The complete ‘how to’ guide for young researchers (so far)

It seems that recently some of my various ‘how to’ posts have been found by various search engines and readers and since I don’t have much to write about today and that these are, I think, some of the most important and beast things I have written, it seemed a pertinent time to resurrect them under a single banner for any more recent followers who have yet to0 find them. For those who have missed out, I wrote an extended series of posts covering all the basic skills of research such as writing and reviewing papers, giving talks, editing work and so on. These I hope have been and will continue to be of use to students and young graduates trying to break into science or generally improve their skills during their education, so here I have bundled them all up into one single slot to make it more accessible and easier to link to as well as hopefully bring this to the attention of new Musings readers.

Basic advice to young researchers

How to complete a PhD

How to get hold of papers

How to write a paper (and get it published)

How to contribute to a paper

How to review a paper

How to edit a volume of papers

How to write a conference abstract

Things to do at a meeting

How to give a talk

How to make a scientific poster

How to arrange a meeting

A ‘how to’ summary (contains various updates and links to other sites)

And finally don’t forget the ‘science basics‘ section on here which contains all of these and more.

Do make use of these and feel free to pass them on to your colleagues / friends / students and do add comments to help keep them thorough and up-to-date. The feedback I have had on these has been very good, so I’m happy to be confident that they are doing some good.

More advice

Mike Taylor has a great write-up over at SV-POW! on chosing where to publish your academic research papers. It’s worth a good read through when you have time and covers a lot of ground that I never did when writing about how to get a paper published as part of my ‘famous’ and ’successful’ how-to series.

Avoiding abstracts

As most, if not all, of you will know scientific meeting abstracts can make up an important part of scientific research. For those that are unaware, well formal scientific meetings, researchers who are attending send off short abstracts of their work that they will present at the meeting (if you have not seen one before a quick google will give you a good idea). Usually this is just a couple of hundred words describing the very basics of the work, though occasionally you get longer ones with reference lists and even figures. This means that in advance of the meeting and the talk itself you have an idea of what is being discussed which helps understand the presentation itself. If it’s a big meeting where you can’t attend every talk, then the abstract can help you decide which talks you want to see (or avoid) and afterwards you have a record of who said what about what subject. In theroy at least, and that is the problem.

Getting hold of papers

Over at the Open Source Paleontologist there is an excellent article about getting hold of research papers (primarily PDFs, but also other sources). It’s well worth a read as he lists various sources for PDFs and ways of searching for them online. There are a few on there I didn’t know about so it’s well worth a look.

Two quick things I will add here (which I also left in a comment on the site) are quite important to this area of scientific research (both for amateurs and professionals). First off, while Andy mentions them, there are increasing numbers of ‘PDF collections’ online, with indices of whole rafts of papers based around subjects (ones for theropods, pterosaurs and ankylosaurs are out there) or people (Marsh is done and Cope I believe is in progress) and more and more researchers are making their papers availbale online on homepages and lab pages (Mike Benton for example has most of his papers, going back to the 70’s, available to download). In other words, in addition to open source journals and google there are huge stores of research inforamtion available online to anyone with a computer and two minutes worth of ‘googling’. Which brings me to my second point.

Why must I (and plenty of other people) put up with the endless requests for papers from people? If you want a copy of *my* papers, then fine, I’ll more than happily send on a PDF or hardcopy if I can. I want people to read my research and cite my papers. That’s a fundamental part of my job and all to the good. What I don’t like is the constant barrage of requests made by people all over the web for every single paper that comes out. This is especially seen on blogs where someone reports on a paper and instantly half a dozen people request copies of the PDF (and this is the same on mailing lists too, with constant requests for papers followed up by loads of other guys asking for a copy once the cry has gone up). It is probably freely available online and if not, the authors will happily send you a copy if you e-mail them.

It is, I feel, discourteous to expect researchers to spend their time randomly e-mailing copies of papers to anyone who asks when they have nothing to do with the paper. Yes it is their chocie to blog about it and spead the news in the first place, but that is in itself a service, and asking for all kinds of ‘extras’ constantly is an unfair use of their time. It will take you as long to e-mail the original author and ask for a copy of the paper as it will to put in a comment on the blog asking for someone to mail the paper to you, who has nothing to do with the work, and is already giving up his time to tell you about it in the first place. It’s especially true of the non-professionals who understandably don’t necessarily have access to all the journals etc. but enough professionals are guilty of the same thing and that’s not an excuse to harry people for reprints and PDFs.

I know some people are good about going this extra mile for service, and yes obviously not every paper is easily available online, or for that matter the contact details of the author (though increasingly that is less and less of an excuse) but it IS a pain. I feel mean when I don’t dig them out myself and send them on because, well, I am a nice guy, but it is (in my opinion) unthinking and unnecessary to expect people to just send out these things when they have real work to do. The act of unthinkingly asking (or even demanding) papers becuase you want to read them is not right. So if you are one of those “I must have it now, please send it to me” types, do stop and think for a minute. You have google. You have online archives. You can contact the authors. You can, and this may be shock, wait a few days before you read it, it won’t kill you – so calm down and look properly online first. If you must contact someone, contact a close research assocaite of the author who is likely to have a copy (a common co-author, his students, or someone who works in a simialr field) who is likely to have it. Send them a short and polite e-mail asking for a copy. Don’t just bang down a bunch of comments on blog threads or e-mail half the palaeo community asking for it.

This is something that rarely affects me personally I admit (apart from when I have my inbox filled with people requesting some new fish paper via the Vert Pal mailing list) and I am not sure how much it bothers others but is I think an important piece of netiquette that people need to think about. Do your own work, and don’t expect others to do it for you. And if you have to ask, ask nicely and ask the right people. Authors are delighted to know people are interested in and reading their papers and it helps them keep track of who is doing what and how their work is recieved, so just ask them.

More hows and whys

I’m basically in transit for the next day or so heading back to Beijing after a thoroughly enjoyable trip to the UK and Germany. In order to keep things ticking over while I am in the air (or in airport lounges) and recovering from jet lag and the time difference, here are a few other things for you all to read. I have put this in Science Basics as these fit nicely with that theme.

First off, here is a review on how to review or critique a paper by those good people at Nature.

Similarly, there is advice from Science on writing papers (though it is very brief and general) via River Continua.

More generally Matt Wedel has a big series of posts on general science communication between scientists and how new ideas are often generated and discussed. It’s a nice take on a rarely discussed area should be of interest to young academics and the general public alike. I’m not if he is finished yet, but he has so far produced four parts to the series. Read them here, and here, and here and here.

A ‘how to’ summary.

This latest week-long series of posts on ‘how to’ do various things (combined with other earlier ones) seems to have generated a few comments (overwhelmingly positive, I am pleased to see) and have been read by a great many people (hits over the last week in general, and for the specific posts have been way above my normal averages). Between these points and few other things that have cropped up, it seemed well worth adding a short off the cuff summary to what all of this has been about and what I tried to achieve with these posts (and I hope to have more in the future).

How to arrange a meeting

Flugsaurier: Munich, 2007

As part of the big stream of ‘meeting’ based posts, it seemed worthwhile to talk about how to go about arranging a meeting or conference. This will be the last one the in current run (with a summary / review coming tomorrow after your normal dose of AABQOTW)so enjoy it while you can! The Wellnhofer meeting was in hindsight not too bad, but the sheer number of details, the lack of preparation time (11 months is *not* enough) and the fact that it was in Munich and basically I don’t speak German made it all the harder. I did get a considerable amount of help from my institution but I basically had to do everything on my own in terms of planning and basic execution. If you have a years run up, speak the language of the country you are in, and get some decent help it should be fine. However, a check list and a few dos and don’ts probably won’t go amiss:

Things to do at a meeting

So you have sent your abstract in and prepared your poster or your talk, but what else should you do at a meeting? This might sound like a facetious question, and the answer might appear to be so blindingly obvious as to almost be insulting, but I think many people waste opportunities at their first few meetings because they are afraid of making a mistake in public, or are even overwhelmed by what is going on. I often see groups of students hanging around together and discover they are all from the same university or research group – you might only get one chance in the next two years to speak to a researcher five feet from you but you spend the time with guys you see every day. This then should provide a few ideas, or at least act as a reminder as to how to get the most from a meeting:

How to give a talk

Although meetings and conferences are about far more than just giving public talks, they are of course a central theme. For the scientist, it’s a chance to present his information to his peers to disseminate his ideas and research, and of course trigger feedback and new research. For the audience, it’s an opportunity to gain access to information and ideas perhaps years ahead of their formal publication, (and some will never be published) and to get access to people and branches of research far outside what they can get in their own institutions of even countries or continents if it’s a big meeting. It seems odd then that I had had to sit through a great many talks that were obtuse, dull, confusing or apparently pointless. It seems a simple enough skill (especially in a profession at the core of which is communication and for which lectures and teaching form such a prominent position) yet is clearly one to be valued and improved if possible. (Image courtesy of Luis Rey).

There are naturally good and bad speakers, and it’s always going to be hard for someone who works on gastralia in theropods to interest someone working on the behaviour of Permian fishes, but the simple errors and mistakes we can at least try to deal with. As ever in these guides, most of this information is simple, straightforward and probably obvious – but enough people don’t seem to realise it so I might as well put down my 2c:

How to make a scientific poster

Conference posters are in theory really simple – stick a few words and pictures about your work on a bit of paper, print it out, stick it on a wall and be done with it, but I have seen a great many terrible posters that need not have been terrible. As with the rest of this series, many, if not all, of the points raised might seem obvious, but then if so, why are there often so many awful efforts out there? This should therefore at least serve as a reminder and with luck will also provide some advice and hints to at least a few people.

How to write a scientific conference abstract

Continuing with my “How to” posts (also known by some as “Dave states the bleedin’ obvious”) this time I want to take a few wild swipes at abstract writing. The conference season will soon be upong us, so these next few posts will all be about various aspects of meetings, conferences and symposia. Abstracts are of course critical to meetings and conferences, whether small internal ones, or major international ones. As ever, most of these points should be pretty obvious, but that does not seem to stop endless numbers of people ignoring them and making major mistakes or having their abstracts rejected. I’ll actually be posting about presenting posters and talks ain the future, as well as another list of blindingly obvious things to do when you are actually at the conference. Right, onto the abstract:

How to contribute to a paper

This one is rather off-centre, but my guess is that it might well be useful for some students. I think most people get their first papers published either working alone, or by collaborating with their supervisors or perhaps another PhD student, and thus you are in a familiar environment with people you know well. It can be intimidating to contribute to a paper with a couple of senior researchers or even to try and handle a big research group on your own as a senior author on a paper. While this micro-guide is aimed at the former situation, it should also serve to help with the latter as well.