In the past years it has become very popular to use metric data to evaluate the quality of science. England, for instance, has for several years used a complicated RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) system, where an expert panel evaluate the quality of a research institution (typically on the department level) based on the number of publications, citations and the quality of the publications.

Oxford University Press together with a consortium of UK academics has launched a new journal, BioscienceHorizons, which is unique among scientific journals in that they publish exclusively papers by undergraduate students about their own final year projects.

All British and Irish universities can nominate their best final year projects. The student then rewrites his thesis into the format of a scientific paper and submits it. The paper will be reviewed by academics in the field and the best papers will be published.

Only a few select students become enrolled and can attend lectures at the top universities in the world, where either very good grades or very good connections are required. However, a Danish student from the University of Aarhus has set about to change that so everybody can attend lectures from all over the world – via the computer.

Jakob Sandvad is the student behind Public University Online - a kind of Youtube for lectures, where you can up- and download links to lectures made public on their university homepages.

There are already more than thousand lectures online and although the majority are in arts and philosophy related areas, there are already many science lectures online.

We are probably a few who, during searches of papers from specific researchers in Web of Science or Google Scholar, have experienced the frustration of getting 100s of papers listed from different subjects and clearly different authors. This problem of course arises when we search for scientists with common last names. Often the only solution is to either browse through all the papers or alternatively go in search of the scientist’s own homepage to view his publication list there.

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank database is a new free online service, which ranks scientific journals after quality. The database has been developed by Spanish researchers from the University of Granada in collaboration with countrymen from the universities of Extremadura, Alcala de Henares and Carlos III.

Here follows a translation from Danish of an interview of Bjørn Lomborg conducted on the 23rd of November 2007 by science journalist Lennart Kiil.

Lennart Kiil: When did you first become interested in political science?