FAQ Misc

This is a page for miscellaneous FAQs often asked of Jose.

How do I edit a page in this Wiki

This is very easy. Just go to this test page

Then log in (top right corner) and the click the edit tab or the edit buttons to the right. Enter some text and click "preview" or "save" and it'll be there.

We use the Wiki because it makes posting info on the web extremely easy.

For more detailed help, there is always a link on the left of every wiki page that says "Help", which takes you to the MediaWiki help page

We use the "MediaWiki" software to run the Wiki, so that help is what's relevant. Note that Wikipedia also uses MediaWiki, so once you learn, you can create an entry for something you are interested on in Wikipedia!

Why does your group publish so much on ACP?

ACP has several key advantages over traditional journals:

• Free open access to papers
• Papers are public BEFORE they are reviewed. In "secret review" journals, nobody knows that the paper even exists until it has been accepted and appears on the web. That represents a delay of typically 4-8 months, sometimes more than a year, in the paper being public, which hurts the visibility of the work and increases the probability of being scooped.
• The reviews and the author responses are public. This is advantageous for at least two reasons:
  • The reviews and responses are often very useful to learn quickly what is new, controversial, or well-established etc. about a paper
  • The transparency of the publication process is also increased.
• Non-reviewers can also publish short comments on any paper. This is very useful to receive input from other researchers in the community (even as it creates more work in responding to those extra comments).
• For all of the above reasons, ACP has effectively become the prime journal in Atmospheric Chemistry, surpassing JGR and others in e.g. Impact Factor, Special Issues, etc.

That said, it is always good to publish on a variety of journals as they reach different readerships etc.

How do you determine whether a paper is "Highly Cited" according to Thomson ISI

Thomson ISI publishes thresholds for papers in each field (e.g. Chemistry, Geosciences, or Mech Eng -- this depends on the classification of each journal into fields by ISI) and each year, above which a paper is highly cited. As of Oct-2010, the thresholds are posted in this page (although ISI often moves them around). Basically they rank the papers by the number of citations, and they report the number of citations that separates the 1% most cited from the 99% less cited. So every year (before my annual performance evaluation with the Director of CIRES), I look up the list on the web, and then I compare the citations of our papers with the relevant thresholds for each year of publication and journal field. In our group publications page I highlight in bold all of those papers.

The categories for the journals most relevant to us are:

• Geosciences: JGR, GRL, ACP
• Environment/Ecology: ES&T
• Engineering: AS&T
• Chemistry: Anal. Chem.