Altmetric trial – Quantifying our online presence

Methods has just started a 6 month trial with Altmetric.
Altmetric is a powerful tool that tracks when an article has been mentioned online on websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blog sites, news sites, Mendeley, CiteULike, and many more. When calculating an article’s score, Altmetric takes into account factors such as the number of people who have mentioned it online, the type of people who have mentioned it (i.e. scientists or members of the public), and also on which sites the mentions were posted.

The following symbol is located next to each Methods article on Wiley Online Library (in this example the article’s Altmetric score is currently 32):You can click on the symbol to find out more information about the attention that the article has received online, for example how many times it has been tweeted about, or who has mentioned it on their blog site. You can also view an explanation of how the score was calculated, a comparison with other article’s scores, and a breakdown of the demographics:

With the increasing use of social media for the dissemination of research, the Altmetric score aims to measure the online reach of individual articles. In comparison to traditional metrics such as the impact factor, which is more of a long-term reflection of a collection of articles (the journal), the Altmetric score is an immediate reflection of an individual article. It’s expected to be especially useful when used in conjunction with other metrics, such as the impact factor of the journal and the number of citations gained, to help create a more complete picture of an article’s impact.

Methods Senior Editor, Bob O’Hara, comments “I’m really excited by this Altmetric trial. Not just because Altmetric provides a whole new set of statistics I can use to boost my ego, but also because I think we have to be aware of the wider impact of our science, beyond simple citations. Reporting a variety of metrics will be a step towards this, and I hope this trial will help people to see how else a paper can influence the scientific and wider community“.

Related:

• Read Wiley’s press release.
• Visit the Altmetric website.

Issue 4.5

Issue 4.5 is online today. This issue includes articles on species distribution models, connectivity, ecometabolomics, demography, image analysis and metabolites. There is also a freely available application paper entitled “RobOff: software for analysis of alternative land-use options and
conservation actions“.

About the cover: This image shows a female chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. During floods, animals often have to cross inundated areas to reach small islands with high-valued food items, such as fig fruits. While some animals enjoy the fresh water, most are stressed by the possibility of encountering crocodiles. To assess how wildlife is affected by such events, metabolites of glucocorticoids (stress hormones) and other hormones can be extracted and measured from faeces. Although a powerful and non-invasive method to answer questions regarding endocrinological processes in free-ranging animals, the long-term storage of hormone samples at remote field sites is of concern. The article linked to the picture, “Long-term storage effects in steroid metabolite extracts from baboon (Papio sp.) faeces – a comparison of three commonly applied storage methods“, assesses variation in hormones extracted from baboon faeces and stored under different conditions for a period of one year. The results underscore the strengths and weaknesses of different storage methods that can be performed at remote field stations.
Image credited to: Urs Kalbitzer.

To keep up to date with Methods newest content, have a look at our Accepted Articles and Early View articles, which will be included in forthcoming issues.

New Associate Editor

Carolyn Kurle

The newest Associate Editor to join the Methods team is Carolyn Kurle from UC San Diego. Carolyn is interested in several aspects of marine and terrestrial vertebrate ecology. She uses stable isotope biogeochemistry to answer questions about trophic interactions, foraging ecology, niche partitioning, and animal movement patterns. She also studies the impacts of human perturbations, such as pollution and invasion, on ecological communities.

New Associate Editor

Liam Revell

Welcome to Liam Revell from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Liam brings Methods expertise in computer-based phylogeny methods, and the evolutionary ecology of reptiles. He has previously published with us, and his articles are currently in Methods top papers list, containing our most highly cited and downloaded articles.
Click on his photo to read more about his work.

Strangeness and simplicity in ecology

In Animal Ecology (1927), Charles Elton wrote that

“while ecological work is fascinating to do, it is unbearably dull to read about.”

It is reassuring that things were just as bad 86 years ago. Here, I want to think about why not all ecological work is unbearably dull to read about, and what this means for ecological methods.

To my mind, the two things that make a work interesting are strangeness and simplicity. By strangeness, I mean ideas that come from outside the reader’s experience. For example, to an ecologist of my generation, raised on Begon, Harper and Townsend (1990), Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology (1971) is strange. It is hard now to imagine the optimistic intellectual climate in which an undergraduate ecology textbook contained a chapter on space flight, and discussed using algae to feed the inhabitants of the kind of mega-city best known from the pages of 2000AD. One of the roots of this strangeness is that Odum’s book is based on a unifying principle (energy flow at the ecosystem level) that is now rather out of fashion. Almost by definition, little contemporary ecology is strange, and if methods papers are interesting, it is usually for other reasons.

By simplicity, I mean that the work’s intellectual framework is the logical consequence of a small number of initial statements (a.k.a. axioms). I do not mean that it is necessarily easy to see how the consequences follow from the axioms, only that they do follow. Some fields are full of simplicity (geometry and linear algebra, for example). In ecology, simplicity is rarer. There are big theories that aim for simplicity, such as Dynamic Energy Budget theory (Kooijman, 2010), the metabolic theory of ecology (Brown et al., 2004), the inertial view of population dynamics (Ginzburg and Colyvan, 2004), and the neutral theory of biodiversity (Hubbell, 2001). Any given ecologist will disagree with at least three out of four of these, but still they are theories that strive for (without necessarily achieving) a clear foundation and internal consistency.

In methods papers, even those with modest theoretical aspirations, simplicity should be almost always achievable. There are only two requirements: a foundation of clearly-stated axioms; and the avoidance of arbitrary choices in progressing from these axioms to a result. Write a simple paper, and reviewers may dislike your axioms, but cannot (unless they do not feel bound by logic) disagree with how you arrived at your results. Write a paper that is not simple, and its fate depends much more on the whims of reviewers. The first option is easier for all concerned.

Matthew Spencer.
Associate Editor, Methods in Ecology and Evolution

References
Begon, M., Harper, J. L. and Townsend, C. R. (1990). Ecology: individuals, populations and communities. Second edition. Blackwell Scientific, Oxford.
Brown, J. H., Gillooly, J. F., Allen, A. P., Savage, V. M. and West, G. B. (2004). Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85:1771-1789.
Elton, C. (1927). Animal ecology. Reprinted 2001, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Ginzburg, L. R. and Colyvan, M. (2004). Ecological orbits: how planets move and populations grow. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hubbell, S. P. (2001). The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Kooijman, S. A. L. M. (2010). Dynamic energy budget theory for metabolic organisation. Third edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Odum, E. P. (1971). Fundamentals of ecology. Third edition. W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia.

New Associate Editor

Barb Anderson

To accommodate Methods ever-increasing number of submissions, we’ve recruited another Associate Editor! Welcome to Barb Anderson.

Barb is currently at James Cook University, Australia, but will be moving to the University of Otago in New Zealand this July, and she is also still affiliated with the University of York, UK.

Click on her photo to read more about her field of research.

New Associate Editor

Erica Leder

We’d like to welcome Erica Leder to the Methods Associate Editor Board, from the University of Turku.

Erica brings us expertise in molecular methods and the evolution of the phenotype. Click on her photo to read more about her research interests.

Virtual Issue – BES Young Investigator Prize Winners 2012

Every year the British Ecological Society awards a prize for the best paper in each of its 5 journals, by an author at the start of their research career. This freely available Virtual Issue entitled “Young Investigator Prize Winners 2012” brings together the winning papers from each journal, in addition to 2 highly commended papers from each journal, all of which were published in an issue in 2012. The issue is available to read here.

Congratulations to all concerned!

RCUK’s new open access policy

From 1 April 2013, Research Councils UK implemented its new open access policies. All 5 of the BES Journals are compliant with these changes via the full gold open access route. You can read about this in more detail on the BES Journals publication page.

Visit the other BES Journals:
- Functional Ecology
- Journal of Ecology
- Journal of Animal Ecology
- Journal of Applied Ecology

Issue 4.4

Issue 4.4 is now online! This month we have included articles model fitting, mantel tests, measuring decay, measuring diversity, growth curves and mortality rates. The issue includes the free application article “geomorph: an r package for the collection and analysis of geometric morphometric shape data“, and an open access paper entitled “Fitting complex ecological point process models with integrated nested Laplace approximation“.

About the cover: Whilst volunteer data collection programs provide an opportunity to address the challenge of studying biodiversity across large spatial scales, issues regarding the quality of the data collected in this manner must be addressed. Volunteer survey protocols are typically less standardised than their professional equivalents and in “Comparing diversity data collected using a protocol designed for volunteers with results from a professional alternative” Holt et al. consider the implications of this for marine fish diversity studies. The image of a SCUBA diver was taken at Hin Muang pinnacle in South Andaman Sea.
Photo © jimcatlinphotography.com.