How the Grinch ruined reviewing

 

Everyone who has ever published scientific results knows about the dread Reviewer Two: The reviewer who is unduly harsh, or just doesn’t get it, or who is inappropriately negative. Yet although we all complain about having been harshly judged by reviewer two, we never talk about the reviews we dish out. So, because it is Christmas, I am posting my harshest ever review below. I actually had to do it twice- I was a naive sucker, and I sheepishly went along when they asked me to do their dirty work for them. Here is part one:

Dear G&G editors:

This paper appears to be plagiarized from Haggerty 2014 Carbonado: Physical and chemical properties, a critical evaluation of proposed origins, and a revised genetic model. Earth Science Reviews 130 49-72 (hereafter: H14).

The first sentence of this manuscript is directly plagiarized from the first sentence of Haggerty (2014), without citation:

"Carbonado-diamond is the most controversial of all diamond types and is found only in Brazil, and the Central African Republic (Bangui)." H14

"Carbonado is the most controversial of all diamond types." this paper

This pattern continues:

"Selected physical properties are presented and the proposed origins, diverse

in character and imaginatively novel, are critically reviewed." H14

"Selected physical and chemical properties are presented and the proposed origins, diverse in character and imaginatively novel, are critically reviewed."

Similarly, entire sentences and phrases from the introduction and descriptive sections seem to be cut and pasted from various parts of H14, while this paper is only referenced (and incorrectly as 2013) occasionally.

There is no author affiliation on the manuscript you sent me.  If it is anyone other than Haggerty, you should probably report them to their Dean, or misconduct board.  If it is Haggerty, then I guess it depends on your policy on large-scale self-cut and pasting and what constitutes an original paper.  I have attached the first page of H14 (just one page, to stay within fair use guidelines) as a comparison- please compare this abstract to the abstract and first introductory paragraph on the manuscript you sent me.

I thought I should inform you of this ASAP. Would you like me to continue with the review?

sincerely,

Chuck Magee

Anyway, the editors replied saying that Haggerty was in fact the author, and that a full review would be appreciated. So I provided the following:

 

Dear G&G editors:

This paper appears to be heavily self-plagairized from Haggerty 2014 Carbonado: Physical and chemical properties, a critical evaluation of proposed origins, and a revised genetic model. Earth Science Reviews 130 49-72 (hereafter: H14).

Specific, paragraph-by-paragraph notes:

The Abstract is heavily cribbed from that of H14, including an identical opening sentence.

The introduction is heavily cribbed from the second half of the H14 abstract. “Selected physical [and chemical] properties are presented and the proposed origins, diverse in character and imaginatively novel, are critically reviewed.”;

Point 2 in this manuscript is point 1 in H14 abstract;

Point 3 in this manuscript is point 2 in H14 abstract;

Point 4 in this manuscript is point 3 in H14 abstract.

Point 1 in this manuscript is the first sentence of H14 Introduction.

Paragraph 1 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from paragraph 1 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 2 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from paragraph 2 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 3 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from the beginning of paragraph 3 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 4 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from the middle and end of paragraph 3 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 1 of this manuscript’s “Carbonado” section is copied from paragraph 4 of the Introduction of H14.

The first half of the “overall appearance” subsection is copied from the “Overall appearance” section of H14. The second half is cribbed heavily from the “Surface and internal textures” section of H14.

The “porosity” subsection is copied with minor changes from the porosity section of H14

The “Hardness and toughness” subsection is copied with minor changes from the “Hardness & Toughness” section of H14

The “Mineralogy” subsection is copied and summarized from from the “Mineralogy” section of H14

The “Chemistry” subsection is copied virtually intact from the “chemistry” section of H14

The “Optical properties” subsection is copied with minor changes (1,2,3 becomes a,b,c) and condensed from the “optical properties” section of H14

The “synthesis” subsection is copied with minor changes from the “synthesis” section of H14

The Objections to Proposed origins section in this manuscript is somewhat mixed up from H14:

point 1 was point 5

point 2 was point 9

point 3 was point 1

point 4 was point 13

point 5 was point 14

point 6 was point 7

point 7 was point 2

point 8 was point 3

point 9 was point 3

point 10 was point 4

point 11 was point 8

point 12 was point 10

point 13 was point 11

point 14 was point 12

point 15-18 are the same.

The summarizing paragraph is cut and pasted from the summarizing paragraph of H14

The Extra-terrestrial Origin section of this manuscript copies 6 of the 7 ennumerated points from H14.

The first “stellar sources” paragraph is heavily cribbed from the third “Extra-terrestrial origin” section of H14.

The second “stellar sources” paragraph of this manuscript appears to be similar to the last paragraph of the “Extra-Terrestrial origin” section of H14

The third “stellar sources” paragraph of this manuscript is similar for the first paragraph of the “new cosmic model” section of H14.

The fourth “stellar sources” paragraph appears to be copied from the fourth “A new cosmic model” section of H14

The “Exoplanets” paragraph is cribbed heavily from the middle of the second “A new cosmic model” paragraph of H14

The 1st “solar system” paragraph is drawn heavile from the end of the second “A new cosmic model” paragraph of H14

The second “Solar System” paragraph is drawn from the last “origin in the solar system” paragraph in H14

The first “When and how did carbonado reach earth” paragraph Is based on the first and third “Transporting media” paragraphs of H14

The second “When and how did carbonado reach earth” paragraph is copied from the second “Transporting media” paragraph of H14

The first “Other host rocks” paragraph of this manuscript is copied from the second “Rarity of carbonado” paragraph of H14

The second “Other host rocks” paragraph is cut and pasted from the “Geological implications” paragraph of H14

The first “Industrial applications” paragraph of this manuscript is copied from the “Industrial applications” paragraph of H14.

The first “conclusions” paragraph of this paper is cribbed from the “Conclusions” paragraph of H14.

In summary, this manuscript does not contain a single paragraph that is not either a partial or complete restatement of part of H14. More importantly, it does not address any of the serious problems with H14.

The idea of glassy carbon forming from a melt is nonsensical; the melting temperature of C is so high that it has not yet been reliably snythesized, however the temperatures required are such that there is no expectation that an amorphous quench product can be contained.  Even if it could, there is no reason to expect it to look similar to a silicate glass.  So the argument that patina = molten carbon is baseless. Most carbonado researchers since Milledge et al. 1998 have favored the view that the patina is a surface layer amorphosed at low temperature by radiation damage.

Similarly, the pores have been known to be open to exchange with the environment since Trueb & de Wys 1971, so there is no way to determine whether or not they are primary, or what originally filled them. So it is not valid to infer that they are vesicles.

Finally, the author has a conflict of interest in that he owns the largest private carbonado collection around, so if he can convince potential buyers that carbonado is exotic, he stands to benefit financially.

This manuscript should be rejected.

Sincerely,

Chuck Magee

This was a dumb way to write a review, and like all reviewer twos, I only hurt myself. In addition to the time spent documenting all the repeated content, all I ended up doing was giving the editors and author a cheat sheet for redrafting in a way to better hide the lack of originality in the manuscript. As you can see from the published version of the paper, all the cuts and pastes were redrafted.

 Furthermore, listing pages and pages of plagiarism had the effect of de-emphasizing the substantive criticisms of science and conflict of interest that I squeezed into the last few paragraphs. In short, this was a lazy review written with the naive assumption that self-plagiarism was something that editors would reject a paper over.

All I did was to waste my own time and give the editors and author a how-to guide to destroy the evidence that the work was derivative. Being pedantically critical was not a useful reviewing strategy.

Mansplainer

So I bumped into Nelly Furtado the other day, and of course I immediately started to explain to her all about Atlantic hotspots and a couple of Canadian cities I’ve never been to and some styles of music that I don’t really know anything about, but she must have had something really important to go to because she walked away before I could tell her that she got the lyrics to her 2006 #1 UK hit all wrong:

Everybody listen to me

I walk in the door and you start fleeing

Come on everybody want to hear more?

Well actually this how it all goes.

Everybody get your pot to crack around

All you crazy people come gather 'round

I wanna tell you all one more point please

You either want to be deaf or flee me

Mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard

Make you want to plug his hole

He’s a manslpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard

Stroke his ego's his one goal

He’s a mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard

Make you want to plug his hole

He’s a manslpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard

Make you wish you never ever met him at all

And when he talks he talks with passion

When he stalks he stalks to interject shit

When he asks “but as you know” he means it

Even if you never understand it.

Everybody get your pot to crack around

All you crazy people come gather 'round

I wanna tell you all one more point please

You either want to be deaf or flee me

Mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard

Make you want to plug his hole

He’s a man-slpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard

Stroke his ego's his one goal

He’s a mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard

Make you want to plug his  hole

He’s a man-slpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard

Make you wish you never ever met him at all

No never ever met him at all

You wish you’d never ever met him at all…

Nomination language note

This is a brief update to last week’s post on nominating for society prizes.  There has been some discussion on twitter about biased language in letters of recommendation, particularly for junior women. This was an issue I was vaguely aware of, but didn’t especially delve into deeply at the time.
Our basic approach was to mostly focus on the science, which of course doesn’t have a gender, and explain why the science she did was so exciting. You can see my citation in the previous post. I’m not posting anyone else’s letter on this blog, but I will put the combined word cloud here, along with a list of high frequency words:

 

Words used ten or more times:

53                                                                                      Jenner

33                                                                                      elements

28                                                                                      data

25                                                                                      paper

23                                                                                      magma

20                                                                                      Frances

19                                                                                      element

18                                                                                      trace

16                                                                                      analytical

16                                                                                      MORB

15                                                                                      O’Neill

15                                                                                      glasses

15                                                                                      work

15                                                                                      new

14                                                                                      analysis

14                                                                                      chalcophile

13                                                                                      quality

12                                                                                      geochemistry

12                                                                                      published

12                                                                                      volcanic

12                                                                                      Carnegie

11                                                                                      differentiation

11                                                                                      magmatic

10                                                                                      papers

10                                                                                      years

10                                                                                      young

10                                                                                      many

Nominating for society prizes

One of the great things about being a geochronologist is that you can delve back in time to when unfinished blog posts were abandoned, and drag them screaming into the present to be finished.

Sometime around about 0.0000035 Ma*, there was a push by Dr. Ball over at Magma cum Laude bemoaning the gender disparityin society prize nominations. The argument, seen here and other places in early 2014, goes something along the lines of:

-When nominated, women are about as likely as men to win society awards.

-However, nominations skew more male than the general population of scientists

-Nominators are mostly crusty old farts, and young scientists (young meaning anyone under 50) are not stepping up and nominating people.

I forgot all about this pressing issue until June (still 2014), when the MGPV division of the Geological Society of America announced that they would be awarding a new early career scientist prize. At that point, I suddenly recalled the issue, and thought, “Might this be a testable hypothesis? What happens when some random industrial scientist barely 40 years old tries nominating?”

I’d sat through a few award ceremonies before, and seen these sorts of things handed out to a wide variety of scientists, from really cool people I’d never heard of to the banal big names who had spent a quarter of a century cruising on achievements from when I was in high school. But in most cases, the nominees were very senior, old, respected scientists. And they nominated other, slightly less old but otherwise very similar scientists. I suppose their point of view is that if they’re great, other great people ought to be pretty similar.

I am not a great scientist. I’m a disorganized industry hack whose H-index can be tallied on the fingers of Count Rugen’s hand. So the way I see it, anyone I nominate for a prize should be as unlike me as possible. So from there it was an easy step to revisit the nomination gap studies, and think, “Might there be, perhaps, any women who would be appropriate for this award?” Luckily, our nominee came to mind almost immediately.

As someone who went through college loathing political correctness, my first thought was therefore, “OK, now am I cutting any more deserving nominees out here by nominating her?” As it turns out, when I was still working at the ANU (see the first three years of this blog) we had many really good grad students. However, none of them really took ownership of their favorite field of science and made it their own the way our nominee did, so I was satisfied that I had made a good choice.

The GSA Junk Mail that announced the creation of a new award came out in June 20 of 2014, I probably read it and connected it back to the earlier exhortations to nominate about a week or two later, around the end of the month. The trouble was, the deadline for nominations was the 15th of July. And I didn’t start approaching people for supporting letters until the second.

My strategy was simple: Here in Canberra, cruise the ANU hallways to figure out who was actually in town and able to put something together on zero notice. I threw the Japanese postdoc into the too-hard basket, as I didn’t personally know any of the people she worked with there, and also language barrier, and concentrated on her colleagues at DTM. I also approached some big names in the field with whom she hadn’t collaborated, to see if they thought it was a sensible nomination and would be willing to write something supportive from more of a peer review perspective.

I was pleasantly surprised at how enthusiastic most of the people I approached were. I guess the good thing about picking a good candidate, however, is that people really do get excited and are willing to get on board and turn letters around in remarkably quick timescales. I had my three supporters lines up by the seventh, and three letters in hand within hours of the deadline. In responsible, organized nominator fashion, I had my nomination letter done a whallopping three days before the deadline, and circulated it to the rest of the team for a science check and general feedback (as I had never done this before).

Around the time of the deadline, a potential referee who had been out of contact emailed me saying that he really wanted to write a fourth letter, and could the deadline be extended? So I asked the coordinator, and he said that as long as a complete submission package was in on time, we could have a week or two to get additional bonus letters in. One such letter was submitted.

Fast forward nine months:
There’s an email in my inbox from our nominee:

“Hi Chuck,

Here is the letter that I woke up to today!!!! Thanks so much!!!”

And that is how Dr. Frances Elaine Jenner won the Geological Society of America’s inaugural MGPV early career award. The only sad part of the story was that I was not able to go to the GSA meeting where the award was presented, so one of the guys who wrote a letter of support gave the citation. He’s a proper academic scientist anyway, so probably had the gravitas that I lack. The citation and acceptance are on page 8-10 of thisnewsletter.

The point of all this story is this: It is possible for mid career non-academic scientists to throw together a nomination at the last minute, and get support from respected scientists, and construct a nomination package sufficient to win the prize. Don’t die wondering, folks.

Now, I should point out that I did have a few things tilted in my favor:

Firstly I attended a number of top institutions during my academic career, which put me in contact with top scientists like Dr. Jenner. Having a great candidate goes a long way towards making a case.

 Secondly, I’ve been kicking around science in one capacity or another to know her referees, several of whom were quite respected scientists. I was reasonably acquainted with three of the four supporters I got letters from, and had at least been to the fourth guy’s lab.

Thirdly, once the decision was made to go, I went all out. This isn't the sort of thing to be half-assed. I read all her papers, and tried to put together a passionate yet logical case for why they made our nominee a prizeworthy scientist.

I’m sure the greybeards who get together at annual meetings to sip nasty scotch plan out their conventional safe picks way in advance, but with a little passion, some broad thinking, and a genuine enthusiasm for science, anyone can nominate for their respective society’s awards, and win. And there’s a month and a half to go before the deadline forthe 2019 award, so don’t be shy, y’all.

* True calendar years; -0.000064 using the 1950 zero year favoured by 14C weirdos.

And in case anyone wants the really nitty gritty details, here’s the nomination I wrote in a sleep deprived haze during the first week of July 2014. Typos and all:

Nomination for Frances Jenner

Dear Division Secretary,

I would like to nominate Frances Elaine Jenner for the GSA’s MGPV division early career award for 2015.  Dr. Jenner is an outstanding young analytical geochemist who has pioneered several novel analytical techniques and applied them to igneous rocks from a wide temporal and geographical range.  Her ability to generate novel, high quality data has allowed her and her colleagues to overturn previous assumptions or hypotheses about a variety of igneous processes, giving us a better understanding of mafic volcanism over the last 3.8 billion years of Earth history.

Upon the completion of her PhD on the nature of Eoarchean rocks (Jenner et al., 2009; Jenner et al., 2013), Dr. Jenner immediately branched out into a new field of study, namely the quantification of “less commonly analyzed elements” in volcanic glasses. One such element is selenium.  In theory, selenium should be a useful proxy for sulfur in systems (such as volcanic glasses) which may have undergone partial degassing, but in practice, there was no standard analytical protocol for measuring this low abundance chalcogenide in silicate materials.  Using the electron microprobe, laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS), and the Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP), Dr. Jenner characterized a suite of commonly used reference materials (Jenner et al., 2009). This study remains the only case where the SHRIMP has been used as a negative ion trace element quantification tool.  However, despite developing this novel SIMS technique, she and her colleagues used the SIMS data to devise an analytical protocol to routinely measure selenium using LA-ICPMS. The use of the cheaper, more versatile LA-ICPMS equipment meant that selenium contents of target glasses and minerals could be determined along with other elements of interest in a wholescale manner much more economically than the use of the SHRIMP would allow.

While an analytical specialist may have been content to run this application without too much thought to the geologic implications, Dr. Jenner and her colleagues immediately put it to use in investigating the enrichment of Cu, Ag, and Au in arc-related magmas.  Their “magnetite crisis” paper (Jenner et al., 2010) uses this selenium analytical technique to generate compelling data relating to the trends of these elements with magma evolution.  This dispels the earlier, intellectually unsatisfying notion of a fugitive fluid or vapor phase, clearly showing that magnetite crystallization triggers sulfide saturation by changing the magmatic fO₂.

The use of more, higher quality data to reject a long held but data-poor assumption is a hallmark of Dr. Jenner’s research.  Although she has continued to analyze selenium for the purpose of constraining sulfide saturation and chalcogenide behavior (Jenner et al., 2012; Patten et al., 2013), her next major achievement was to roll out the same approach to the rest of the periodic table, and a wider variety of sea floor volcanic glasses.

Jenner and O’Neill (2012b) is a primer for how to analyze most of the periodic table in mafic glasses, with corrections for interfered elements and methods for how to minimize analytical difficulties.  While the analysis of volcanic glasses by LA-ICPMS is not new, this study is remarkable in its thorough examination of issues of normalization and reproducibility which have not necessarily been presented in a single unified study before.

Jenner and O’Neill (2012a) then apply these techniques to hundreds of ocean floor volcanic glasses, yielding a rich, high quality dataset that allows them to realize (O’Neill and Jenner, 2012) that the mid-ocean ridge fractional crystallization model that we were all taught as undergraduates decades ago cannot explain their new, higher quality data, and needs refinement.

Once again, Dr. Jenner and her colleagues develop new tools illuminate a previously underconstrained system, yielding a novel explanation with greater predictive power. This changes the way we think about the main type of magma generation on Earth.

There are quite a few talented young geoscientists who develop new analytical techniques.  And many of them apply them to known areas of scientific debate, to build up or tear down evidence for one or more prevailing hypotheses.  But Dr. Jenner is unusual in having both the analytical skills to devise new approaches and the intellectual agility to find entirely new geological interpretations, which were not even part of the debate before her studies were carried out.

And although Dr. Jenner is very much an analytical geochemist, it is her ability to find the natural rocks to use her procedures on which underpins her success.  While she collaborates extensively with experimental petrologists, she mostly analyses natural samples of diverse provenance.  Working from the Greenland Eoarchean to modern submarine volcanics, her areas of study span more than 95% of the terrestrial rock record in geologic time.  Her onshore field areas range from the periglacial west coast of Greenland to tropical Samoa.  While ocean drilling programs do not fit the stereotypical mold of outcrop hammering and rock licking, they are none-the-less the only way we currently have of accessing the ~70% of our planet’s surface that is under water. And it is her ability to choose the right sample or samples for her new analytical methods which allows her to discover novel petrologic processes.

Finally, it is worth noting that in a competitive field like academic geology, there is an element of luck which is often a contributor to success.  Whether it is happening on just the right rock, or simply having jobs appear in a manner that allows a stable, productive workflow, simple good fortune can often be the difference between a discovery and a confirmation. Dr. Jenner has had, by far, the worst luck of anyone I know with an advanced geology degree.

I have worked in industry and government for the past seven years, so I know many of the situations which result in a person leaking out of the academic pipeline.  Dr. Jenner has experienced a large number of these “career-terminal” events.  But unlike the rest of us, she has forced her way back into the pipeline with a combination of intellectual firepower, gritty determination, and the most dedicated work eithic of anyone I have met in any field. This has allowed her to not just stay employed, but maintain control of her career trajectory, despite her three postdocs and her faculty job being on four different continents.  And despite her hardships, she is one of the most enthusiastic, positive, energetic scientists I know.  This, as much as her academic record, makes her a role model for all young scientists. Frances Jenner would be an inspirational choice for the GSA committee as the inaugural MGPV division Early Career scientist.

References:

Jenner, F.E., Arculus, R.J., Mavrogenes, J.A., Dyriw, N.J., Nebel, O., and Hauri, E.H., 2012, Chalcophile element systematics in volcanic glasses from the northwestern Lau Basin: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 6, p. Q06014.

Jenner, F.E., Bennett, V.C., Nutman, A.P., Friend, C.R.L., Norman, M.D., and Yaxley, G., 2009, Evidence for subduction at 3.8 Ga: Geochemistry of arc-like metabasalts from the southern edge of the Isua Supracrustal Belt: Chemical Geology, v. 261, no. 1-2, p. 83–98.

Jenner, F.E., Bennett, V.C., Yaxley, G., Friend, C.R.L., and Nebel, O., 2013, Eoarchean within-plate basalts from southwest Greenland: Geology, v. 41, no. 3, p. 327–330.

Jenner, F.E., Holden, P., Mavrogenes, J.A., O’Neill, H.S.C., and Allen, C., 2009, Determination of Selenium Concentrations in NIST SRM 610, 612, 614 and Geological Glass Reference Materials Using the Electron Probe, LA-ICP-MS and SHRIMP II: Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research, v. 33, no. 3, p. 309–317.

Jenner, F.E., and O’Neill, H.S.C., 2012a, Analysis of 60 elements in 616 ocean floor basaltic glasses: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 2, p. Q02005.

Jenner, F.E., and O’Neill, H.S.C., 2012b, Major and trace analysis of basaltic glasses by laser-ablation ICP-MS: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 3, p. Q03003.

Jenner, F.E., O’Neill, H.S.C., Arculus, R.J., and Mavrogenes, J.A., 2010, The Magnetite Crisis in the Evolution of Arc-related Magmas and the Initial Concentration of Au, Ag and Cu: Journal of Petrology, v. 51, no. 12, p. 2445–2464.

O’Neill, H.S.C., and Jenner, F.E., 2012, The global pattern of trace-element distributions in ocean floor basalts: Nature, v. 491, no. 7426, p. 698–704.

Patten, C., Barnes, S.-J., Mathez, E.A., and Jenner, F.E., 2013, Partition coefficients of chalcophile elements between sulfide and silicate melts and the early crystallization history of sulfide liquid: LA-ICP-MS analysis of MORB sulfide droplets: Chemical Geology, v. 358, p. 170–188.

Be the comet

It has been a bad month for flashbacks for victims of sexual harassment in Academia. First came the horrific stories of campus harassment from Rochester University, followed by the Antarctic harassment from Boston University, followed by the story of Harassment by a major Hollywood movie producer. At this point the producer has lost his job, and investigations continue for the two professors. And closer to home, the University of Canberra professor who was convicted of raping a student has appealed against his 4 year sentence.

As geologists, we need to figure out how to consign these dirtbags to the fossil record, preferably on a human, not geologic timescale. There are many ways to wipe out a species, but I am going to focus on what I think is an important one that is often overlooked: Habitat destruction.

It is no accident that harassment issues are constantly popping up in the academic and creative workplaces. Both sectors value their reputation, and are willing to defend the appearance of everything being fine. Both disciplines are popular career choices, with many more people willing to work in them than there are available jobs. Both sectors value intelligence to the point of considering it a virtue, or being willing to overlook other problems in the name of “Genius.” Both sectors have substantial hierarchies, with few formal checks and balances on power.

It is these problems that we should address if we want these perpetrators to go extinct. The names aren’t important- I haven’t even mentioned them above. As long as universities and studios build the perfect ecological niche for abusers to thrive in, then they will flock to the sectors. It is institutional change that is needed to actually stop the abuse.

So, specifically, what has to happen?

Firstly, reporting mechanisms need to be transparent and incorruptible. The reason that these scum can continue to wreck peoples lives for decades is that complaints, even if made, are too easy to bury. An administration that prefers ongoing, covert sexual assault on its campus over an embarrassing headline can simply use the reporting mechanism as a way of silencing victims, allowing the rapist to continue offending for decades.

Whomever victims report to, be it the police, the funding agencies, professional organizations, or some special independent body, the report receiver needs to be able to investigate allegations without being pressured from the university. In cases where potentially illegal activities have occurred and complainants are threatened, then university officials should be subject to the same treatment as organized criminals who try to intimidate witnesses.

Sexual predators are ambush predators- they need cover from which to attack, and removing administrative cover gives them fewer places to hide. There must be heavy penalties for authorities who fail to act, especially if the offender commits further offences. Administrators who cover for offenders so that they can offend again should be considered accessories.

However, these crooks are also pack animals, so a healthy culture is important towards setting an example of what is and isn’t professional behavior. This is not in itself a solution, but it makes sketchy behavior stand out more easily, and it puts the ratbags on notice that the work place is for real men, not whiney losers.

Finally, although habitat destruction is important, the offenders to have to be hunted down when spotted. This is best done by the whole work team, as uncharismatic megafauna can be dangerous in single combat. However, a habitat in which they are allowed to operate with impunity is not detrimental to them. It is by shrinking their range through a unfavorable setting that allows them to be vulnerable to catastrophic events, but those events still need to be initiated. If a change in corporate climate has weakened the terrible lizardmen, and drying their environment removes their cover and their hiding places, then it is much easier to be the comet that wipes them out.

Playing with science metrics

There are numerous critiques, both online and in the literature (pdf), of the overused H-index and journal impact factor (IF) metrics, particularly when it comes to assessing the quality of recent research.  However, many of these critiques do not include suggestions for how to improve the situation, aside from pointing out that if h-index equals half the square root of total citations, then it is a redundant number.  Over in Economics, they have gone all out to make a fantasy economics league, but we dirt people have no such construction.  Here, then, are a few easily calculated stats that would be an improvement on the status quo.  The can be calculated using Google Scholar, if necessary, assuming anyone knows how to yank their numbers.

COIF: Citations over Impact factor.

This is the number of citations per year a given paper has relative to the impact factor of the journal. Impact factor/2 is the average citations per year of a journal for papers in their first two years of release; subracting that from the citations per year for each given paper gives each paper a score. averaging those for a researcher gives their score. 

This metric puts the particular work of a scientist into perspective relative to others who publish in similar journals. Of course, the COIF from someone who publishes in journals with IF of 20 is not comparable to that of those who publish in papers with IF of two, but if IF is going to be tied to individual researchers despite all admonitions against this practice, then COIF gives a way to interpret it.

I suspect that most young to mid careers scientists will have a positive COIF; citations, at least in geology, tends to accumulate more in later years than in the first two.  However, a declining COIF might mean that one's work is becoming less relevant as time goes by.

Whether an institution wants a person with low COIF and flashy journals, or a high COIF in esoteric publications probably depends on the particular institution, and what their priorities are.  So the COIF might even be useful for determining how well suited people are to various particular institutions.

As an industry person who publishes occasionally, I have few enough papers to be able to calculate this for myself manually and easily (using Google scholar, which probably inflates the numbers by 20%). Anyone with a basic knowledge of programming could probably automate the process, though.

Paper	year	Journal	IF	CPY	COIF
Birch et al.	2007	AJES	1.6	1.8	1.0
Parsons et al.	2008	Am Min	2.0	4.3	3.3
Klemme et al	2008	Geostandards	3.2	2.9	1.3
Parsons et al.	2009	CMP	3.5	3.3	1.6
Aleinikoff et al.	2012	Chem Geol	3.5	7.7	5.9
Magee et al	2014	SIA	1.2	1.0	0.4
Mean				3.5	2.2

SCP: Self citation percentage

What percentage of a paper's citations come from authors of that paper? This is simply The number of times a paper is cited by one or more of its authors divided by the total number of citations. This has been looked into by a number of people in the never ending struggle to interpret citation numbers.  At least some suggest that the number in generally in the twenties, and doesn't have enough variant to be useful, but I find that surprising, as the papers I've published vary quite a bit:

Demonstrating on myself again, it can range from 4% to 100%.

paper	year	cites	sefies	SCP
Parsons et al.	2008	30	6	20%
Aleinikoff et al.	2012	23	1	4%
Parsons et al.	2009	20	7	35%
Klemme et al	2008	20	6	30%
Birch et al.	2007	14	2	14%
Magee et al	2014	1	1	100%
Total		108	23	21%

Hard rock men and soft rock girls

Readers with short attention spans who waste too much time on social media may have noticed that Brian Romans has been complaining over on twitter about the hardrock/ softrock divide. This being a blog, I will whinge in more depth below:

For those of you who grew up on a carbonaceous chondrite, there is a historical cultural divide between hardrock- the study of high temperature processes as recorded in crystalline rocks, and softrock- the study of low temperature processes which can be recorded in sediments.

I’m not sure where in the fossil record this division first appeared, but my experience of it goes back to teachers who were trained in the Apollo era. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, the moon race injected lots of cash into the study of (dead, high temperature) moon rocks and associated meteorites. A generation later, from the 90’s on, there has been an increasing push to understand climate, presumably in hope that we can learn something about it before it kills us all. One result of this change in focus is an unnecessary cultural divide, premised on lazy assumptions that in some cases are decades out of date.

For example, one of the strengths of the 20th century hardrock push was the elevation of petrology beyond a simple descriptive science to a thermodynamically constrained, math-based quantitative science. The calculations done with thermocalc or MELTS or any of the other equilibrium simulators are of course trivial compared to what goes into climate models or organic geochemistry or genetics, but some of the older, out-of-touch hardrock evangelists haven’t quite caught on to these developments yet. Similarly, researchers who have used the surge in climatological research funding to tackle new fields of research have sometimes been labeled as too soft to make it in hard rock, while in many cases they feel that their former fields of study have either had the interesting questions answered, or degenerated into untestable speculating.

In reality, the advancement in modern analytical, conceptual, and computational techniques means that the separation between hardrock and softrock is largely a psychological or historical one. As you carbonaceous chondrite dwellers surely appreciate, we have moved on from isotopic anomalies in presolar grains to organic cosmochemistry, the origin of chirality and life, and other burning questions that require understanding the interaction between low and high temperature processes in active planets. Even bread-and-butter questions like continental crust formation are increasingly having to deal with the effects of weathering (and how it changes as the atmosphere evolves), in order to explain increasingly detailed analyses. As a community, we should have realized way back when subduction was discovered that it is futile to separate aqueous and thermal processes on a planet whose thermal engine is driven by downgoing oceanic slabs.

Having met a lot of scientists over the years, the ones who use their skills to address a variety of questions across outdated subdisciplinary boundaries seem to be happier and more productive than those who choose to wave an archaic banner from a lost tribe of geoscience. From the 21st century, the hardrock / softrock divide seems as old fashioned as the Billy Joel song parodied below:

Softrock Girl

Softrock girl,

She’s been living in her softrock world.

I bet she’s never had a mantle guy

I bet her momma never told her why.

I’m gonna try for a softrock girl

She’s been living in her climate world

As long as anyone with magma can

and now she’s looking for a hard rock man

And when she knows what she wants from deep ti-i-ime

And when she wakes up and makes up her mi-i-ind

She’ll see I’m not so tough

Just because

I’m in love

With a softrock girl.

You know I’ve seen her in her soft rock world,

She’s getting tired of her plankton toys

and her presents from her soft rock boys

She’s got a choice.

Softrock girl

You know I can’t abide to study pearls

But maybe someday when my ship comes in

Drilling MOHO through the MORB so thin

and then I’ll win.

And when she’s walking on sand grains so fi-i-ine.

And when she’s drilling, she yearns for a mi-i-ine.

She’ll say I’m not so tough

Just because

I’m in love with a softrock girl

She’s been living in her climate world

As long as anyone with magma can

and now she’s looking for a hard rock man

That’s what I am

Softrock girl

She’s my softrock girl.

You know I’m in love with a

Softrock girl

My softrock girl.

You know I’m in love with a

Softrock girl

My softrock girl.

The Tim Hunt sleight of hand

The internet has been all atwitter about the blatantly sexist remarks made by Nobel laureate Tim Hunt earlier this week, at a women in scientist event in Korea.  These remarks have been roundly ridiculed, as is appropriate for such stupidity from such an influential scientist.  A few days later, after a half-assed apology, Professor Hunt resigned. 

This is unfortunate.  His resignation allows his university, not to mention the rest of academia, to “shoot the messenger” and use him as a scapegoat to ignore the structural problems that allow academia to shelter and perpetuate sexist behaviour in the first place. It is like treating cholera with doxycycline while ignoring the sewage.

Ideally, his remarks, which were basically an admission of sexual harassment and/or bullying, should have triggered the standard investigative processes at his universities.  If, in fact, he has been hiring in a gender-biased manner, or taking sexual advantage of starry-eyed underlings, or making his employees cry, then he should be dealt with using the appropriate channels.  By resigning in haste, it means that we have no way of gauging the efficacy of the university grievance policies, and it gives his victims no means of redress or compensation.

I have mentioned many times the depreofessionalization ofscience, and the attendant social problems that result.  However, the flip side of scientific research getting outsourced from the corporate world to academia is that it requires academia to get more professional.  This is especially true in those areas where commercial research is being done.  However, there has been a resistance from academia to adopt professional attitudes and work practices along with this work.  And this is one of the problems that allows sexist and racist hiring practices and work environments to persist in the ivory tower while private and public sector workplaces are trying to reduce them.

In all types of workplaces, people do fall in love.  Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, and People hopefully learn to work out how to balance their personal and professional lives before their 72^nd birthday.  But whether one believes the appropriate waiting time between leaving supervision and calling should be measured on the second hand or by the orbit of Mars, the admission of a senior researcher of committing damaging and unprofessional behaviour should not prompt knee-jerk resignation.  This just deflects attention from the institutional structures that either address or cover up these sorts of problems.  The issue is not Professor Hunt’s twinfamy; it is the inability of academic institutions to protect their junior personnel.

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