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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** First: A big thanks to Barry (as I mentioned to him privately) for posting about my article. Second: I hear from the twitterverse that Peter Dodds is planning to weight in on allometric scaling. I googled and found a JTB paper of his after I 'heard' the rumor (and noted, but haven't yet looked at, his 2010 PRL on the topic), and I think he'll have some very good things to say on the topic. I will reserve further comment on that until I read what he has to see, but I look forward to the discussion at any rate. Third: I want to make a couple of points about James' comment about missing non-physics references (and the small but cynical comment included with it): 1. My coauthor and I had to fight with Science a bit to include as many references as we did. Indeed, the paper is 1/3 of a page longer than is supposed to be true for Perspectives pieces, and a bit of that comes from the extra references. When commenting on citation practices, please keep those constraints in mind, because authors often do not have full control over such things when it comes to some of the 'shiny' journals (and even other venues). I would prefer a neutral statement of our having missed citations rather than whether or not is surprising or what our motivations might or might not be for not having cited something. The existing reference listing includes *numerous* papers by people who are not physicists. That does not mean we didn't miss anything, and it is true we were unaware of your work, a subset of which Jim Moody kindly pointed to me just a day or so after the paper was published. 2. Neither my coauthor nor I are physicists. He is a systems biologist and I am an applied mathematician. So if you do want to make a point about someone having bad citation practices, then making a dig at physicists is, frankly, picking on the wrong discipline in this case. 3. The vast majority of citations to physicists in this particular article are pointing out things that we think they did wrong. :) If you take a look at who wrote the papers making points that we liked, I think you'll find that most of the articles we did cite on such things were not written by physicists. Obviously, that does not mean that we didn't miss papers. 4. Point (3) said, I'm very glad to now know about your work. I do *not* purposely ignore things and have on several occasions had very long and very loud fights with both journals and coauthors to include more citations. So, again, please just make the neutral comment that we didn't cite a relevant work than rather than also including the extra commentary on that, which I resent very deeply given the efforts I undergo to try to give credit where it is due. Obviously, like everybody else, I will miss references---and I *want* them to be pointed to me afterwards (as you've done). And I think the people on this list who know me personally will back me up on my sincere efforts on giving credit! 5. Thanks for agreeing with us on the scientific aspect of things. That's always nice. :) Excuse me for a bit of a rant, but the idea that one group of people routinely and purposely ignores giving credit where it's due and others don't is something I just don't buy. I think this is rampant throughout science, including in the disciplines represented on this mailing list. ----- Mason ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mason A. Porter University Lecturer (and Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College) Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford Homepage: http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/~porterm, IM: tepid451 Blog: http://masonporter.blogspot.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "That's my new excuse, and I'm sticking to it." (Me) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.