Ask Herr Abbe your burning questions at jpshield@uga.edu.

My apologies to you all; the note on page 38 is a spoof. My co-authors are a fictitious member of the electron microscopy group at Bristol University in the 1980s and a fictitious student we invented at my secondary school, half a century ago. In the case of the latter, we were able to persuade the teachers and administration that he was real for an entire term.

Having trouble sleeping at night worrying about technique? Can't seem to find the right words to say to your technicians? Let Abbe have a whack at it. What could go wrong? Send your posers to his assistant at jshields@cb.uga.edu.

No recent phenomenon in scientific publishing is more remarkable than the rise of the Impact Factor (IF). Once an obscure statistic devised by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), it has now assumed a prominent place in the minds of researchers and administrators.