Adding a species to the ESA can set a conservation biologist on the path to a healthier future: A study by Silliman
The 260 species were added to the ESA by the Obama administration. They counted 4,836 citations for academic papers published in 785 journals. Defining journals according to their impact factor, they showed that only a small percentage of citations came from journals with an impact factor of more than 9. Mid-ranking journals accounted for 6%. Journals that have not been given an impact factor by Clarivate — often because they are not considered influential enough — represented 13% of ESA citations.
But publishing in the kinds of journal that are more likely to influence the ESA could set conservation researchers back in their careers, says study co-author Brian Silliman, a marine conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. A researcher’s impact is too often compared with the number of citations they get and the impact factor of the journals they’ve published in to make decisions about hiring, promotion or funding.
Given that the ESA has the power to halt logging, construction, problematic fishing practices and other human activities that threaten vulnerable wildlife, getting a species added to it can be an important way for a conservation biologist to help protect populations.
What is the best taxon-specific journal to publish in? The impact factor of Pacific Science had a conventional value of 0.74, and the search is on to discover dark proteins
If you want graduate students to get a job you should not publish in taxon-specific journals because they aren’t going to be much of an impact. “Even if it’s great science and it has applications to other systems, it’s a very limited audience and it’s going to be harder for them to get a job.”
The team created an impact factor based on the fraction of papers that a journal publishes that are used by the European Space Agency. Pacific Science had a conventional impact factor of 0.74 and was the top ranked journal.
The study’s findings do not devalue the kind of theory driven science that appeals to high impact-factor journals. Rather, they emphasize the need to support researchers who want to do other kinds of work, such as long-term population-monitoring studies, without sacrificing their career prospects. “That is really important science when it comes to conservation that we stand to lose if we don’t incentivize this kind of very baseline data collection,” says Choi.
The human genome encodes potentially thousands of tiny ‘dark proteins’ that were previously overlooked. Now the search is on to find out what they do. (Nature | 12 min read)
The Plant Institute: The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: The Case of the First Proper Seed Bank of the World during the 1941-1944 Nazi Siege
In his book The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, author Simon Parkin tells the story of the city’s Plant Institute — the world’s first proper seed bank — during the 1941-1944 Nazi siege. “The institute’s staff members sacrificed themselves, one by one, to protect a collection for which the whole raison d’être was to one day save humanity from starvation,” writes reviewer Simon Ings. Despite unthinkable privation, Vadim Stepanovich Lekhnovich, the curator of the tuber collection, later said that “it wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection. It wasn’t possible to eat the work of your colleagues and your life’s work.
Plans to ramp up fossil-fuel extraction in the United States doesn’t have to spell the end of decarbonization efforts or lead to further environmental degradation, argues energy geographer Jennifer Baka. What matters now is that it’s done right. The regulation of energy projects must be widened to consider factors such as how the infrastructure needed to run them impacts the local area. “The economic and environmental trade-offs of drilling can then be better evaluated,” Baka writes. “It is key to fostering industrial growth while avoiding an environmental catastrophe.”
There was a freeze on a lot of federal grants and loans in the United States after President Donald Trump issued an order on January 27. Many universities advised their faculty members against spending federal grant dollars after a federal judge temporarily blocked the order. In a subsequent memo, the Trump administration attempted to clarify what was and wasn’t covered by the freeze, but it included no information specific to scientific funding and did not say when the pause would be lifted, leaving scientists worried about its long-term effects. It is easier to destroy the world’s greatest scientific system than it will be to rebuild it.
Fast Radio Bursts: The origin story of a strange burst of energy from an ancient galaxies, says astronomer Wen-fai Fong
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) — mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of energy — might be even weirder than we thought. Most FRBs are thought to come from magnetars, dead stars that usually form in young galaxies and host powerful magnetic fields. The origin of an FRB can now be traced to the edge of an ancient galaxy, in which stellar activity has slowed, which gives evidence that at least some may come from another source. “The FRB origin story is far from boring, and certainly far from solved,” says astronomer Wen-fai Fong.