Victor Venema had me thinking about publication. You should probably go and read all the wonderful things he’s written on this subject rather than read what follows, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Some time ago, I wrote a review on uncertainty in in situ* measurements and data sets of sea-surface temperature, SST. It started life as a literature review that I put together while I was working on the HadSST3 data set. I tidied it up and put it on the web to provide a bit of context for the HadSST3 data set and papers, which talk about uncertainty through the specific lens of that data set, but not uncertainty in a more general (and useful) sense. After a while, it seemed that people were referring (informally, via blogs and such) to the essay more often than they were the HadSST3 papers, sometimes to the extent of confusing the two. Based on this, I felt like the essay might be something that could be usefully published. So, that’s what I did: I published it as a peer-reviewed article.
The problem is that once something’s in a journal, that’s that. It sits there, getting progressively out of date. People cite it, but each time they do, it gets less relevant as the people who are most likely to cite it are the same as are energetically heaping interesting new findings on top of it and around it. While undermining its foundations. And breaking new ground. When I go back to it myself, I find that I have to mentally integrate new papers, cool things I’ve seen at conferences and discussions I’ve had. There also areas – notably on the subject of buoys and in situ radiometers – where it was deficient to begin with. The question is, how to keep on top of this**.
I don’t know the best way, but, just maybe, I have a way.
Diagram Monkey 