'A Poor Measure'

April 19, 2012

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H-indices offer poor measures of early-career researchers' productivity and potential, Stanford University's Richard Zare argues in Angewandte Chemie this week. "Just as the IQ number does not capture the creativity and originality of a person's work, the h-index is not a full measure," Zare says. "Some rough correlations do exist, but in judging researchers early in their career, the h-index seems to be a poor measure. It is more a trailing, rather than a leading, indicator of professional success." He adds that while citation-based metrics can speak to the value of a particular publication, "not being highly cited does not mean that someone's work will never have value."

About time someone realized

Submitted by john.ely on Mon, 04/23/2012 - 10:51.

About time someone realized that there is more to sound scientific inquiry than following current fads...

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Alex Pearlman

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The model was featured in a recent issue of the Journal of Probability and Statistics, a paper that he calls the "culmination of 10 years of work" and the "methods paper" for what he hopes will soon be a clinical test. "The finish line is pretty clear," says Pearlman, who is at New York City's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "It is to develop a US Food and Drug Administration-approved kit to predict prostate cancer metastases and to alleviate men of needless surgeries and radiation treatment."
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Genomic architecture of adaptive color pattern divergence and convergence in Heliconius butterflies
Supple, Hines, et al. Genome Research

A group from the US, UK, and Colombia describes findings from a comparative genomics-based study on a form of adaptive variation in butterflies known as mimetic wing coloring. By sequencing co-mimicking Heliconius butterflies from two species and a handful of hybrid zones, researchers narrowed in on a color pattern-associated site near a gene already implicated in red color variation — an apparent regulatory region suspected of evolving by convergence in the two species distantly related species. "Using a combination of next-generation sequencing analyses, we have refined our understanding of the genetic architecture of wing pattern variation in Heliconius," they write, "and gained important insights into the evolution of novel adaptive phenotypes in natural populations."
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Hologic has appointed former Beckman Coulter head Scott Garrett to its board of directors, where he will serve on the corporate development committee.
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An international team has sequenced the genome of the carnivorous bladderwort plant, Utricularia gibba. Their findings suggest that the carnivorous plant has ditched virtually all its non-coding DNA, retaining a set of sequences that's almost exclusively genic. "What that says is that you can have a perfectly good multicellular plant with lots of different cells, organs, tissue types and flowers, and you can do it without the ['junk' DNA]," said co-corresponding author Victor Albert.
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Sponsor: EMD Millipore

GenomeWeb and EMD Millipore invite you to view an archived webinar discussing new approaches to detect RNA at the single-cell level as well as new probes for the direct quantification of circulating miRNAs. In this free online seminar, recorded April 25, 2013, our expert panel shares protocols for improved RNA and miRNA detection.

On-demand recording available here.

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