit? The whole point of this is to nudge. . .cajole. . .motivate. . .humiliate. . .all of us into finishing up those nagging papers. With less than three months to go, it's time to start kicking things into overdrive.

PPCers: Now it's time to make good on your promises. In the comments below, drop a note to tell us how you're doing! It's upon all of us to make each other finish these papers!

I'll start. I've committed to finishing a paper on a Myledaphus tooth site, as well as finish up revisions on one of my dissertation chapters. Right now, I'm ashamed to say that I haven't done a thing. But, the good news is that the dissertation chapter is on my priority list for the coming week. Readers: if I don't indicate any progress by Friday, you are allowed. . .nay, required. . .to publicly humiliate me. And while you're at it, get to work on your own papers!

That is all.

The Paleo Paper Challenge in the Blogosphere

The Paleo Paper Challenge is now in full swing! At just under 20 participants (and please let me know if I've inadvertently left you off the list!), some serious science is going to be happening in the next few months. Dave and I are seriously excited about the turnout.

In my casual internet browsing, I've noticed that a few of you have blogged about your efforts on the PPC (or at least mentioned them in passing). Here's a quick run-down of some of the links - once again, please let me know if I've left anyone out! And if you're a blogger, but haven't blogged about your participation, why not give it a try now?

Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings (Dave Hone; only most recent post included here): Return of the PPC, post SVP (& SVPC), OK?
Dinochick Blogs (ReBecca Hunt): Only 88 Days Left
El Pakozoico (Pak): Paleo Paper Challenge!
SV-POW! (Mike Taylor): Electronic Publishing is Inevitable, and Even the ICZN is Beginning to Accept It
Thoughts and Ideas from a Paleo Punker (Tor Bertin): The Paper Paper Challenge

The Paleo Paper Challenge: Post-SVP

In the event that you were trapped under a building for the past two weeks, the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings have come and gone. Not only do these meetings provide a nice outlet for ongoing research, they also provided an opportunity for me and Dave to 1) recruit more participants for the Paleo Paper Challenge; and 2) nag everyone to get to work on their papers, already! With the SVP recruits and new volunteers from the comment threads of this blog, the Paleo Paper Challenge is rounding out nicely. Oh yeah, and I finally got to meet Dave Hone in person.

Acceptors of the Paleo Paper Challenge

Brian Beatty
Calvert Formation terrestrial mammals review with Ralph Eshelman

Tor Bertin:
Statistical analysis of evolution of sauropod body size, involving a mystery specimen
Spinosauridae review

Lisa Buckley
Papers to be decided

Andrea Cau:
Description of metriorhynchid from northern Italy

Andy Farke:
Myledaphus paper
Final dissertation chapter

John Foster:
Morrison critter paper

Francisco Gasco:
Master's thesis

Mike Habib:
Pterosaur flight range

Penny Higgins:
Bulk isotopic ratios from tooth enamel and general interpretation of environment

Casey Holliday:
Articular cartilage paper

Thomas Holtz:
Tyrannosaur heterochrony/paleoecology

Dave Hone:
Unspecified paper

ReBecca Hunt:
Mygatt-Moore taphonomy paper

Nick Gardner:
Unspecified paper with Mickey Mortimer

Chris Note and Ari Grossman:
Dinosaur ecomorphology

Bill Parker:
Revueltosaurus manuscript

Heinrich Mallison:
sauropods rearing
sauropodomorph rapid locomotion

Anthony Maltese:
Unspecified paper

Mark Mancini:
Redondosaurus cranial description (with Axel Hungerbuehler)

Eric Snively:
Chicken electromyography and implications for big theropod neck muscles
Atlas of gekkotan lizards of the Paris Basin
Artiodactyl vs. Stegoceras head-strike mechanics

Mike Taylor:
The Archbishop description

Matt Wedel:
Final dissertation chapter

Adam Yates:
Early sauropodomorph pneumaticity
Rauisuchians of the Elliot Formation

A Veritable Paleo-Blizzard from PLoS ONE

I'm just back from SVP/associated collections visits, enjoying the post-SVP glow of research motivation as well as a big pile of things on my "to-do" list. Among these are an update of the Paleo Paper Challenge, commentary on the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology publication contract, and much more.

In the meantime, I wanted to call your attention to a whole blizzard of paleontology-relevant publications that have been unleashed from the on-line, open access journal PLoS ONE during the past two weeks. Although I'm an admittedly biased opinion (I am an academic editor for the journal), it is quite nice to see so many interesting and relevant paleontology publications within PLoS ONE's "pages." I am short on time, and many of these articles were covered in depth by other bloggers, so I'm just posting the references this time around.

The Papers
Arribas A, Garrido G, Viseras C, Soria JM, Pla S, et al. (2009) A Mammalian Lost World in Southwest Europe during the Late Pliocene. PLoS ONE 4(9): e7127. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007127

Hocknull SA, Piper PJ, van den Bergh GD, Due RA, Morwood MJ, et al. (2009) Dragon's Paradise Lost: Palaeobiogeography, Evolution and Extinction of the Largest-Ever Terrestrial Lizards (Varanidae). PLoS ONE 4(9): e7241. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007241

Kröger B, Servais T, Zhang Y (2009) The Origin and Initial Rise of Pelagic Cephalopods in the Ordovician. PLoS ONE 4(9): e7262. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007262

Spaulding M, O'Leary MA, Gatesy J (2009) Relationships of Cetacea (Artiodactyla) Among Mammals: Increased Taxon Sampling Alters Interpretations of Key Fossils and Character Evolution. PLoS ONE 4(9): e7062. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007062

Wolff EDS, Salisbury SW, Horner JR, Varricchio DJ (2009) Common Avian Infection Plagued the Tyrant Dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 4(9): e7288. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007288 [Note--Ewan Wolff, the senior author on this paper, was my co-author on the "fighting Triceratops" paper that came out earlier this year. Nice to see more paleopathology stuff out there!]

The Paleo Paper Challenge: Who Has Accepted?

After our posts issuing the Paleo Paper Challenge, we have had a number of very brave souls step up to the plate. We're dusting those old papers off of our hard drives, finishing them up, and making a commitment to get them through into review!

Of course, it wouldn't be a challenge if we weren't holding our feet to the fire with the possibility of public embarrassment. All of us have signed on the dotted line, and committed to getting these puppies out the door by January 1, 2010!

It's not too late to sign up yourself! There's always room for one more - so join the party!

Acceptors of the Paleo Paper Challenge

Tor Bertin:
Manuscript on mystery specimen

Andy Farke:
Myledaphus paper
Final dissertation chapter

John Foster:
Unspecified paper

Casey Holliday:
Articular cartilage paper

Dave Hone:
Unspecified paper

ReBecca Hunt:
Unspecified paper

Bill Parker:
Revueltosaurus manuscript

Heinrich Mallison:
Plateosaurus CAE (is waiting for the two other diss chapters to come out of review)
sauropods rearing
alligator muscle cross sections
non-Plateosaurus at MFN description
sauropodomorph rapid locomotion

Anthony Maltese:
Unspecified paper

Mark Mancini (Tanystropheus):
Redondosaurus cranial description

Eric Snively:
Chicken electromyography and implications for big theropod neck muscles.
Atlas of gekkotan lizards of the Paris Basin.
Artiodactyl vs. Stegoceras head-strike mechanics.

Mike Taylor:
The Archbishop description

Matt Wedel:
Final dissertation chapter

Adam Yates:
Early sauropodomorph pneumaticity
Rauisuchians of the Elliot Formation

Does Anyone Read Our Papers?

Writing papers is fun, but rather pointless unless anyone reads them, uses them, and cites them. How do we find out if anyone reads our work? Gross citation counts are nice, and easily provided by ISI Web of Science (easily, that is, if your institution coughs up the money to pay for the database) or Google Scholar (free, but not always as comprehensive as ISI's counts). These services also provide links to the papers with the citations. This is useful, but everyone knows that more people read the paper than actually cite it. The problem, of course, is that there is no way to know how many are reading the darned thing.

Until now. Public Library of Science (the publishers of PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, and other open access journals; in the interests of full disclosure, I'm an academic editor for PLoS ONE) has just completely shifted the playing field. Free, article-level metrics are now available. Easily. With one click, you can find out how many page views a research article has had and how many people have downloaded the PDF. Better yet, you can track trends through time and download the data into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

Just for fun, I checked out the stats for my co-authored paper on Triceratops horn use, which was published in January of this year. To date, the publication has had over 7,000 page views, 851 downloads of the PDF file, and 1 citation. The paper on Darwinius, which came out shortly after the Triceratops paper, has had over 66,000 page views and over 5,800 downloads of the PDF file. PLoS ONE also provides summary tables for selected disciplines - a paper on evolutionary biology (which includes paleontology, for most purposes) published in 2008 could expect to have racked up at least 2,200 hits by now.

So what's to like here? Well, an author gets an immediate sense if someone is paying attention to a publication. Page views and PDF downloads are a valuable tool for gauging community interest. In concert with citation data, it's probably a far better gauge of a paper's worth than the impact factor for the journal that the publication happens to show up in. The data are also freely available, transparent, and frequently updated. The latter is particularly important because it may be years before a paper's full impact is known. An open-access metric for an open-access world.

And are there any problems? As with any metric, the unfortunate answer is yes. Page view counts probably include a lot of casual readers, who read the abstract and promptly forget the existence of the article in question. These counts could also be gamed by "click contests" - one need only smell the stench emanating from the hordes of Pharyngula's zombie fanboyz as they lurch towards the next on-line poll to realize just how malleable page view data potentially are (although to PLoS's credit, they have attempted to filter out any robot and web crawler traffic). The metric will also be abused by administrators, who will still make career-ending decisions based on a number (although at least it's a hopefully more relevant number this time). Once again to PLoS's credit, they provide explanatory and cautionary pages candidly outlining the pros and cons of the metric.

I suspect that other journals will follow suit - it may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen. We may be seeing the death of the traditional, sometimes tyrannical, "impact factor." Let's hope we don't replace it with a new despot!

The Paleo Paper Challenge

Dave Hone of Archosaur Musings and I were recently chatting online and were lamenting the inevitable problem of ‘the unfinished paper’. Most researchers have a project or two (or anything up to 20) that were started and then kind of stalled for various reasons – uncooperative co-authors, being unable to find the elusive essential paper, other projects taking priority, or just general malaise. It’s left as a few pages of notes, or unreferenced, without figures or a key analysis complete or whatever. It’s good science and publishable, it’s just not done. Without a good incentive to get them finished off (like a rival group) or them getting out of date (the stuff is interesting but not ground breaking and will not revolutionize the field when it comes out, but it’s not old either) these things can last for ever. Sometimes, all the manuscript needs is one day of solid work to kick the thing out the door!

Both of us have these kinds of papers knocking around and we are far from the only ones. As such with SVP around the corner we decided to issue the Paleo Paper Challenge (or Palaeo Paper Challenge, if you're so inclined). If you have a palaeo paper that really needs to be finished off then we challenge you to sign up here and get it done this year. If so, simply leave a note in the comment thread and we’ll total them all up in a few days and create a register of those taking part (so you can’t back out!). There is no need to let everyone know exactly what it is you are working on (if people want to keep things private, that’s fine) but of course juicy details will be welcome. Dave and I will also both be canvassing at SVP, and if you want to encourage others to join, do please mention this on your own blogs etc.

This should serve as both self-motivation to get the project done and a nice little race to see who can finish first and get their paper(s) submitted or in print. The real challenge of course is simply to get it done, so we are setting January 1, 2010, as your ‘official’ deadline – if you are joining the challenge you’ll have about three months to get it done. There are hundreds if not thousands of these papers languishing on hard drives so let’s try and get a few of them out there!

[NOTE: This post was largely written by Dave. . .I've modified it slightly for posting here. Perhaps this laziness is why I have so many half-finished papers sitting on my hard drive right now.]