Tuesday, January 13, 2009

So what exactly is this blog about?



I usually spend a lot of time surfing through email alerts and RSS feeds from my Google reader, from a series of scientific journals. Every time I found an article I thought a colleague/friend might find interesting/useful, I used to forward it to them. After sending a whole lot of papers to my colleagues, they suggested that I created a blog where I could compile all of these articles instead of sending them and filling their email accounts. I considered this to be very useful, as they could subscribe to the blog, and not only read what I thought would be interesting to them, but all that I thought of as being interesting altogether. So, this blog was initially created in order to highlight some research articles/websites/news and commentaries in the life sciences (mainly molecular biology).

Later, we decided it was better to comment and discuss many of the papers rather than only posting links to them. Posts that feature only links are not very useful. We joined ResearchBlogging and frequently submit our discussions to that aggregator. But what about all those paper that we don't discuss, but that may be interesting to many other molecular biologists? That's why we created "Around the Journals", in which we highlight selected molbio articles from a hand-picked list of journals directly from our Google Reader account

We noticed that there are not many websites and blogs dedicated specifically to molecular biology, and the few that are, don't generally give detailed, analytical and/or comprehensive descriptions of the reported papers, nor are they generally reviewed by biologists.

We consider this site to be an interesting contribution in this matter and our aim is to group, analyze and discuss, in just one place, a series of papers,news,websites and tools in molecular biology in a way to help fellow researchers and also to create a community where discussion, one of the basis of science, can take place.

It is noteworthy that we cannot (due the ever growing amount of papers and journals) be comprehensive here and several articles that people might think of as 'MUST-HIGHLIGHT articles' may not be here. This may be for several reasons. As mentioned, our search for articles is not comprehensive. Second, the articles may be biased towards our fields of research. One way we would like to approach this limitation is by inviting fellow scientists working in different areas in molecular biology to contribute to the blog by suggesting papers to be highlighted here or even by writing their own reviews of the articles. Those will be reviewed by the Editor before publication in the blog. As we are part of Researchblogging.com, these articles may have a wide dissemination.

OK. Enough with the seriousness. In this blog we will also talk about life as a scientist, things we consider interesting or noteworthy and we may also use it to rant a little, so bare with us.

Please feel free to comment on any of the posted articles and to suggest article,websites, etc. to be highlighted here, at aemonten (at) gmail.com.

A special invitation to participate is extended to grad students from schools everywhere. This will lead to interesting discussion, which are the basis of science.

Regards,

Alejandro Montenegro-Montero (Editor)
Francisco Barriga

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