New types of journal metrics grow more influential in the scientific community

AT ONE POINT in his career, Nobel Laureate Sir Harold W. Kroto was the second most highly cited chemist in Britain—topped only by the University of Southampton’s Martin Fleischmann, one of the proponents of cold fusion.

Kroto, who codiscovered C60 and is currently a chemistry professor at Florida State University, declines to draw any conclusions from that experience. But given the ultimate fate of cold fusion, the anecdote suggests that citation statistics aren’t always a good indicator of scientific excellence.

Read the full article at Chemical & Engineering News

As part of the UBC Library’s mandate to archive undergraduate research, two honors theses have just been added to the Physics and Astronomy Community in cIRcle – UBC’s Information Repository.

Measurement of Upsilon (1S) Production at BaBar
by Rocky So.

A Deformation Induced Quantum Dot by Daniel
Woodsworth.

If you are interested in contributing your undergraduate thesis to cIRcle, please contact me directly kevin.lindstrom@ubc.ca.

Microsoft’s much anticipated WorldWide Telescope was released on Tuesday – May 12th, 2008.

There is a very nice article about it in the New York Times – Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D

Moreover, around two months ago, Google also introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.

Take a look on the books UBC Library has on this topic of Astronomy

** Photo by Fort Photo

Dr. Erich Vogt
In addition to an outstanding career as a top researcher and scientist in the field of nuclear physics, Dr. Erich Vogt was one of the founders of the TRIUMF project at the University of British Columbia, the largest university-based scientific laboratory in Canada for particle and nuclear physics.

Dr. Vogt is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of British Columbia, where he has taught thousands of students who have excelled under his enthusiastic mentorship and influence. Dr. Vogt has also served on many high-level advisory committees in the field of nuclear and accelerator science in various world-class institutes. He is an internationally renowned scholar, and has published many research papers on theoretical physics

For more information, go to Day of Celebration in Honour of Dr. Erich W. Vogt.

Tentative Program

Sunday, May 4, 2008

12:30 – VOGT SYMPOSIUM – Hebb Theatre
12:30 Hon. Stan Hagen (MLA, Comox Valley) – Introduction
13:00 Nigel Lockyer “The Future of TRIUMF: Building on the Past Successes”
13:40 Art McDonald “TRIUMF and UBC in the SNO experiment”
14:20 BREAK
14:40 Carlo Rubbia “Beta beams and ion cooling: the future of accelerator driven neutrino oscillations?”
15:20 Walter Kohn “Density and Density Functional Theory of Nuclei and Other Self-bound Fermi Systems”
16:00 Erich Vogt Summary
16:30 – RECEPTION – SUB Party Room
16:30 Semi-Open Microphone (sign up in advance)

Biotechnology for Biofuels is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal featuring high-quality studies describing technological and operational advances in the production of biofuels from biomass.

www.biotechnologyforbiofuels.com

We are pleased to announce a new open-access journal, Biotechnology for Biofuels [1], published online by BioMed Central. Biotechnology for Biofuels will emphasize the research and application of biotechnology and synergistic operations to improve plant and biological conversion systems for the production of fuels from lignocellulosic biomass, and any related economic, environmental and policy issues.

The need for this journal is evident: the recent explosion in research on the production and subsequent use of biofuels has huge implications for science and future policy directions, yet Biotechnology for Biofuels is the first open-access journal featuring research dedicated to this exciting and expanding field, thereby filling a vacant niche. We are convinced that a communication will facilitate scientific progress in this extremely important area, and will also help to promote informed public debate. Biotechnology for Biofuels will ensure public availability of high-caliber peer-reviewed research, reviews and commentaries on all aspects of biofuels research and any related political, economic, and environmental issues.

The benefits of publishing in an open access journal are manifold: open access enables free and universal access to articles online, at no cost to the reader, allowing research to be disseminated by as wide an audience as possible. Submitted manuscripts undergo rapid peer review by internationally renowned experts, drawn in part from our Editorial Board [2]. Articles are published immediately upon acceptance and, soon after, listed in PubMed [3]; the communication of research is therefore not postponed until the collation of an ‘issue’.

The interdisciplinary nature of biofuels research makes the benefits of open access particularly attractive, as it ensures that biologists, chemists, engineers, genomicists, and biotechnologists (to name just some of those involved) all have shared access to the latest biofuels research in each of these areas.

UBC’s Dr. Mark Halpern gave a presentation on Thursday April 17 about WMAP and some of the results from their five years with of data.

The audio and pdf presentation is available at
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/730

Abstract:

We have released maps and data for five years of observation of the cosmic microwave background with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and I will review the main results in this talk. A simple 6 parameter cosmological model continues to be an excellent fit to the CMB data and to our data in conjunction with other astrophysical measurements. In particular a running spectral index is not supported by the data, and constraints that the Universe is spatially flat have increased in precision. Increased sensitivity and improvements in our understanding of the instrumental beam shape have allowed us to measure for the first time a cosmic neutrino background. Neutrinos de-coupled from other matter earlier than photons did. While they are expected to have a 2 Kelvin thermal distribution today, they comprised 10% of the energy density of the Universe at the epoch of photon de-coupling. The data also allow tighter constraints on the shape of the inflationary potential via the amplitude of a gravitational wave background new constraints on features of cosmic axions. Recorded at TRIUMF on Thursday April 17, 2008.