While I can't comment on otter research, the complaints of the humanities scholar about how graduate students read texts ring true for young scientists too.
Why is it that so many graduate students are reflexively critical of what they read? Why are they so eager to dismiss, dislike, and disrespect work that has already been done before they can even hope to begin to contribute?
I think there are some upsides to the arrogance that grad students initially bring to reading the established literature. Grad students, some of them at least, are the future of any field. It's a wonderful thing that they critically evaluate for themselves everything that's become conventional wisdom, because some of that conventional wisdom is wrong. And as we become more entrenched in academic science it's harder to spot the flaws in the conventional wisdom that we've embraced for 10, 20, 30 years...
I remain a very detailed reader and reviewer, but I'm not nearly as acerbic as I was as a graduate student. I also find I have much less time to take on accepted ideas when they are assumed in papers I review... most recently, I lost hours of a week's vacation working on my laptop trying to convince myself (or disprove the author's assertion) of one aspect of one virus' lifestyle. In the end, I now believe there isn't much/any data against the conventional wisdom, but it is crazy that I chose to spend a substantial fraction of my time at a beach house chasing this idea down. I'm too busy now, but I do envy the perspective and time that graduate students have when they read the literature, and when they assist in or write their own peer reviews.
2 comments:
Interesting post.
Personally, I think we need that "arrogance" to keep us on our toes.
However, there is something dangerous going on when a powerful PI gives paper reviews to their harshest grad students and then puts their own name on the reviews.
There has to be a place for this kind of criticism, but in our current system there's no balance of power. We end up burying a lot of important findings by having inconsistent expectations for the work that we do, and placing undue weight on opinions that come from certain names (and may not have actually originated there).
It raises some interesting questions about who is the puppet, and who is the puppet-master. Science doesn't only eat its young, the current system also encourages the young to eat each other.
Just found your blog, so sorry for the tardiness of the comment.
But perhaps one reason that grad students tend to be harsher is that they're being told by their PIs to be critical of manuscripts, to not accept things at face value. It takes time to learn the balance between harsh and constructive criticism.
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