Some Reasons to Rename my Blog as BioCode's Notes

Hi Dear Readers:

I’ve decided that it would be prudent, exposure-wise,  to change the name of my professional blog to BioCode's Notes, for a number of reasons:

1. People into bioinformatics comprise a significant part of my –alas, still small- readership. They tend to be always hungry for code tips, language comparisons, and other things that do not fit neatly under the umbrella of “computational proteomics”.

2. My own work is straying more and more from computational proteomics per se into other problems linking biology (Proteomics, Genomics, Life Sciences) with programming (R, Java, Perl, C++). Biocoding is now my bread-and-butter…

3. I need a shorter, catchier name that is easy to use in coffee talks, presentations, or when sharing links with friends.

4. I also decided to add a Blog's mascot, our T-rex:
              Truth    => Science is about Truth.
              Tea: UK Science.
              STaTisTics => OK, this one’s got as many ‘S’ as ‘T’, but the latter is more frequent in English.
              T-rex  => The future belongs to Big Data, which we’ll use (and are already
                                 using) to trace back the march of evolution to our preferred
                                 species, including the dinosaurs. And last, but not least, this is
                                 Abel’s (my son) favorite animal.          

Hope you enjoy this Idea
Yasset

My List of Most Influential Authors in Computational Proteomics (according to Articles References, Google Scholar, twitter, Linkedin, Microsoft Academic Search and ResearchGate)

Young researchers starting their careers will often look for reviews, opinions and research manuscripts from the most influential authors of their chosen field. In science, however, unlike many other topics on the Internet, ranked lists or manuscript repositories of top authors sorted by research topic are hard to come by. For some researchers, the idea of such a task brings the words ‘wasted time’ to their minds; the most critical condemn it as a frivolous pursuit. Maybe so. In my opinion, however, it as an excellent starting point.

Home Page of ResearchGate with more than 3 millions of users

These days, more people than ever are involved in science and research. Just look at ResearchGate’s homepage.  There are over 3 million persons there –and we’re only counting ResearchGate users. Once simple undertakings, such as finding the right manuscript to cite, the most authoritative group on a topic, or the best software application for a specific task, have become increasingly difficult for graduate students navigating this ocean of data, despite the availability of services such as Google Scholar or Pubmed. The situation will only worsen in the future, as is easy to see by simply tallying the number of  published papers in the fields of Proteomics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Computational Proteomics since 1997:

Number of published manuscripts in Pubmed per year (1997-2012). the statistics was done using the Medline Trend Service http://dan.corlan.net/medline-trend.html

In 2012 alone, over 6,000 and 17,000 manuscripts were published in the fields of proteomics and bioinformatics, respectively. Our young field, computational proteomics, published more than four hundred papers. Perhaps well-established PI’s or Group Leaders can easily tell apart derivative or me-too contributions from groundbreaking work, but young scientists, who spend most of their time implementing someone else’s ideas, can certainly have a hard time doing so. Although technology has come to the rescue with today’s mixture of search engines and social networking tools (ResearchGate, Google Scholar, twitter and LinkedIn among them), the best way to harness its power is, precisely, by starting from a ranked list of the most authoritative voices within a field of research, whose whereabouts can then be traced in the scientific literature, the blogosphere, and anywhere else.

#HavanaBioinfo2012 Hard, but Awesome Experience

From 8th to 11th of last December the "I Bioinformatics for Biotechnology Applications" (#HavanaBioinfo2012) was held in the hotel “Occidental Miramar” located within an elegant area in Havana, Cuba. Putting on a Bioinformatic workshop takes a lot of different pieces (small ones and big ones). You need write lot of mails to invited speakers, you need a nice and comfortable place with lots of tables and chairs and good food and the drinks. 

I started from October, writing the first mails to EBI friends, advisers and professors (www.ebi.ac.uk), and to be complete honest it was fantastic because most if then accepted from the very beginning. Thanks to Henning Hermjakob and Alex Bateman (@Alexbateman1) for the support. At the end the workshop was fully subscribed, with more than 45 attendees and sixteen speakers, participating in two poster sessions and a panel discussion. Speakers from EBI, Belgium University, Mascot (UK), Bioinformatics Solutions (Canada) accepted the invitation to come here and give one or two lectures about proteomics, genomics, bioinformatics.