Brian’s had the cool idea of summarising some of his pending scientific papers using tag clouds, and I’m joining Lab Lemming, ReBecca and Maria in jumping on the bandwagon. The following two clouds, which may or may not provide some insight into what I’m all about scientifically, are generated from the text of a couple of my papers, sans references and figure captions, using tagcrowd on its default settings (hence the appearance of ‘et’, ‘al’, and ‘figure/fig’). I thought it also might be fun to compare the clouds to the list of keywords that you actually have to provide yourself. The first one is for my recent JGR publication about New Zealand tectonics (yes, the one I promised to write some posts about; something I will get around to once I’ve completed a couple of neccesary background posts).
My keywords: remagnetization, greigite, vertical axis rotation, New Zealand, Hikurangi margin.
Number two was submitted to Earth and Planetary Science Letters just before I went away, and is based on work I did between finishing my PhD and leaving Southampton, and focuses on diagenetic changes to the magnetic mineral assemblage within marine sediments, and their effects on the paleomagnetic signal they carry.
My keywords: sediment diagenesis, sulfate reduction, magnetite dissolution, greigite, superparamagnetism, hysteresis.
I’m apparently not too gratuitously self-citing, but it does seem that, since my PhD supervisor’s name appears on both lists, I’m a bit of a suck-up. That’ll surprise him – although since both papers concern the effects of evil greigite, and he’s been heavily involved in its ascent up the heirarchy of Important Magnetic Minerals in recent years, I could hardly help citing him lots. Given that certain recent reviews have suggested that I seem to be rather good at upsetting people I’m rather surprised that more researcher names don’t appear (the only other one on the JGR paper is retired).
There is also a reasonable degree of overlap between my chosen keywords and the ones that appear in the tag cloud. It’s no surprise that they’re not completely identical (as the most important concepts or themes in a paper are not neccesarily related to how frequently you mention them), but it does seem that you can potentially get a reasonable sense of what a paper might actually be discussing from this sort of thing. The question is whether it actually has any utility in finding papers and/or assessing whether you want to read them.
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