Write me a review!

Calling all my fellow academics, I am the new Reviews Editor for the Journal of Zoology and as a result I’m on the lookout for review papers that cover any aspect of whole organism biology (behaviour, ecology, taxonomy, evolution, anatomy and many other aspects). The journal has a good track record of covering palaeo topics (including dinosaur combat, display, trilobite diversity) so it’s not all about fluffy mammals.

I think reviews are important to science and provide a great platform for state-of-the-art updates, for people entering new fields (including students) and for steering debates or having new ideas put out there. They are also, I think, often a great paper to write as part of a PhD – they might not be REF-able, but give you a chance to get to grips with a subject and are often highly cited. In short, if you have an idea for a review you are likely to find me a sympathtic ear with a possible opening for you.

In particular I’m keen to reach out beyond the regular readers here, so do please pass on the gist of this message to people far and wide, especially in the biological / invertebrate divisions where I know far fewer people that the dinosaur / vertebrate community.

Tenth Anniversary Post

This blogpost is in fact a bit late since this date passed on the 7^th of September, but I have now been blogging for a full decade. The archives here do not quite reach back that far, but very long time readers will know that I first started on the now defunct DinoBase pages (though these are available on some internet archive sites) hence the apparent gap.

I don’t want this post to turn into a long ramble about all of my posts and things I have got done, how I got blogging and so on, (this is after all covered in various places), but this seemed too big a milestone to ignore. I’m really not sure when I started all of this, how long I thought I might keep going for, but I doubt it would have included a guess of anything like ten years.

Back then I was still on my first postdoc with no guarantee of employment in another year or so, let alone an academic career and I was already running Ask A Biologist which was a massive outreach project in its own right. If I’d thought about it, I think I would have considered five years to be a big but achievable target and while I’m hardly going at the rate I once was, to still be going is something I’m rather proud of.

That really is it, just a post to mark the passing of the event. The blog will continue, slowly, as things progress and topics come up that I still want to talk about or are relevant. I doubt that I will still be going in 2027, but that in some ways doesn’t seem too far away or too unlikely. Time will clearly tell but I’m not stopping any time soon.