39 thoughts on “PNAS Paper”

1. Protest list for Wag TV:
   http://climateofdenial.net/?q=node/1

2. Thanks!

3. As for the 2008 CMOS document, I am sure you saw the 2007 and 2009 on the CMOS website, but no 2008. Climate Change 40th Congress is there (2006)
   http://www.cmos.ca/climatechangestatements.html

4. intrepid–I downloaded the 2006 statement, but it doesn’t include a list of signatories.

5. Prall provides the following link for the CMOS 06 statement:

   http://www.cfcas.org/LettertoPM19apr06e.pdf

6. I am curious as to the response you get/got when you ask Mr. Prall for the list of actual names, as well as for the scripts he used.

   At the moment, I do not understand why he would not be forthcoming with the specific list and the scripts he used.

   In the best sense of Eli Rabett, this would be a fine place where an amateur could participate! (Not to suggest you are an amateur.)

7. Here’s the CMOS 2006 letter to the Prime Minister signed by 90 climate science leaders (includes all names) which predates the conference by a month and a half.
   http://www.cfcas.org/LettertoPM19apr06e.pdf
   As mentioned the 2006 statement from the conference doesn’t include the signatories. In fact it doesn’t talk about signatories. It talks about writers and 200 copies being made available for attendees.
   In the 2006 Preparation of Statement document it says approximately 50 people were involved in the writing session but it doesn’t name them.
   http://www.cmos2006.ca/statement_prep_e.pdf
   Not sure if that helps?

8. Just found the 2008 letter including names of signatories.
   http://www.cmos.ca/mediacontents.html#OpenLetter2008
   Cheers

9. Better scholar search:
   author:”Andrew Weaver” climate
   On the results page you can select either “include citations” or “at least summaries”.

   Be aware, that by now numbers have likely changed because of new publications. google estimates of hits are bogus, try to get to the last page of results for a better number.

   If you indeed want to waste time on redoing this study, doing it properly via ISI web of knowledge would be appropriate. Doesn’t take blogs and other nonsense into the publication count.

10. better scholar search:
    author:”Andrew Weaver” climate

    google hit counts on the first page are bogus, try to click through to the last result page.

    If you want to redo this exercise in bean counting, why not do it properly on ISI web of knowledge. Does not count blog posts and stuff like this, which are nonsense for the publication count. And expect to find differences, the google db likely has changed since submission.

11. blue grue–
    I’m not trying to learn the best way to use Google scholar. I’m also not trying to do a “proper” citation search.

    I’m trying to verify that the PNAS paper did it the way they said. (I agree the method they describe will result in some bogus citations and is not a good way.)

    I do expect the search done now to differ from one done back when the PNAS authors did the search.

12. anonymudder (Comment#46734)

    I am curious as to the response you get/got when you ask Mr. Prall for the list of actual names, as well as for the scripts he used.

    I didn’t ask him for a list of names and didn’t ask for a script. I asked a question to verify that the methodology really is as described in words in his paper.

13. Lucia, you asked for the “proper way”, hence my google suggestion.

    And sorry, my post grew terser with each of the three retries to post this info, as your board kept eating them. Maybe you should feed it more electrons, so it doesn’t have to munch comments. 😉

14. Lucia,

    I guess my POV as a software engineer is that in 2010, Mr. Prall’s research, if useful, should be a GPL’d open source project, and why not? Stripped of it’s primary content in climate science, if the methodology is sound, it’s a useful research tool to explore scientist rankings and credibility in any field. And even narrowed down to its climate science domain, it would still be a useful tool once it is verified, and once many eyes can take a look and help out.

    And, unlike the CRU folk who may be able to plead 10-20 year old data and loss of data due to budget inadequacies and ignorance of data preservation, Mr. Prall, as an IT professional (I think) who performed this experiment recently, should have little reason to not open source his code (scripts), or open up his data.

    (I do think it is good that you try to replicate his experience or reproduce his experiment.)

15. Lucia,

    The numbers match for 2008 (130 names listed) as in my post #46736, but for 2006 as referenced above #46735 there is no mention of the number of signatories that I can find. The closest I have found is the letter reference posted by me and by Spence_UK. It is a letter written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and lists 90 signatories not 120. If the CMOS 2006 Statement is available, it must be referenced in some obscure way.

    Cheers

16. Bluegrue

    Lucia, you asked for the “proper way”, hence my google suggestion.

    Sorry. I see how you thought that. But what I meant was, “The way it was done in the paper.”

17. anonymuder=

    Mr. Prall, as an IT professional (I think) who performed this experiment recently, should have little reason to not open source his code (scripts), or open up his data.

    Sure. But I have a different interest, and I’m asking questions to get information I would like to obtain.

18. why not do it properly on ISI web of knowledge

    wondering the same myself.

    that said, I’ve never actually used google scholar (that I can remember). Does it have any advantage over ISI, besides ease of access?

19. It’s free, unlike ISI. To be honest, it started out quite well, then they started to include blogs and general web. For some searches it makes the results unusable. When looking up some papers on climate change you don’t get to the abstract of the paper in the journal, you don’t get to an authors homepage but instead you end up at climateaudit.

20. CE. I haven’t used ISI for a long time, but Scholar does everything I used ISI for. The big plus now is that it points to free pdf sources (if available) in big letters. I haven’t found non-journal cites to be a problem.

21. bluegrue #46837

    But then google news will often have RealClimate among the top hits for “News” sites when searching on climate related news.

    Go figure.

22. Very interesting, bg, you end up at Climate Audit. Did you take the hint of the ‘Invisible Brain’ and read up on what sucked its attention?
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23. Kim, give me a call when McIntyre’s next paper is out. I prefer those over meandering lab notes, the signal to noise ratio is too low for my liking. Idealy, writing a paper forces you to focus on the important stuff and convey it to the reader in a straight forward manner.

    In the context of google scholar, due to its popularity climateaudit happens to have the same effect as a link farm, giving it undue weight for scholary search results, which aren’t a popularity contest after all.

24. bluegrue, the nature of the curling edge of science is changing. Steve’s effect is not in corrupted climate science peer review journals, but in open source. Ideas and their locations are like water and topography; they’ll flow to the place of greatest sense, truth acting as gravity. There is a reason your searches are ending up there. Think about it. Ockham did.
    ===================

25. Kim, let’s agree to disagree.

26. With regard to the paper’s prominence/eminence figure (number of publications and citations), do other scientific disciplines calculate it similarly? It seems like a good way to do it based on the type of data that is already out there.

27. Citations is a pretty common thing to look at, but I think most people agree it’s an imperfect thing to look at. In general, a paper with 0 citations probably didn’t have much impact; a paper with 400 citations probably did. But for context, you hunt down the citing papers and see why they’re citing it. Is it just the same guy citing his own work? Do they just mention it in passing? Has it become the paper that everybody cites in their background section to refer the reader for general background on some idea? Do they actually build on the results?

28. CE–thanks. I have often wondered how the scientific disciplines pass on their knowledge. It still seems weird that scientists, with their focus on delineating this from that, don’t have a more formal and “final” method of assessing which papers are the really influential ones and which ones are crap. Perhaps that is covered in the process of writing and re-writing textbooks through the years.

29. Bill, it’s not that easy. Papers describing a novel method that may find wide use are highly cited. Good review papers are highly cited. But there are lots of good papers which just aren’t done in a fashionable research area. Or present a local data.
    In my research, I often hunt for long forgotten plant pathology and mycology papers from 19th or the first half of 20th century and I’m often surprised by their high observation and conclusion quality. And it seems I’m the first one to cite them after some 90 years…

30. By publishing this survey and its conclusions, the National Academy of Sciences is approaching a low perhaps not seen since eugenics was in vogue.

    Is there an ‘implied Godwin’ category? Wiki: “Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century, but has largely fallen into disrepute after having become associated with Nazi Germany. Since the postwar period, both the public and the scientific communities have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of “undesired” population groups. ”

    You can guess where this stuff is circulating.

31. Oh, right, Phil; but for its association with Nazis, eugenics would be acceptable. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.

    Now, I know you didn’t quite say that, but truly, tell me what you were thinking.
    ================

32. Carrot eater,

    I don’t think you are in the 21stC version of science. 400 cites means nothing when a paper is automatically included, a la Mann et al1998/9, because of the ‘celebrity value’ of that paper in the field.

    Seriously, how many of the subsequent scientists who cited Mann do you think actually took any time to really look into the results of those papers and how they were obtained?

33. Lucia,

    Your blog is becoming almost impossible to post to. Internal server errors occur continuously

34. Is this some kind of post modern irony? After a number of rejections the above gets through!

35. Hi Dave–
    I went to dreamhost. Their diagnostic reported this:
    http service for rankexploits.com error Your website does not appear in the Apache configuration file.

    So, there is a problem is on their side, but I wrote to find out if there is something I’m doing. (For example: Bad plugins etc.)

36. Hi Dave–
    It seems to be some of my scripts are memory hogs. This is a pain for me go diagnose. My first guess is the betting scripts aren’t working well with caching. So, I’ve gone through and replaced the script that shows results in pages since before Jan 2010. No one reads those, but spiders come through and the script may be getting activated unnecesarily. (I can’t imaging that it’s a memory hog. But… there yah go!)

    That might solve the problem. I also had a script running on another site that noone reads and no one will ever read, but which spiders crawl, so I turned that off.

37. Lucia you asked:

    Q2: Can anyone verify that this is the proper way to run the “climate” citation search

    author:A-Weaver climate for someone like Andrew Weaver. Do you know if they used “include citations”, or not?

    Anderegg et al claim to have:
    “counted the number of citations for each of the researcher’s four highest cited papers (defined here as prominence) using Google Scholar.”

    1) However Prall’s actual link for me to Google Scholar is
    “author:DL-Hagen” with no “climate”.

    2) Prall’s link was for Google to:
    “Search only in Physics, Astronomy, and Planetary Science”
    NOT
    “Search in all subject areas.”

    3) The search wrongly included another researcher with my initials and last name.

    4) A Google “Search for all subject areas” picked up 68 compared to 5 papers. Of these only 33 of 68 were by me. The others were by other “DL Hagen” authors.

    5) Adding “climate” eliminated all but 2 publications, none by me.

    6) Pral’s narrower search misses my two most important publications relating to global warming/climate change, including a 330 page report:
    “Application of solar thermal technologies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions”
    and
    “Methanol: its synthesis, use as a fuel, economics, and hazards”
    which was on NTIS’s best seller list for three years.

    7) Pral’s narrow search misses all my patents which potentially will have the greatest impact on anthropogenic emissions.

    In summary, Pral’s actual search methodology does not match that stated in the paper. Furthermore it does not achieve what it claims.

38. David–
    One problem is that Prall’s web page is not really the data in the paper. This is a very confusing thing.

39. I’m number 397 on Prall’s list, I spend at least equal time in bashing cranks as criticising alarmist fairy tales. Which makes me what?

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