Comments on: Phil. Trans. B

By: jim

jim — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:01:29 +0000

Re: 10

There are proceedings of the roy soc. and phil. trans. of the roy
soc. phil. trans. rates higher. And, a difference of 1.5, from
2.6 to 4.1 does indicate a ratchet up of about 1/2 notch in the
status/prestige of the journal.

Jim

By: per

per — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:28:35 +0000

re: pecking order
from isi web of science, 2007
Proc Roy Soc B 4.112
Int J Climatol 2.610
PNAS 9.598

so the difference between ijc and roy soc b is not that large
per

By: Paul Maynard

Paul Maynard — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:48:41 +0000

This is very interesting as of course the Royal Society itself is fully paid up on MMAGW as are all the other Royal Societies. Strange how the two can live together.

Paul Maynard

By: My “wish list” for the climate sciences in 2009 « Fabius Maximus

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 01:20:27 +0000

[...] posts at Climate Audit: here and here. There are examples of top-quality practice by journals (here), and some that are less so [...]

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:13:22 +0000

Re: #5

About the journal pecking order

Phil trans of Roy Soc was founded in 1661. So this is definitely
an “old money” journal. They have an impact factor of 5.5.
Publications of papers in old-money high impact factor journals
is part of the academic rat race. Scientists will generally want
to publish stuff in journals like this, it is reasonably influential
when applying for grants. So when the editor says jump, most
scientists will do so if they want to keep publishing in the
journal. The editor here carries quite a big stick.

The IJC has an impact factor of 2.3. This is OK, but nothing special.
Publication in IJC counts as another notch on the gun belt. There
is nothing special about publishing here, if you are part of the
rat race, it is expected you would regularly publish articles in
a journal with this impact factor as a matter of course. When
applying for grants, a publication in Phil.Trans. is much better
that IJC.

The PNAS comment (I know it is in another thread) is up there.
PNAS has an impact factor of 9.something (only science or
nature are higher in the field). Publication there is a big
deal, but it is also a big deal if someone craps all over
you at PNAS.

By: Edward

Edward — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:15:51 +0000

RE: Henry #5
Here is a link to a search engine on Phil. Trans. B (Royal Society Publishing) where you can search on what has been published.
http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/?k=Michael+Mann

I did a very quick couple of searches and found the following that may be of interest:

Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature, Mike Lockwood June 08, 2008

Climate change and trace gases, James Hansen1, Makiko Sato1, Pushker Kharecha1, Gary Russell1, David W. Lea2, Mark Siddall3 July 15, 2007

Atmospheric aerosols versus greenhouse gases in the twenty-first century, Meinrat O. Andreae1 July 15, 2007

Ensemble climate predictions using climate models and observational constraints, Peter A. Stott1, Chris E. Forest2 August 15, 2007

There are plenty more. Just put in Climate and CO2 and there are 216 publications that pop up including “The Met Office Hadley Centre climate modelling capability: the competing requirements for improved resolution, complexity and dealing with uncertainty”
Thanks
Ed

By: henry

henry — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:42:51 +0000

Now that Phil. Trans. B is requiring authors to archive data, are there any old papers by the team in this journal?

Any other old data that we’ve been looking for?

The sad part of this might very well be that the climate scientists will no longer see or use Phil. Trans. B as a “peer reviewed journal”.

Expect the submissions to IJC to increase, though…

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:38:07 +0000

I think that the withholding is usually a combination of spite, precaution and prima donna-ishness. It will take a while to analyze the data as they’ve merged the Tornetrask and Finland data. The Finnish data is from many different sites and has been selected from larger data sets: is there bias in the selection – who knows? It will take quite a bit of work to find out. I’ll try to make some data collations as I’m quick at that and make the data available to readers for experimenting.

I’d like to check whether there is any bias in the locations – some fossil data comes from north of the present treeline: what effect if any does this have?

By: MarkB

MarkB — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:17:53 +0000

I think it was Samuel Clemens who said “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

There’s an obvious corollary here for scientists: if you do your work properly, there’s no need to withhold anything. If someone finds an honest error, you can thank them and move on, and no one will think the less of you.

By: Clark

Clark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:08:43 +0000

Kudos to the Royal Society individuals running the journal. If journals more uniformly enforced such policy, we could dispense with all this nonsense stonewalling and FOI requests.

On a side note, I am curious to see what you find. Were they hiding the data out of just plain spite, or were they hiding some real problems?