Podcast: Chemjobber, Stu, and SAO Discuss Plagiarism (Part 1)

Way back in February, Chemjobber and I sat down with Stuart Cantrill, Chief Editor of Nature Chemistry, for a chat about plagiarism in scientific publishing. We had so much fun talking that the recording ballooned into a 2-h epic podcast; I didn't know where to start editing!
Mea culpa - the conversation languished on my desktop, and I made excuses each week not to get it done.

Finally, Part 1 of the CJ / SC / SAO "Epic Podcast" arrives!



0:07 - Special guests
1:29 - Stu's day job: What happens to papers submitted to Nature Chem?
4:29 - How do you define #1?
8:19 - "Actually, actually, actually..."
10:42 - Journals already use plagiarism-checking software!?!
12:10 - (and get way too many submissions)
16:22 - Cantrill, automated.
18:47 - Who bears the cost of plagiarized papers?
22:50 - CJ's curious: What happens to the person caught copying?
28:12 - The self-correcting scientific literature
28:58 - Bloggers: A small group of people who care too much...
30:17 - Why publish or perish? Shouldn't it be quality, not quantity?
32:09 - Indexes (Indices?)
33:18 - Opening the door to Hour 2...

P.S. - If you need a primer, the earlier podcast CJ and I refer to is here.

Friday Fun - Superlative Publishers

Who's got the highest total # of published papers among living synthetic chemists?

Criteria: The person runs a group that makes things - sorry, no theorists this round - and works principally in some sub-field of synthetic chemistry (organic, organometallic, inorganic, photochem, med-chem, polymers, etc). 

I opened the discussion up on Twitter this morning, and used SciFinder, backed up with [cough] group websites that often need updating [cough]. 

Here's the list, as of 10:00 CST...

(All counts rounded to nearest 100 for convenience. SciFinder is an imperfect metric, since it includes abstracts and some duplicate entries. Please refer to caveats, below, for more detail.)

Alan Katritzky: 2,200 website; 2600 SciFinder

Source: exchangewire.com

Robert S. Langer: 2000 SciFinder

George Whitesides: 1,200 website; 1900 SciFinder

Leo Paquette: 1500 SciFinder

*E. J. Corey: 1,000 website; 1500 SciFinder

J. Fraser Stoddart: 1,000 website; 1400 SciFinder
Tobin J. Marks: 1,000 website, 1600 SciFinder
Paul v. Rague Schleyer: 1,300 website; 1600 SciFinder
Jean Frechet: 800 website; 1300 SciFinder
Irina Beletskaya: 1300 SciFinder

Barry Trost: 900 website; 1200 SciFinder

K.C. Nicolaou: 700 website; 1200 SciFinder

D. Reinhoudt: 1200 SciFinder

J. S. Yadav: 1,000 website; 1200 SciFinder

Ben Feringa: 1100 SciFinder
J-M. Lehn: 1100 SciFinder

E.W. "Bert" Meijer: 1000 SciFinder

Robert "Bob" Grubbs: 1000 SciFinder
Virgil Percec: 1000 SciFinder

Samuel "Sam" Danishefsky: 700 website; 1000 SciFinder

Ryoji Noyori: 800 SciFinder

Steven Ley: 900 SciFinder
Amos B. Smith: 900 SciFinder
James Tour: 500 website; 900 SciFinder
Stuart Scheiber: 500 website; 800 SciFinder
Karen Wooley: 700 SciFinder

Peter Langer: 700 SciFinder
Carolyn Bertozzi: 700 SciFinder
Jean'ne M. Shreeve: 500 website; 700 SciFinder
JoAnn Stubbe: 600 SciFinder

John Hartwig: 300 website; 600 SciFinder

K. Barry Sharpless: 600 SciFinder
Jacqueline Barton: 300 website; 600 SciFinder
Gautam Desiraju: 500 SciFinder
J.K.M. Sanders: 500 SciFinder

Ted Taylor: 500 SciFinder
Laura Kiessling: 400 SciFinder
M. Joullie: 400 SciFinder
Cynthia Burrows: 300 SciFinder
Melanie Sanford: 200 SciFinder

(Update: 1PM - Added Tobin Marks, Virgil Percec. 6PM - Added top-author women chemists. 7PM - Added Frechet, Desiraju, Sanders. 12AM 6/1 - Added Shreeve, Beletskaya)

Some caveats: I know it's folly to attempt correlating total publication count : scientific 'genius.'

If you only publish one paper, but you cure a major disease or invent a top-selling polymer additive, you're doing just fine! 

Also, I note that not everyone agrees that folks on this list belong in the "synthetic chemist" bucket - see ScienceGeist's (noted) exceptions here. (Update: P-O. Norrby noted another exception...)

Importantly, graduate students shouldn't feel down and out about this list. You can have a perfectly fine career with just a handful of papers; these superstars are the exception rather than the rule.

Curious thought: Publications in large synthetic groups certainly seem to follow a power law** - it takes ~15 years to get those first 100 papers, then about 8 for 100 more, and then the pace picks up dramatically. Presumably, this represents added hands and minds, along with building respect and excitement for one's work. I don't know how many other factors (prizes, location, grants, "buzz") are involved, but they probably belong to another post.

Readers, what say you? Have another person I've missed on the list?

*Who knew E.J. pwned ejcorey.com? (show of hands?) I think I smell a fantastic cyber-squatting campaign ...danishefsky.com, anyone?

**An example we discussed on Twitter: Phil Baran. It took him 15 yrs (1997-2011) to get 100 pubs. Next 25 or so have only taken 2 yrs. If power law holds, he'll have >400 pubs by age 50.

The 2011 Organometallics Roundtable – Peering into the Future

(Note: I’m publishing this post concurrently with my blog bud Chemjobber. Hop on over to his site to read about the industry / academia training and #chemjobs angles. This way, regular readers get twice the opinions for half the price!)

Who wants to chat?
Source: Texas A&M U.

As 2011 drew to a close, John Gladysz, the new Chief Editor of Organometallics, sat down for a chat with seventeen organometallic chemists from different national (German, Swiss, Australian, US, Chinese, British) and employment backgrounds (14 academia, 2 industrial, 1 government). The result?  An in-depth discussion, full of banter and back-talk, which covers topics such as industrial training for grad students, national creativity differences, “dream reactions,” and how to encourage industrial cross-collaboration.

As an icebreaker, Gladysz had each chemist dream up their “Christmas Stocking Reaction,” the ultimate goal each would love to see realized. Here’s a quick rundown:

-      Pragmatism –Joachim Ritter (DuPont) envisioned several scenarios for taking non-petroleum-derived feedstocks on to commodity chemicals. Ritter’s focus on hydroxymethyl-furfural (HMF, a darling of ChemEng labs across the country) was perhaps unsurprising, but I enjoyed his new ideas for deoxygenation of vegetable oils to produce fine chemicals. Jerzy Klosin (Dow) chimed in for development of newer, cheaper catalytic complexes, especially championing first-row analogues for replacement of palladium in polymerizations. Bernhard Rieger (Technische U. Munschen) weighed in on incorporation of CO₂ into polymers with nickel catalysts.

-     Break the Glove Boxes! – Jim Mayer (U. Washington) and Bill Jones (U. Rochester), building off of Ritter’s theoretical deoxygenation catalysts, proposed chemistry based on high-oxidation-state metals. Mark Humphrey (Australia National) wished for an air-insensitive route to Sonogoshira-type couplings of alkynyl dendrimers. Jennifer Schomaker (U. Wisc.-Madison) hoped to use nitrous oxide as a terminal oxidant, and Vy Dong (U. of Toronto) would like chiral ligands for high-valent Pd chemistry.

P-N-N pincers and Pd oxidation,
Z-metathesis and dehydrogenation,
Iridium cat'lysts that stitch up new rings
These are a few of their favorite things...

-      Crank up the Heat – Tobin Marks (Northwestern U.) wanted to see more ligand classes (think pincers and porphyrins) capable of supporting homogeneous catalysis at higher temperatures.

-      Mind your MOFs – Still others, such as Zach Ball (Rice U.) and Ekkehardt Hahn (Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster) weighed in on new types of building blocks and metals for cluster and MOF chemistry. Vivian Yam (U. of Hong Kong) wrapped up everyone’s requests with a nice bow; she hoped for new air- and moisture-insensitive OLED materials, solar energy-collecting polymers, and water-splitting photocatalysts.

Filling the “Tool Box” - Rieger cautioned to watch out for the recurring industrial opinion that “all the useful chemistry is already discovered.” Gladysz used the example of frustrated Lewis pairs, which, while a fairly young concept, are already turning heads. Bill Jones gave an impromptu one-liner about heterolytic hydrogenation: “If someone had written that on an exam…you’d give them a zero (back in the old days).” Humphrey chimed in on bimetallic bases, and Klosin for Ziegler-Natta studies.

But just then, Ritter poured cold water on the party: “Today’s chemical companies are busy reacting to rapid market swings and trends, which does not leave a lot of room for risky long-term projects.” Sensing, perhaps, that he’d deflated the roundtable’s enthusiasm, he quickly backtracked and mentioned that he’s “looking forward to…CO₂ utilization, solar energy, and biomass based energy and chemicals.”

So there you go, future faculty members, he’s written half your proposal already!

Throwaway lines – CJ has collected quite a few of these, but I’d like to comment on a few more.

 “I’ve talked to a colleague in China whose professor advised ‘If you don’t do palladium chemistry, how will people know you are my student?’.” –Vy Dong

Peering into the OM "xstal ball "
Source: Organometallics

This issue seems to rankle most with the faculty, who toe the fine line between capitalizing on their past successes and striking out with their own programs. Suzanne Blum (UC-Irvine) cautioned against what she calls “n+1 research,” clinging to well-trodden paths while writing funding proposals. But Yam and Humphrey pointed out that initial funding in their home countries (China, Australia) can be tough unless you stick to the script.

This creativity discussion wound through the group, until Yam and Hahn debated whether Indian and Chinese universities still seemed to hire based on quantity (i.e. papers published) vs. quality.

Hahn: “…even the 28-year old researchers from China know their h-indexes [and] introduce themselves saying their name and ‘I have an h-index of 10.’ And you wonder who has trained them?”

I can’t say that I’ve never encountered the "publish or die" sentiment, but I had hoped it was becoming less prevalent with time. Readers, your thoughts?

The Last Word - “…in my opinion, the chemical community performs poorly in transmitting to the general public what they are actually doing.” –Ekke relays a sobering thought for those of us in the blogosphere who toil daily to demystify our science.

Maybe he doesn’t read enough good science blogs?