Cell on Blogs

In my last year in grad school I got a free subscription to Cell. Cell is a very good journal, but for the most part they didn’t regularly offer articles that pertained to my research interests. Or let me put it another way; I should be reading a dozen of other journals before I read Cell to stay really current with my field: (in no particular order) Evolution, Genetics, AmNat, MBE, PNAS, Science, Nature, Bioinformatics, TREE, Systematic Biology, TPG, etc.

However, this month Cell has an article clearly of interest to me because I’m in it: Scientists Enter the Blogosphere. The leading suspects are all there, PT, PZ, Larry, Bora, etc. They also include the story about Comai and Cartwright (2005):

There is one case (The Scientist 21, 21, 2007) where a scientist blogger ended up becoming a coauthor on a paper thanks to his blog. Back in 2005, Reed Cartwright, a Ph.D. student in genetics at the University of Georgia, wrote an alternative interpretation of published findings about the mutant hothead gene of Arabidopsis (Nature 434, 505, 2005) in his blog De Rerum Natura. Several months later, Luca Comai at the University of California, Davis was publishing a similar interpretation in the journal Plant Cell. When he found out that Cartwright had already “published” the idea in a blog, he offered to make Cartwright a coauthor on the Plant Cell paper (17, 2856, 2005).

Too bad they didn’t link to this blog like they did for others.