New blog adress: "http://exeb.blogspot.se/"

Posted by Erik Svensson

The blog has been quite quiet the lasts weeks, mainly due to the ISBE-meetings and the summer break. It will soon start to get active again, as we are returning to work.

To all of our outside readers: 

We will soon change the blog adress from the current "http://svenssonresearchlaboratory.blogspot.se/" to "http://exeb.blogspot.se/". This change will take place as this blog has evolved from a personal research blog started by me (Erik Svensson) to a group blog for EXEB, with the aim to be used by all of us. The changed adress will be implemented sometime next week, after our first lab-meeting for the semester. Please bookmark this new adress for the future, so that we do not loose you outside readers from all over the world!

We would also like to thank all you visitors who have visited this blog over the past years, and as we have an increasing number of readers from all over the world, we are of course curious of which you are, where you come from and your thoughts about this blog. If you have any comments, suggestions or issues that you want to bring up how we can improve this blog and make it even more interesting for outsiders, please write your comments below, and tell us about yourself. All input, including both negative and positive criticisms would be most welcome. 

New blog name and a few words about the past and the future

Some of you might already have noted this, but the blog has recently changed its name from the more person-oriented "Erik Svensson Research Laboratory", to the more general name "Experimental Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour" (Acronym: EXEB). This is more than cosmetics and simply a changed name: it reflects a significant change that had as its starting point over a decade ago, in 2000, when I returned from my postdoc in the US.

By that time, our department was (and still largely is), very dominated by bird behavioural ecology and two large research groups: Molecular Ecology and Bird Migration Ecology. It was therefore a bit odd to try to start up something in between these two large groups, that was neither, and in this case an evolutionary and ecological research programme focussed on field studies on insects and with a strong connection to quantitative genetics and selection approaches. Moreover, at that time (unlike today), odonates were still considered to be quite odd study organisms, both in Lund and elsewhere. It was quite lonely, at times, to strive to cut out an independent niche in a department so strongly focussed on birds and behavioural ecology, and it was tempting several times to give up, and just follow the crowd along some easier path.

Luckily, I got several excellent PhD-students, who were all succesful in terms of their theses, defended, got postdocs and went abroad to learn new things: Jessica Abbott in 2006, Tom Gosden in 2008, Fabrice Eroukhanoff in 2009 and Kristina Karlsson in 2010. Of these former PhD-students, Jessica recently obtained a "Junior Project Grant" from "Vetenskapsrådet" last year, and as you know she has now re-established herself in Lund and in our research environment. She is hopefully not the last of my current and former PhD-students/postdocs who will be able to establish herself as an independent PI, but only the future will tell this, of course. This spring several of you will apply from VR, and later this year, Tom Gosden will return to Lund from Australia on a one-year postdoc (Marie Curie). Any new PhD-students entering this group will have an idéal situation in the form of several postdoctoral mentors, good role models and senior scientists.  

Given these happy and exciting developments, I feel that the goal I did put up more than a decade ago, i. e. to build up a new evolutionary oriented research group in Lund focussing on insects/invertebrates, has largely been achieved. As there is now more than one senior scientist and PI,  it is time for me to transform this group in to more of a collective enterprise, and less of a one-man show. This has already started to happen,  naturally, as lab-meetings were obviously running when I was recently away in South Africa. This is great, and exactly how I want it to be. A research group cannot stand and fall with a single person, it has to be a collective effort.

Time is therefore mature to change the name of both the blog and the research group. These new changes will soon be seen also at the the department's website. I strongly feel that it is important to have a group of people who regularly meet, as several brains work synergistically, and intellectual lab-meetings of the kind we have had over the years should be the last thing to prioritize down, even if time is always limited. As for myself, I will now try to cut down on the number of projects, focus more on my own research and hopefully share some of the administrative burden and advising activities with Jessica and those others of you who might also hopefully soon enter as new PI:s.

A few more words about the new name of the blog, which I and Jessica have discussed before deciding on  EXEB. "Experimental Evolution", i. e. the first two words, signify the important fact that Jessica brings with her an entirely new research approach to Lund and our research group, while at the same time we keep our strong focus on ecology and behaviour.

Some might argue that there are other groups in our department working with these topics too, and that our research group is therefore obsolete or unnecessary. Perhaps we should simply dissolve it, and happily integrate ourselves with other similar groups like MEEL, The PEG ("theoretical ecology") or "Bird Migration Ecology"?. Well,  I do not think so, otherwise I would of course have shut down this blog a long time ago. Personally, I think we represent a significant and different research current than these other groups, without denying that they also do good work.

There is clearly room for a research group that is both integrative (i. e. combines molecular, experimental and field approaches) and theoretically oriented (although not a pure theory group), and which is firmly rooted in population and evolutionary quantitative genetics. That is who we are and what we are good at, I think. And we also have a certain responsibility to represent this particular research tradition in Lund, rather than trying to copy others and become too similar to other research groups.

Finally: Goodbye "Erik Svensson Research Laboratory" and long live EXEB!

Interesting blog about "Eco-evolutionary dynamics" by Andrew Hendry's lab

Those of you have met Andrew Hendry before, either in Vienna during the "Speciation"-meeting last week, or last year when he was the external opponent on the PhD-thesis by Fabrice Eroukhmanoff, might enjoy this blog from his research laboratory. His lab seem to have a similar attitude as ours when it comes to public outreach and using social media, which is nice. A general theme of their blog is "Eco-evolutionary dynamics", which fits well with the kind of research Hendry et al. have been pursuing in recent years, using sticklebacks, guppies and Galápagos finches as study organisms. Enjoy!

Interesting visitor statistics of our blog: where do our readers come from and how many are they?

Although this blog was never intended primarily to have a big outreach, and was mainly aimed to communicate within our own lab, locally in Lund, you might be interested in some visitor statistics that has accumulated over the summer, since a counter was installed earlier this year. Sofar, we have had about 1500 pageloads, which probably is not equal to the number of visitors, since some visitors come back.

However, I think it is a fairly educated guess that we probably have several hundred visitors, many of them active scientists and biologists. That demonstrates quite convincingly, in my opinion, the value of blogs as an efficient tool of scientific communication. Hopefully, this blog also increases the visibility of our research and could even help to attract students and postdocs, once they discover it.

I have included a graph of the number of downloads this year, and as you see, it has peaked during the summer and then gone down, probably because low activity from us all during the field work and our vacations. Now, however, I think we should all strive to put up more blog posts, and try to keep the blog an active and attractive forum. I have kick-started the fall today with three blog posts, and I am looking forward to more contributions from e. g. Maren, Machteld and Fabrice and of course our colleagues in other countries, mainly Tom and Shawn.

I have also included a map of the geographic origin of downloads and visits. As you see, many downloads come from Sweden and Europe (not surprisingly), but we also have some fans in Australia (hello Tom!), the US (hello Shawn and Ryan) and even Brazil (!). Again, this map and the visitor statistics sends and important message: research group blogs, like the one we have, are extremely useful to communicate science, not only locally within the group, but also globally. So please, do not hesitate to put up new blog posts, including advertisements of your own recent lab-publications, as it increases the visibility of our research and (most likely) results in more future citations. Keep on bloggin'!!! Gotta love it!

 

h-index! b-index!

Here is an article from wired.com that explain the h-index and its origin.  It’s a fun story and it's nice to know the basic formula of the h-index (h=n means you have published n articles that have been cited at least n times).

I’ve come up with a new metric, the b-index, which describes the impact of said blog.  Instead of times cited we are looking at times commented upon.   Our blog’s b-index is 6, explanation follows:

We have 32 posts so far with 23 comments going to a single post.  Stellar!  Ordering posts by high to low comment level we have the following sequence 23, 10, 8, 8, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5 etc.  Counting down the line we find that 6 posts have a comment level greater than or equal to six. 

Is that good?  Who knows!  But hey, it’s our index and we set the bar.