PDF has become the standard way we consume scientific papers, but in fact is not a good format for this purpose at all. Or as Martin Robbins said at the recent Science Online London conference: PDF is an insult to science. The problem was nicely illustrated by Duncan Hull, using a quote from Peter Murray-Rust from a May 2008 article: There are of course ways journal publishers can add metadata to PDF files, e.g. using XMP markup.

The iPad was released six months ago, and we already have several reference managers available for the platform. Reading the PDF of a scientific paper on an iPad is a positive experience, and to me very different from reading the PDF on a regular computer. While this could also be done with generic iPad PDF readers such as iBooks or Goodreader, reference managers make it much easier to organize a large collection of PDF files.

In a blog post last week, Dario Taraborelli officially announced ReaderMeter. ReaderMeter takes the usage data from reference managers (starting with Mendeley) to analyze the impact of publications by a particular author. ReaderMeter is a welcome addition to other metrics of researcher impact, most of which are citation-based. And ReaderMeter was hacked together in a few nights, so the service should improve over time.

This week PLoS Computational Biology published another helpful editorial in their 10 Simple Rules collection (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941): Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia. I have very rarely edited Wikipedia articles myself, and I suspect this behavior is the rule and not the exception among science bloggers.

Tables and figures contain the data of a scientific paper in condensed (and often visually appealing) form. This is why they are among the first thing we look at, and why they are often reused when we discuss the paper in a presentation or blog post.

Dear Christian Specht, Thank you very much for your detailed response in The Scientist to our previous letter regarding citation mutations.

Citation styles are one of the greater mysteries for the novice manuscript writer. There are numerous ways that authors, title, journal, etc. can be arranged and formatted (see examples below), and in bibliographies citations can be ordered either alphabetically or by order of appearance in the text. Laemmli UK. Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4. Nature. 1970;227:680-685. U. K. Laemmli (1970).

Whereas most reference managers are either standalone applications and/or web-based, Zotero works as a Firefox plugin. This approach has many advantages, but is not for everybody.

Dear Scientist, last week you published an interesting article by Christian Specht about Mutations of citations. Dr. Specht found more than 600 wrong citations for the paper by Laemmli (Laemmli 1970), which has been cited at least 88633 times according to Scopus. Laemmli UK. Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4. Nature. 1970;227:680-685.

In March 2009 I posted an overview chart of how popular reference managers have implemented some important features. I’ve since updated this chart several times, and the chart probably has outgrown the format of a blog post.

Dear reader, two weeks ago I moved this blog from Nature Network to PLoS Blogs. I hope that most of my old readers have followed me here, and that I might even have a few new readers. Ed Yong recently talked about how he interacts with his many, many blog readers. One important strategy he uses is to ask his readers for feedback in regular intervals – he calls it delurking.