Seems the big online controversy over the holidays was a series of posts by Fake Steve Jobs (aka Forbes writer Dan Lyons, aka FSJ). Lyons writes a blog pretending to be the Apple CEO Steve Jobs, offering critiques of the tech world and journalism in general. While at times he can be pedantic, he can also be brilliant (FSJ offered the best explanation of Google’s business model I’ve ever seen: “Google’s basic goal in life is to drive the cost of everything in the world to zero — except the one thing Google sells, which is incredibly overpriced advertising with super high margins that are fed by Google’s refusal to share information with partners”).

So, in response to Apple’s apparent buyout of the Think Secret website, which Apple had accused of stealing trade secrets, FSJ wrote a series of blog entries pretending that Apple had approached him as well, had threatened him with a similar lawsuit and then offered to buy him out (posts start here, then here, here, here here, and here. The posts were fairly tongue in cheek, and FSJ went so far as to mention his lawyer, Tony Clifton (an old Andy Kaufmann pseudonym) and to include a photo of Kaufmann. The point was that through the use of parody, FSJ would highlight Apple’s wrongdoing here. Yet somehow, these fake posts by a fake author openly pretending to be someone else got taken seriously at sites all over the internet.

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Thomson/ISI has issued their own statement refuting the JCB’s article claiming that Thomson could not provide the data used for determining a journal’s impact factor. According to Thomson, the data supplied to JCB matched the Impact Factor ratings to within 99.8% (note that the JCB claims this set of data appeared to be, “assembled in an ad hoc manner to create a facsimile of the published data that might appease us”). Thomson states that there is only one set of data, not two as claimed, and that this set of data is interpreted in different ways for different purposes.

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Pretty damning article published this week in the Journal of Cell Biology showing that Thomson Scientific (formerly ISI) can’t produce the data that they use to determine journal Impact Factors. The Rockefeller University Press, which publishes JCB bought their own data back from Thomson as part of an analysis of their properties. Much to their surprise, the data didn’t add up to the impact factor that Thomson has declared for their journals. This led to the revelation that Thomson keeps two sets of books, but neither of these sets of figures matched up with the Impact Factors. As the article notes, “If an author is unable to produce original data to verify a figure in one of our papers, we revoke the acceptance of the paper.”

While Impact Factors play a big role for those of us in the publishing game, they’re probably even more important to the working scientist, as job offers, promotions, tenure and grant funding are all often determined by one’s record of publishing in journals with high Impact Factors. This harkens back to a PLOS Medicine editorial from 2006, where they noted that in their opinion, determining a journal’s Impact Factor is “unscientific and arbitrary.”

As both articles note, perhaps it’s time to re-examine such measurements, and start using more scientific and meaningful tools to determine the value of a given publication.

CSH Protocols focuses on methods for use at the bench (and at the computer), but this only covers part of the job requirements for most academic scientists. Teaching can be a demanding task, but there are more and more resources available online to help put together informative and memorable lectures for students. Here’s a quick rundown of a few sites freely available from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that provide some useful teaching tools.

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Fate-mapping, the tagging of specific cells or tissues in an embryo, and following their movements and development over time, has a long history as a valuable method. The earliest fate-maps date back to the 1880’s. The first “modern” fate-maps were created in 1929 by Walter Vogt, who applied vital dyes to regions of the amphibian embryo. This allowed him to track which embryonic regions developed into which adult tissues. Two methods, featured in the December issue of CSH Protocols and freely available to non-subscribers, present new fate-mapping techniques, which overcome some serious experimental barriers.
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