Impact Factors of Journals Influenced by the ESA: A Case Study of Brian Silliman and the Duke University Marine Conservation Biologist

The journal of the Lepidopterists Society and American Fern Journal were taxa-specific journals which were used as the most important sources of ESA citations.

But publishing in the kinds of journal that are more likely to influence the ESA could set conservation researchers back in their careers, says study co-author Brian Silliman, a marine conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For decisions about who gets hired, promoted or funded, he says, a researcher’s impact is too often equated with the number of citations they receive and the impact factor of the journals they’ve published in (the standard way of calculating a journal’s impact factor is by dividing the number of times all the papers it has published in the past two years were cited in the last year by the total number of papers published in those two years.)

Given that theESA has the power to stop logging, construction, problematic fishing practices and other human activities that threatens vulnerable wildlife it can be an important way to help protect populations.

“When you have graduate students who are trying to get jobs, you generally advise them not to publish in taxon-specific journals, because they’re going to be low impact factor,” says Silliman. Even if it is great science. and it has applications to other systems, it’s a very limited audience and it’s going to be harder for them to get a job.”

The team also created an “ESA listing impact factor”, which was based on the fraction of papers that a journal publishes that go on to be cited by the ESA. The highest ranked journal had a conventional impact factor of just 0.74.

Choi is careful to point out that the study’s findings do not devalue the kind of theory-driven science that appeals to high-impact-factor journals. They want to support researchers who want to work on long-term population-monitoring studies without sacrificing career prospects. “That is really important science when it comes to conservation that we stand to lose if we don’t incentivize this kind of very baseline data collection,” says Choi.

The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: a tale of survival and survival in the United States during the 1941-1944 Nazi siege

The human genome encodes potentially thousands of tiny ‘dark proteins’ that were previously overlooked. The search will be on to find out what they do. Nature takes 12 minutes to read.

In his book The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, author Simon Parkin tells the story of the city’s Plant Institute — the world’s first proper seed bank — during the 1941-1944 Nazi siege. “The institute’s staff members sacrificed themselves, one by one, to protect a collection for which the whole raison d’être was to one day save humanity from starvation,” writes reviewer Simon Ings. The curator of the tuber collection said it wasn’t hard to not eat the collection. It was impossible to eat the work of the people you work for.

Plans to ramp up fossil-fuel extraction in the United States doesn’t have to spell the end of decarbonization efforts or lead to further environmental degradation, argues energy geographer Jennifer Baka. What matters now is that it’s done right. Energy projects should be more regulated to consider how the infrastructure needed to run them affects the local area. “The economic and environmental trade-offs of drilling can then be better evaluated,” Baka writes. “It is key to fostering industrial growth while avoiding an environmental catastrophe.”

Researchers in the United States are reeling after the administration of President Donald Trump issued an order on 27 January that froze a vast array of federal grants and loans. Many US universities had already told their faculty not to spend federal grant dollars after a federal judge temporarily blocked the order. The Trump administration tried to clarify the situation, but didn’t say when the pause would end, leaving scientists worried about long-term effects. It will be a lot harder to destroy the world’s greatest scientific ecosystems than it will be to rebuild them.

Source: Daily briefing: Chaos erupts in US science as Trump’s team declares freeze on federal grants

Fast radio bursts: Origins of strange flashes of energy from a dead star or a distant galaxies

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) — mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of energy — might be even weirder than we thought. Most FRBs are thought to come from magnetars, dead stars that usually form in young galaxies and host powerful magnetic fields. Evidence has arisen that some FRBs may have come from another source, as we have found that an FRB was created by the edge of an ancient galaxy which has slowed its stellar activity. “The FRB origin story is far from boring, and certainly far from solved,” says astronomer Wen-fai Fong.