Other posts in this series:
Paleontological Research Tips II: field notes, continued
Paleontological Research Tips III: a complete idiot's guide to taking decent specimen photographs
Paleontological Research Tips IV: the art and science of maintaining a research notebook
A recent discussion at SVP revolved around a dear friend
asking me how I stay so productive at writing papers. I've been thinking about
the next logical step in the paleo research tips series, and this sort of
seemed like the next step beyond maintaining a research notebook - translating
those notes into a manuscript. I've decided to tack on some ideas about
research productivity as well as ideas on peer review, collaboration, and
professional conduct. These are all intertwined and perhaps difficult to tease
apart into different posts. I won't be going in to figure construction here.
Cautionary note: I think the phrase "Life is too short" appears like
three thousand times in here. There's a theme here. Fair warning: this one is kind of long.
Writing your first manuscript (or thesis)
So you're a new graduate student or perhaps a particularly
enterprising undergraduate, and you're excited to start your first research
project! Writing a manuscript is generally not where you start, but day one of
the project is precisely where this 'tutorial' begins, because that excitement
- that flame - must never be extinguished. We'll get back to that. For now,
fast forward to the part where you've collected all the data you think you need
to begin writing it up. I'll divide this into two broad categories, since this
post specifically covers "paleontological" research tips: 1)
anatomical/morphology based data and 2) numerical data of various sorts (my
background here is chiefly taphonomic). Each has its own idiosyncracies.
Regardless, however, the easiest way to begin a new manuscript is to start with
the data - after all, data are the foundation of a scientific study and it is
best to let the 'story' build itself from the ground up, even if you think you
already know what the narrative and conclusions are - surprises happen during
the scientific process, for better or for worse (always better for science-but
often worse for your own mental state of affairs).
For the first category, anatomical/morphological description
based studies - the bedrock of paleontological research - care must be
exercised with regards to how much detail is necessary. The data being
presented are new anatomical structures - more than likely it falls into one of
the following categories: 1) fossils indicating a new taxon; 2) new fossils of an already described taxon, expanding the knowledge of said taxon and permitting rediagnosis/reevaluation/phylogenetic analysis etc.; 3) incomplete fossils insufficient for taxonomic purposes but nonetheless worthy of reporting; 4) incomplete specimens recording a certain taxon in a new place/time/stratum; 5) specimens revealing a noteworthy anatomical structure;
and 6) a faunal survey or description of an assemblage. Categories 1 and 2 are
typically those that require gory detail, and monographs fall under these two
categories. As much as a new study should attempt to be the 'be-all, end-all'
reference for a particular taxon, at some point you have to realize that if you
keep adding detail the description will never get completed. Categories 3 and 4
will generally consist of shorter descriptions, and should focus on the
features permitting identification (e.g. if the fossil is identifiable as Genus
A, briefly list the synapomorphies of Genus A that are preserved and emphasize
those in the description). Category 5 is a bit different, as this focuses on a
particular structure and the emphasis of the paper is on anatomy rather than
taxonomy - gory detail is likely necessary, but only on the structure of focus;
for example, the ethmoid labyrinth of extinct cetaceans.
Category 6 is dangerous territory, and one I've wandered into several times -
because describing an entire fossil assemblage can include categories 1, 2, 3,
and 4, and it's important to mentally subdivide each taxonomic section of the
manuscript. Yes, consistency is important, but some fossils are more complete
than others and warrant longer descriptions - and some assemblages will contain
crappy specimens indicating the presence of an interesting taxon (#4) as well
as more spectacular fossils of already known taxa (#2) and perhaps even new
taxa, resulting in a manuscript-within-a-manuscript naming it (#1). An example
of this is my 2013 monograph in Geodiversitas describing the marine mammal assemblage from the Purisima Formation.
For methods, things are a bit more lax here: a list of specimens examined is
useful, methods used for preparation, photography, and measurements, and of
course anatomical terminology (there are often mutually exclusive sets of
anatomical terms, and some reviewers will really nail you if you mix them).
Anatomical descriptions should be informative. Biological
structures are difficult to describe - make reference to easily remembered
shapes, include quantified proportions (e.g. the ulna is long and narrow,
approx. 10% as wide as long), and emphasize taxonomically and functionally
informative features. If you're naming a new species of whale, don't get hung
up on a feature common to all vertebrates ("it has a frontal bone" -
congratulations! the reader knows it's a vertebrate). You can't afford wasting
any space telling us information the reader likely already knows.
For analytical studies, it's actually perhaps less daunting
to begin with as you can write this up in a classic methods-results-discussion
format and not have to bother with learning how to write anatomical
descriptions. For these studies, so long as you're done with the bulk of data
collection and processing, you can start by writing the methods section first
(I'm only going to speak in general terms I hope are applicable to most
analyses; also, if you're here looking for advice on how to write a
"methods paper", you won't find any; I've not really written any
myself, except perhaps in taphonomy, and am not a great source of wisdom). Then
write about the results themselves: describe individual graphs and various
statistical metrics. At this point you may start to realize one of four things:
1) your analysis demonstrated everything you hoped for; 2) the analysis sort of
did that but showed some unexpected results; 3) the analysis overturns your
worldview, by failing to support a favored hypothesis or failing to reject a
disfavored hypothesis; and 4) the analysis has results that are inconclusive to
a degree that it is not worth publishing them. For starters, I strongly
disagree with the philosophy that only positive results are publishable: that
idea is antithetical to scientific progress and is perpetuated by the tenure
game. I recently had a manuscript turned away from a journal without review
because I advocated caution regarding stratigraphic 'certainty' and
identification of incomplete cetacean fossils, which seems strange for an
admittedly low-impact journal (I'm not going to mince words).
So, if you're in category 1, congratulations - you probably
don't need much help. Category 2 is a bit more nuanced, but you will be able to
say some words of caution. If you are in Category 3, then you have my highest
congratulations - this is a rare opportunity for reflection and intellectual
growth as a scientist. It may seem like a pain to reconstruct from the
ground-up certain ideas, projects, and manuscripts - but this really is a gift,
and moments of realization like this are what drives the science forward (or,
alternatively, drags transgressors with false results back where they belong).
The trick is whether or not this will trigger the ire of your adviser - so,
tread carefully. Unfortunately, for category 4, I don't really have much advice
other than to pick another avenue of data collection/analysis. Most analytical
studies will have one or two types of analyses, and it should be reasonably
straightforward to describe the methods and results. For my master's thesis, I
had several sources of data and analyses I preferred to keep all within a
single manuscript: 1) a stratigraphic column; 2) a lithofacies analysis based
on that column; 3) a multivariate dataset that permitted 4) a number of
different comparative taphonomic and taphofacies analyses exploring
preservational bias and differential preservation between depositional
settings, taxa, and even tissue type. Organizing all of this garbage was quite
daunting, and in the process of thesis writing, I really had to mentally remind
myself where the mental barriers between topics existed so as to keep each
source of information, analysis, and implications in different information
'silos', so to speak (e.g. each analysis will have its own methods section,
results section, and discussion section). Eventually I succeeded, and the paper
is now published in PLoS One with a healthy number of reads and citations for a taphonomic study
Once you've written up the methods and results section, the
discussion is next: this can be somewhat nebulous at first, and requires a
solid grasp of the literature (see below). What is new about the results? How
are the results different? Does it mean somebody else has been wrong about a
particular idea or interpretation? Depending upon how many ideas the new
results support or do not support, or how many new ideas it generates, the
discussion section can really vary in length. Owing to this I don't really have
an overarching theme here, but rather a few choice suggestions. Don't
overinterpret your data; it will be very clear to the reader that you had to do
mental gymnastics in order to support a particular narrative (especially one
you are known to prefer). Follow the Einstein quote: "If you can't explain
something simply, you probably don't understand it well enough" - that is
not to say that the truth is never esoteric. Don't oversell your results: it's
very likely possible that you have in fact not written an earth-shattering
paper; it may be difficult when to tell if you're being obnoxious. Reviewers
are likely to ding you on this. A degree of boldness is necessary as a young
researcher, but hyping up your research, overselling it, and reinventing the
wheel comes across somewhere between obnoxious and pathetic, with 'insulting'
someplace in between.
Once the discussion is done, now you have the necessary guts
to form the remainder of the manuscript around: abstract, introduction,
conclusions. Each of these serves different purposes: sometimes the discussion
and conclusions can be combined, especially if while writing the conclusions
section you feel really repetitive. Some repetition is OK; it's also OK, and
perhaps a bit more effective for a paper discussing a multitude of topics, to
list conclusions as a set of simplified bullet points. I write the abstract and
introduction dead last. The abstract should be somewhat sterile, and a recap of
the entire paper in 250ish words: 1-2 sentences introducing the problem, 1-2
sentences on methods, brief summary of results, and the implications of the
results. The introduction is a bit of a different beast altogether: it can
start with a completely different but at least tangentially related topic, a
brief review, something to act as a 'hook' for the audience. This, along with
the discussion, is perhaps the most creative part of the scientific writing
process. Make it interesting - but don't you dare make it too long. There is a
tendency, especially for graduate students converting their thesis into a paper
- to dump their literature review into the introduction. Don't do it! Cut that
shit out. We don't care you know the entire background. You're supposed to
know it, and we implicitly assume that you do. All it does is waste space by
retreading crap everyone has already read about. Summarize prior work with as
little text as possible, unless the point of the paper is quite literally a
literature review. If you're really proud of how much you've read and want to
cite everyone who deserves it, do so in the discussion instead and cite
everyone deserving of it as the breadth of your results and interpretations
dictate.
Acknowledgements
Here's where it's really possible to mess things up. Many
journals request that you avoid overly flowery acknowledgments; that's fine.
But don't you dare forget anyone, because you'll hear about it. And not
necessarily in ways that you'll like. If a piece of thesis work you are
publishing yourself, thank your adviser. Thank any other official/informal
mentors. Always thank the reviewers, either by name or if anonymous; thank the
editors. Thank all who gave you the gift of red, bleeding drafts (below), even
if they were an asshole. Always thank the kind folks who helped you in
innumerable ways: museum collections managers, curators (sometimes you're
supposed to thank both, even if the friendly manager was the only one who
lifted a finger; you may not be invited back to visit collections again if the
curator did not actually help you was not thanked as well; just bite the bullet
and thank them anyway). Most importantly, thank the folks who collected and
prepared the fossils you're reporting: collection and preparation involve a lot
of effort, and I've heard a multitude of comments from colleagues along the
lines of "I'm a bit pissed off I wasn't acknowledged by Student/Colleague
X, given that I collected/prepared that goddamn specimen they were so pleased
about publishing on." Almost nothing in paleontology paints you as an
out-of-touch elite as failing to thank the people who most fundamentally made
your scientific research possible. Speaking of, don't forget to thank funders.
Anyone else who let you borrow their car, let you stay on their couch, fed you,
discussed research with, etc. also deserves thanks. None of this needs to be
particularly long, and while flowery language ought to be avoided, it does not
mean you can't have some fun with it.
Embrace the tyranny of the red pen
Your first draft is probably going to be garbage, and that's
OK. Self-editing is a difficult skill to learn, and usually you're going to
learn it from others; a good adviser will know to be critical but not nasty.
You'll probably learn the most from them and their comments. Unfortunately, bad
advisers teach bad habits and breed bad scientists. If comments on a manuscript
piss you off or make you sad or distressed, don't despair - ask yourself
"why"? You've spent all this hard work just to see a manuscript
bleeding to death with red marks. Sometimes you focus entirely on those red
marks - or sections completely crossed out - and panic. That's fine. Take a day
off. Go see a movie. Hang out with friends. Have a few drinks (the number of
drinks might end up being proportional to the amount of red ink) with friends
(not by yourself). After a day or two, think about why you're so upset; I find
that knowing why allows you to separate the emotion from logic and gives you a
way forward. Are you upset because you are not used to dealing with criticism?
If so, I don't really have anything insightful to say other than accepting
criticism and not getting hurt feelings over it is difficult to learn and takes
a lot of conditioning; ignoring emotions is unnatural, and 10 years of research
later I'm still learning. It takes time and practice. Are you upset because the comments are nasty? It happens, and several things are important
here. 1) &%$# them. If at all possible, do not ask this person for review
comments again. They are a bad scientist and cannot divorce logic from
emotions. 2) Try to separate the useful comments from the shit ones; try taking
a marker and literally cross out the hurtful garbage. There may be some genuine insight, and it's best not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 3) If this is your
adviser, then you're in trouble. Learn to live with it for now, and try to
learn from it: try to learn it as something to avoid rather than emulate.
Everything is a learning experience, and unfortunately, sometimes learning from
negative example can hurt but reveal to you a positive alternative. If you
think you can speak frankly about it with them, then do so; it is fully within
your rights to respectfully demand to be treated with respect. If your adviser
is capable of a heart to heart discussion, then you've made a good choice for
graduate school. If not, I'd start thinking real quick about how to complete
your thesis soon or find an alternative. At one of my alma maters, there was
some seriously messed up adviser-student antagonism and students secretly
switching advisers and committee members like baseball cards.
Once you're able to ignore shitty comments, you can get over
them quickly and take action to insulate yourself: don't keep it a secret if
you get a shitty peer review with ad hominem attacks back from a journal; write
to the editor and politely request that the editor not pick that reviewer
again, or edit the review for content. A surprising number of unhappy people
end up in academia and it's best to avoid them, and warn others which bridges
have trolls.
After you've learned some tips for editing, you can
self-edit more effectively. Can you shorten a sentence? Does anything seem out
of place? Does it belong in a different sentence/paragraph/section? Or, a
completely different manuscript? Is anything repetitive? How is the flow of the
paper - are the large breaks needing more efficient paving? All of these factor
into what Ernest Hemingway called the "shit detector". Personally, I
will repeatedly print off a manuscript and mark it up myself several times during
the process. If a section seems totally disjointed, you can quite literally cut
out thematically contiguous passages of text out of a printed copy, lay them
out on a table, and try placing them in alternative orders (I did this several
times during graduate school). Once you've figured out a more logical order,
tape them together and use that as a guide for copy/paste/cut into the new
order. One last tip about editing: it helps to wait a few days after you've
written something to edit it. If it's still fresh in your mind, nothing will
seem amiss. Give it a few days, and the details you articulated will become
fuzzy and eventually forgotten to a point where it will read like anything
written by a different person. For example, if you read something you wrote
years ago, you may have zero memory of writing it to begin with. My golden
standard is about one week: after this period of time I have no misgivings
about editing my own work and 'crap' becomes much more obvious.
Keeping up with current research - the literature review
This is a crucial part in the early stages of any scientific
writing. I'm including it here, after the section on writing your first paper -
to emphasize that it usually doesn't belong anywhere in the published
literature. Often this is a check box you need to tick off during the stages of
thesis writing, and many theses include one; actually including it within a
scientific body of text, UNLESS you're writing an actual review paper, is a
waste of time. Unless your adviser requires it for the thesis, don't bother
(see below). It is, however, important to read everything and distill it
somehow. I knew I did not want a big literature review, but I needed to go
through the process anyway - so I filled up an entire moleskine notebook with
notes and figures from papers on marine vertebrate taphonomy. This took me
about a year - maybe 3-4 papers a week. I would write anywhere from 1/2 to 2
pages of notes, and if possible include a photocopied figure pasted into the
notebook - try to find the single most important figure from the paper, and
pick only that one - and ask yourself, why is this one most important? Boil
every paper down into a series of 4-5 bullet points. What is truly new?
Ironically, you won't be summarizing the lit review sections of those papers
and before you know it you'll skip over those sections wholesale. When you're
new, you're probably going to be googling a LOT of definitions, which will in
all likelihood not be in a dictionary and will force you to disappear down the rabbit
hole of other background work. Once you've gotten good at this you can distill
a 10 page paper into a few bullet points in about a half hour or less.
One last point - don't fail to cite anyone who deserves
citing. Being not cited by someone really hurts, especially if you did hard
work going unrecognized and they get a bunch of fanfare for something you
published several years before. There's no better way to show the community you
are sharp than by hitting all the proper notes; if you neglect to cite
something relevant, you risk pissing off that researcher (who may review your
work in the future) and showing the world you're not very competent. When I do
peer reviews, I routinely suggest additional citations if the authors have not
included them. Often they listen; sometimes they don't.
Walking the tightrope: how many side projects?
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. My master's thesis
was not published until three years after I graduated. It was a reasonably
tight thesis but a pretty hefty manuscript. My biggest advice on here is to
start out a small number of side projects, once you're comfortable enough.
These should not include your adviser, if, for example, your adviser is
responsible for holding up research. If they are able to acknowledge "this
is a short side project, we work together well, and we can get it out
quickly" then there's not a problem. But ideally, start making early
collaborations with other graduate students - these projects are often the
seeds of lifelong collaborative partnerships with other researchers and
friends. All projects will have stopping points and slow down; maybe you're
waiting on somebody for data, access to a specimen, etc. - if you have
something else you can work on in the meantime, then you can keep the motivation
train going. So how many side projects? You want to leave graduate school with
at least one paper already published. As in, something you can put down
for Ph.D. program applications. Not in press, not in review, published.
So, have as many as you can manage - I juggle anywhere from 3-4 active projects
at a time, with several additional 'off in the distance' projects I will
incrementally update and 'open up' once enough active projects are completed.
This is a critical part of planning for the future: always have extra rounds to
load into the chamber. Do not take on so many side projects you cannot complete
them all or be a burden to your coauthors - be responsible. I've met many
researchers who have taken on too heavy a load; it's OK to be responsible and
decline project invitations. More below.
The dreaded writer's block and random tips for maintaining
productivity and sanity
Everyone will get to a point where they've gotten sick of
research or academic bullshit. Just accept that this is probably going to
happen. It often comes down to interpersonal relationships - if you can,
minimize (or eliminate) these interactions and for those you can't, grin and
bear it. If it's something that can be avoided without being detrimental to
your graduate school graduation prospects (or job for that matter) - life is
too short for toxic bullshit. There are a lot of bullies in academia, and it's
OK to tell yourself that they can go blank themselves. It may not be the best
thing to actually say to their face - but make a pact with yourself to avoid
them. If they're not on your committee, and they really really suck,
they are of zero consequence. I encountered these sorts of personalities during
each of my graduate programs - I avoided them, and instead spent time with labmates
who I enjoyed being around. More below.
Note that I'm talking about general assholery here and not
actual harassment. Actual harassment - verbal, sexual, physical - should be
immediately reported, damn the torpedoes.
If the source of writer's block is not related to general
assholery, then it's important to figure out what it is precisely. In my case
it has often been a series of conflicting ideas within a paper, or perhaps the
paper is hung up because some analysis/equipment/data is not quite available.
Can you find a workaround? Often workarounds will come at odd moments of
brilliance - I often got ideas while muttering to myself on long walks home in
the rainy suburbs of Dunedin NZ, immediately calling my wife at home to discuss
the proposed solution. As with many other parts of this post, creativity is
important - working your way through nonscientific problems is just as
important a set of skills you will need as a scientist, particularly when
working as part of a research team.
I do not profess to have all the answers or even many of
them - but I'll share my perspective on motivation. I wanted to be a
paleontologist since I was very young, and the modus operandi of my career has
been keeping research fun. So long as I am enjoying it, I will surmount most
challenges and keep trucking. I make decisions about what to work on in order
to maintain that fun - which also ensures that productivity is maintained. I
will shift from project to project to fight boredom. I'll share a particular
strategy I learned during my undergraduate. I am a millennial, and grew up
playing computer games, and I shamelessly continue to do so as do many of my
peers (many baby boomers don't get it). Gaming can be quite addictive, and
resulted in some lackluster grades during my freshmen year of college. When
taking calculus I and II during summer school, a particularly addictive game
had just came out - but my computer was a bit out of date and could just barely
run it. So, between missions, the computer would have a loading screen for
about 20 minutes - during which I would solve 1-2 calculus problems. After a
few hours, my homework was done, and I got my gaming fix in. That was ten years
ago - and this strategy still serves me well. I'll do something fun for about
an hour or less, then switch to writing/figure editing/formatting/data
entry/analysis for a bit. Another tip: if you're on a roll writing, I find that
a drink or two really helps - relax, have a beer or a glass of wine; you second
guess yourself less and less and write more. You can go back and edit it later,
but I tend not to sweat the small stuff so much if I'm ever so slightly tipsy.
Another tip: when you get a bit sick of a particular
project, halt work on it and switch to a different one that is more fun and easy
to stay motivated about. Eventually you'll get to another stopping point and
can switch back to the other project. Your own attitude towards a project can
be a stumbling block of its own.
Yet another quick tip: use a shit load of check lists. I
have an entire tiny notebook that is devoted only to checklists! Each page
represents about 2-3 weeks worth of tasks to complete. Write out everything and
accomplish as much as you can; on days I don't teach, I try to check off 2-3
items a day. This is an easy and effective way of tracking progress and keeping
tabs on what task is next.
Lastly, don't give up your personal life. It's only science.
It'll be there waiting for you if you take the weekend off. Stop and smell the
roses. During my last year of graduate school I became really frustrated on a
number of fronts, the specifics of which I won't repeat. I took more time for
myself; I left campus every day right at 5 o clock regardless of what I was
doing. I spent more time at home with my lovely wife and cat. I decided to do
more artwork - and to hell with it, I wanted to learn to paint! So I taught
myself watercolor since it was reasonably affordable. Once I started my first
job, I could afford more expensive materials and taught myself to paint on
canvas as a gift to myself. Set aside a certain number of hours every week for
something fun, something that doesn't overlap with research at all. Don't
neglect your significant other, family, and friends; they understand you're
busy, but don't overdo it. Life is too short. And, most importantly, life as a
professional is going to be busier than graduate school, if you can believe it
- so find something that works. Mental health is really important, and don't
mess around with it. On that note, so is physical health: many Ph.D. students
gain a bit of weight. Living in a foreign country with a budget too paltry to
afford meals in restaurants or travel, I had a lot of spare time so I worked
out a lot - I channeled much of my negative energy into exercise. Jogging,
lifting weights, etc. Take care of yourself.
Thesis v. Publication
This is going to be short: nobody cares about your thesis.
It's probably great. But, nobody is going to read it (unless of course you
don't bother publishing it, and somebody desperate might cite something from
it). Write your thesis in such a way that makes converting it to a scientific
manuscript easy. Or, better yet, write the manuscript first, and convert it
into thesis format second; that way, you won't have the laborious task of
having cut off all the thesis fat to make a solid, lean manuscript that will
survive the hellfire of peer review. Many schools now offer a manuscript option
for the thesis, where you can write some sort of synopsis and then quite
literally copy and paste the text from two or more different manuscripts into
the body of the thesis (you may have to combine the references cited list,
though). This is a great option. Unfortunately, my master's thesis was too
monolithic and had no easy dividing line, so I published it as a single,
enormous paper. My Ph.D., on the other hand, had 10 chapters - all of which are
now published as six papers (several of which I combined).
A brief guide to peer review
Once you start publishing papers, you'll start getting
invitations to review articles for journals. Holy crap! Somebody cares about
what I have to say? It's one of the most satisfying - and sobering - moments in
your academic career. Hopefully by this point you have learned by positive
example how to edit your own work - and if by negative example, you may already
have a short list of things you really didn't like seeing. I would not profess
to be good at peer reviewing, *but* during my Ph.D. a senior colleague whom I
had reviewed a paper for wrote me a polite letter thanking me for the best peer
review he had ever received - so I'll try to not mess this up. There's a number
of rules I put in place.
1) In a word, don't be an asshole. Nobody cares about your
feelings, so keep them out of the review - unless of course they're positive.
It's OK to have nice, warm fuzzy feelings if you read something amazing - then,
goddamnit, tell the author how damn talented they are. Glowing reviews are OK
if the work is good. But if it's not, then you should be careful - even if it's
somebody you dislike. First off, if it's a researcher you do not particularly
care for, or has mistreated you in the past, it is probably best to recuse yourself
as you are unlikely to offer an objective review. Watch your tone, stay away
from ad hominem bullshit. If you wonder about a particular passage offending
the writer ask yourself if everything you wrote is factually or objectively
defendable. If not, make it that way. Make sure your reviews are always
constructive.
2) Be detailed. Short statements painting things with broad
strokes doesn't help anyone - don't skimp on details and don't be a lazy ass.
We've all gotten reviews where the reviewer basically did not like something
but did not really explain it in enough detail - they did not really have
enough time to review it and have thus failed you and the scientific process.
Don't fall into that trap; explain things precisely in order to give the author
a 'road map to success'.
3) Avoid saying "we don't really know enough for you to
claim/propose hypothesis X". That's a bullshit cop-out, and when you see
this, this is the translation: "I don't really like this work, out of my
disdain for the authors or out of laziness." One exception is if you truly
do not believe a proposed hypothesis is testable - and if you don't think so,
then say it. One example comes to mind - the "Triassic kraken".
4) Make sure the authors have not skipped any steps. A
classic example in taphonomy is "these bite marks are best interpreted as
coming from shark bites" without exploring alternative hypotheses.
Multiple working hypotheses should be evaluated given that we are in a
historical science. Ensure that the authors have gone from one logical step to
another without cheating (knowingly or unknowingly).
5) Save rejection for only the worst cases.
6) If an author continually has papers rejected from regular
journals, only to be followed by publication in non-peer reviewed journals
without incorporating your comments, then consider refusing to review for them.
7) Always sign your review. Doing this ensures two things:
it ensures you keep the review constructive and is something you can stand
behind; it also gets your name out there, and writing good reviews helps you
get taken more seriously. Eventually you may come across a paper written by a
colleague where you feel they have been led down the wrong path and owe it to
them to write a firmly worded review saying certain things that need to be said
- it's an uncomfortable position to be in, and I've been there - and that's
perhaps the one example where it is politically best not to sign your review.
Note that some journals not only make your name aware but publish your name and
reviews; others keep everything anonymous. Each has their pluses and minuses,
and truth be told there is not a one-size-fits-all approach that works
universally. You'll always end up reviewing something that is just kind of f-d
up, poorly written dreck, and it takes calm nerves and a steady hand to
politely dissect it.
8) If you have a stronger grasp of the literature than the
author (possible even as a grad student) then suggest alternative works to be
cited.
9) If you want to phrase something politely to the authors,
but wish to be firm about it, do not hesitate to say to the editor "The
authors NEED to do X,Y, & Z in order for me to endorse this work" in
no uncertain terms. This will give your review teeth.
10) Most importantly, you have to spend the rest of your
career sharing the field with these people. You gain more from being friendly
and honest than being a vindictive asshole. Trust me: I've watched people
systematically burn their bridges, one by one, and it's not pretty. Don't
poison the well.
11) Don't be a parasite. You should be, bare minimum,
reviewing at least one manuscript for every one you submit. My Ph.D. adviser
suggested three per every manuscript you submit - I think that's a fine number,
if you get that many requests. By the third year of my Ph.D., I was reviewing
on average 2-4 for everything I submitted.
12) Know when to recuse yourself. If there's a scientific
paper with some data you really shouldn't be seeing, owing to a conflict of
interest - recuse yourself. I've been asked for unpublished data by an
unscrupulous colleague, and then subsequently had that data unwittingly shared
with said individual by an editor who did not bother to read my reasons for
excluding said individual from reviewing.
13) Get it done on time! Don't take more than a few weeks at
most. Don't be the asshole who sits on a manuscript for four months.
Minesweeper
As nice a picture as I've painted academia is not always so
nice and rosy. Survival in academia relies upon being able to navigate
minefields. I'm not going to say much here - but to quote a famous 80s cartoon,
knowing is half the battle. Keep a mental record of attitudes, goings-on, etc.
- keep tabs on things. Know which way the wind is blowing. Do a lot of
listening. Having 'feelers' out will help you avoid toxic individuals, avoid
saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, etc. Identify friends who are good
confidants and know the score, so to speak, and you can safely discuss ideas
and concerns with. Being able to predict things before they happen is a useful skill
to have. Being a researcher has a surprising number of parallels with being an
intelligence analyst. Some degree of secrecy is important: there may always be
some shitty person out there incapable of independent creative thought and
takes your idea and publishes it themselves. Think about information circles
and the movement of information; who can you trust with what information? If
individual X should not hear some critical piece of unpublished data from your
research, it probably should not be shared with somebody in their circle:
students, departmental coworkers, external coauthors/collaborators. People
talk, and they do hear things. I hate saying it, and people (even who
this applies to!) roll their eyes when I say this, but most effective researchers
think like spies do. And I don't mean illicit acquisition of information - I
mean in the sense of just being alert, taking lots of mental notes, and doing
mental gymnastics regarding the flow of information - going through 'what if'
scenarios in your head. My advice to all graduate students is to read spy
fiction by John Le Carre and others; I wish I had earlier, it would have saved
me from a number of early blunders in my career. Loose lips sink ships!
Parting note
Nobody gives a flying # about your ego. We're young
researchers, and we're going to be working together for a long, long period of
time. Some of us have gotten some decent papers out there already and made some
great discoveries. But check your ego at the door. Quite frankly, nobody wants
to see it; it's like that annoying dog your friend has that they obsess over a
little too much and show off all the time but in reality it's kind of ugly,
barks too much and eats its own poop. Nobody wants you to bring that dog to a
dinner party.
At a regional conference I recently saw some speeches made
about the career of a recently 'retired' paleoherpetologist who I was not quite
familiar with - they emphasized positive relationships with colleagues over a
long career, mentored many (successful) students, and nurtured quite a number
of paleontologists. Try to be that person who everyone speaks of in glowing
terms. Life is too short to be a miserable loner surrounded by enemies. And
most of all, when you've finished your climb up the education ladder, be nice
to students: if not, they will remember. I was that student once, and I
remember everything.
Further Reading