I Only Remember the First Times

A Dunedin retrospective.


Arriving on the bus into cloudy Dunedin in 2005 - a lot like future arrivals into Dunedin; no matter how nice the weather was elsewhere, it was always cloudy or raining on my return. We got picked up from the bus station by a friend. Driving around, Dunedin seemed like a real city!

Walking to university for the first time. A friend showed me the nice way through the botanical gardens. It was sunny and warm, but we still hadn't unpacked all of our boxes, so I was stuck wearing a long black skirt and boots. I remember talking to my supervisor and then the department administrator showing me around the place.

The first time I went to the university Taekwon-Do club (the club that I would later inherit), I thought I was going to die. They did a lot more intense exercise than my old club! Also, I was quite unfit!

A favoured running spot along the harbour, when I could run without feeling like death.

One of the first meals we had as a flat was sushi that I think I prepared.

The first time we heard our flatmate play his guitar, it was Nine Inch Nails. Yay for surprise common taste in music!

The first party I attended. Two people had a chocolate sauce drinking contest, with unfortunate consequences.

I remember freezing in the flat until the fireplace was installed, and then later chopping wood with the flatmates. I liked chopping wood. We also went from a temperature of less than 10 degrees C (good old Dunedin houses) in our living room to 25 degrees if we closed the door.

Dunedin from Flagstaff.

The first time I went to the university gym (probably 2007), I ran 2 km on the treadmill and thought I was going to die.

In 2008, we moved to a flat with a fantastic view of the city. I remember walking to university through town in the mornings. I still miss the beautiful sunny mornings at that place. That year, towards the end, I was able to run without feeling like I was going to die.

I taught my first Taekwon-Do class in 2009. I was nervous as hell.

PhD graduation at Otago with my family.

In 2011, we made a Bose-Einstein condensate in the lab for the first time. It was the culmination of a lot of work!

The last couple of years were really a blur of working, training, and almost no socialising. They passed very quickly! Almost too quickly.

Tunnel Beach: one of Dunedin's hidden gems.

I already miss the place.

What's in a name?

There is a problem with physics. I only became consciously aware of it last week when I was browsing through the arXiv in my research area, but it's something that has been quietly annoying me since I was a student.

There are no systematic naming conventions!

Let's look at some examples.

Particle Physics:
Particle physics naming conventions (or lack thereof) are famous for their ridiculousness. Particles have mostly been named mostly haphazardly as they've been discovered. The names are often cute. For instance, gluons hold quarks together (like glue, get it?). Why "quark"? The person who predicted them, Murray Gell-Mann, liked the way it sounded. Quarks have "flavours" which describe their type - up, down (okay so far), top, bottom (how is this different from up and down?), charm (??), and strange (???).

Quark kitteh has a flavor.

While particle names can provide hours of amusement, they do create a barrier to understanding what it is they actually do. I'm not sure that I would want them to change, though!
 
Quantum Gases:
What made me really annoyed about lack of naming conventions, though, was not particle physics, but my own field of ultracold atoms. A lot of inspiration for ultracold atoms research comes from condensed matter physics, so they can definitely take a lot of the blame for this. As I was browsing new papers on the arXiv, I suddenly realised that I didn't have a clue what half the papers were about from reading the title, because they were all about various effects that were named after the person or people who predicted/discovered them.

What are Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov states? Damned if I know! And if you're going to use four hyphenated names to describe something, you might as well come up with an actually meaningful term for the phenomenon! This is rampant in my field. It's nearly impossible to describe what I'm studying without referring to phenomena named after people - Feshbach resonances, Efimov resonances, Rabi frequency, Bose-Einstein condensation (!), Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic trap. Every theoretical approximation has it's own name, usually with several hyphenated names. If you're not already familiar with the sub-field, you're gonna have a hard time.

It's jargon, pure and simple, and I think it makes it difficult for newcomers to the field or for general physics audiences. I can recall many occasions where I trawled through paper after paper to try to figure out exactly what something named after someone actually was.

Who is doing it right?
Lots of people!

• Astronomy is doing pretty well. Celestial objects are usually denoted by coordinates in the sky. How logical! You have to be if you are dealing with as many objects as they are.
• Chemistry! They have a logical naming scheme. It may be boring, but if you know the name of a compound, usually you know what it's made up of.
• Biologists. This should be deeply embarrassing to physicists. Enzymes, proteins, etc. have names that specify their function.

Physics is certainly not alone in this, but in a discipline tasked with revealing the mysteries of the universe and describing complex behaviour using elegant formulae, surely we can do better?

Having said all this, perhaps the folks who invented copper nanotubes would have benefited from just naming them after themselves.

The r-index

Everyone within academia knows what the h-index is. For those who don't, it's a metric for how productive you are as an academic. The h-index itself is h number of papers with at least h citations. It's something that can easily be looked up via an academic's Google Scholar profile, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, and maybe others I don't know about. A higher h-index is supposed to be correlated to how productive you are as a scientist (number of papers published) and how meaningful your contribution to your field is (how often people cite your work). Universities love it. Human resources departments love it. Governments love it. Finally, it is possible to sum up the entirety of someone's value as a scientist with a simple integer value!

Or is it?

There are many problems that mask a person's true contribution to a field if one looks at the h-index alone. For instance, someone who has few but extremely highly cited (= important) papers will have a low h-index, even if they work they did was very far-reaching. The system is also easily gamed. For instance, self-citations are usually included in an h-index calculation, so you can cite yourself all the way to the bank. This guy probably takes the cake (he is a real person - I checked). If one defines another index, say w, where w is the number of papers where you have cited yourself at least w times, this could be particularly revealing of your citation habits. I have heard this dubbed the w-index (where w stands for "wanker", rather than Wu). There are also groups of people who regularly cite each other, thereby avoiding raising their w-index, but gaming the system nonetheless.

Ever since the h-index became a Thing, people have been getting a little crazy about it, and it's being used as a be all and end all metric (much like impact factor). Most of the alternatives I have seen proposed just seek to normalize the number of citations against some other quantity. I'm not convinced that any of these actually provide a measure of how much real impact, or reach, a person's research has.

My husband and I were talking about this over dinner, and he came up with a good idea: why not count the number of unique citations? I think this is quite promising. It completely eliminates double-ups (legitimately citing the same paper in multiple publications), self-citations, and gratuitous citations.

The r-index would be defined as follows: the number of unique citations that a given author has, where unique implies that no two citations share a common author, including the author being cited. The r-index could also be applied to individual publications.

If you have a high r-index, then it indicates that your research has reach within and possibly beyond your own sub-field. It likely punishes against papers with more authors, but perhaps this could be a handy tool against gratuitous authorship. I hope, though, that it wouldn't push deserving authors out of a publication, but I think this is highly unlikely.

What I really would like is to look at some real life examples of scientists at various stages of their careers and see if this is a reasonable measure, and what the r-index of an average academic is. I calculated it for myself. It was easy. I am only a fledgeling! When I tried calculating it for my supervisor, I immediately gave up. This cannot be done manually (unless you have a lot of time on your hands). Some data extraction from a citation database is required here! Stay tuned!