the youngest peer reviewers are often the harshest...

...illustrated by recent articles in the Chronicle and The Onion.

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.

People I'm taking for granted

I have been busy working on grant applications lately, and I want to publicly, if anonymously, thank all of my non-scientist friends for their support as I work through this.

I am grateful for my supportive academic friends, too! But it's something special to get encouraging and inquisitive Twitters from distant friends who don't particularly care what I study. It's important to them because it's important to me... and maybe because I tend to gesticulate wildly when I tell funny anecdotes about my work.

(Besides, my scientist friends are still on the hook to read my drafts... they'll get their thanks later ;-))

Fixing peer review, part 1

A colleague who knows my strong feelings on peer review sent me a recent article about "the tragedy of the reviewer commons." It doesn't address all my concerns with the peer review process, but it makes a few excellent, concrete suggestions:

"First, have colleagues pre-review your manuscript before submission. This was a time-honoured norm in publishing, but has diminished in recent years. Its decline could be due to increased pressure to publish quickly, competition between colleagues, increases in the numbers of co-authors on papers, and ironically, less time available to comment on our colleagues' papers because we are submitting and resubmitting more of our own papers."

"...journals could require a statement in the cover letter such as 'We confirm that should our study have been previously submitted to another journal, we have taken all reviewers comments into account in revising our manuscript for submission to…', has the merit of increasing author awareness and responsibility, without biasing editors because all submissions, whether or not previously rejected, would have to carry this statement."

"Our experience has been that, when they are chosen appropriately, students and post-docs are very conscientious and thorough in preparing reviews. Moreover, this is a route by which a busy senior scientist can still participate in the review process, and can mentor younger scientists in the craft of writing a good manuscript review."

Amen, my ecological brothers! (The authors are Michael Hochberg, Jonathan Chase, Nicholas Gotelli, Alan Hastings and Shahid Naeem)

I could not agree more with each of these points. As a reviewer I am constantly amazed by the shoddily prepared manuscripts that people submit to journals... and I wonder if authors had to first reveal their draft to their colleagues, who vote on their career advancement, whether the manuscripts would be in better shape even before the internal pre-review.

The authors' second point is remarkably creative, and something I would never have thought of (and something I have not heard anyone else mention). We all have been asked by multiple journals to review the same paper, and when you see that the authors did not revise the manuscript AT ALL in response to your first, rejecting review... it creates resentment. For those of us who take the time to write detailed, constructive reviews, this will offer us a direct recourse. If an author is caught in the act of wantonly ignoring a previous round of review, the reviewer can document this and affect change. Perhaps the authors will be blacklisted at that journal -- a concrete negative effect of not taking advantage of the first round of reviews. However, I do not think all reviewer's comments should affect change in a manuscript, so this policy has to be employed with some common sense by editors. I wouldn't hang up an author for not changing figure formatting that I had previously suggested, but I might talk to an editor about authors who ignored cogent criticism of their statistics.

And finally, how can we teach our students to become competent reviewers if we don't expose them to the process? Because too many scientists take their own peer reviews so negatively, I don't think that's the best way to teach younger scientists how to critique and improve papers. Plus, younger scientists often take the responsibility of reviewing to heart, and spend inordinate amounts of time on their first reviews, checking references more diligently than the busy senior scientists could have time to do.

These aren't a panacea for the problems of peer reviewing, but I would wholeheartedly endorse both the cultural and official changes to review suggested by Hochberg et al.

"I love bacteria."

Several of my oldest friends are writing application essays right now. One is writing his research statement for tenure-track positions, one is applying to PhD programs, and one is applying to become a New York City teaching fellow. Of course, I think each of my friends will be great at the position to which he is applying, and I've happily been reading and editing their essays. I've especially been enjoying seeing which of my changes each of them likes and which alterations they can't stand.

But I'm far from the only one with application essays on the brain. FSP has opened up a contest for egregious parodies of graduate school application essays. I've been poking around on the internet looking for advice on essay writing for my PhD-bound friend, and have found some interesting things:

1. There are places you can pay to edit your graduate school application essays. This shouldn't have surprised me, but it's nice, in a way, to know I'm still this naive.

2. The typical, generic and earnest advice I expected to find. However, there were some interesting sections in these, like "What if I don’t have any unique experiences or qualities?" and some that were written in more relaxed tones. One site offered free example essays as a loss-leader, I suppose, for the "pre-written," "model" papers they sell.

3. Overall, the science blogs focus on other aspects of applying to grad school (being very very careful when selecting an advisor, etc), though FSP gives some excellent practical dos and don'ts of grad school application essays.

I remember that starting my graduate school application essay was very problematic. I was blocked on it for weeks. In the end I said %$*^ it, and started the essay "I love bacteria." And I went on to explain what I thought was cool, attractive, intensely important about microbiology for the rest of the first paragraph, then I wrote about my research experience, and finished with a paragraph about whom I would have liked to work with in each department. Overall, it was very conventional, but my honest and blunt introduction did have some consequences; I was identified by people at several interviews as "ohhhh, the girl who loves bacteria." But there's no such thing as bad publicity for one's application... right?

Since then, I have learned a few things about how to start writing introductions. Besides the ubiquitous and useful "start writing now, polish/cut later," I've found I often write an entirely superfluous, too-much-background paragraph that precedes a perfectly reasonable introductory paragraph in my drafts. Sometimes this superfluous paragraph is very well-written, but it doesn't really need to be there. This was pointed out by one of my oldest advisors, when I was writing my research statements last year, and I now see this problem in many things I write. If I took the time to look back, maybe even in my blog posts . But I also have been able to see this in other people's writing -- including in one of my friends' application essays. So that's my contribution to the application essay resources on the intertubes... check and see if your second paragraph actually is a decent introduction in and of itself.

Mostly, though, I'm happy to be at a stage in my life/career where I have a lot more direction and purpose to the starts of my essays (cough, grants), and no one expects me to start with "My life's purpose came to me as I was hiking though the French Alps three summers ago..." Except Female Science Professor, of course.

CV roundup

The CV workshop was a mixed success. The grad students who had been most excited about it couldn't be there because of a family medical emergency, and she always contributes a lot of life to the meetings. Another grad student just left for a three month research trip to Asia. So the attendees were:

Frazzled female grad student, who's preparing for comps and looks contemptuously at anyone who tries to distract her from her current work

Ignored (by her lab) female grad student from a nearby lab, who also is facing her comps

The senior professor who sometimes joins our meetings who is an absolute grant/publishing dynamo

New male postdoc who had previously done a masters with senior professor


I brought five CVs that all had very different formats. Three were from within our department: a PhD student applying for a postdoc and two postdocs who had just received TT jobs (including mine). A third postdoc applying for TT jobs and a new assistant professor's CV rounded out the bunch. I also had copies of NSF and NIH-grant format CVs from both myself and the senior professor, but no one was particularly interested in grant-specific CVs formats.

One thing that I wish I had made clearer to Senior Prof was that this wasn't an "applying for a job" workshop. Senior prof has a very strong personal point of view -- publications, and to a smaller degree, grants, are all that matter. When he is on a job search committee, he doesn't read whole CVs, he scrolls to the publications and sees where and how much the candidate's been publishing. He also considers the reputation of the letter-writers when deciding whom to put on the short list. And while I would never say that publications weren't the most important factor in almost any application for a research job or research grant/award... that wasn't the message I wanted to send, that it doesn't matter what your CV looks like, it's your pubs, pubs, pubs.

Not every professor is as single-minded on this as Senior Prof (and most professors cannot match Senior Prof's publication rate... the coincidence is notable), and many look at CVs as not just a list of your qualifications, but also an example of how you present and organize information. That message might have gotten drowned out as we lapsed into another episode of "The Phagenista and the Senior Prof Show." Sigh... As a graduate student, lab meetings were called the "Dave, Jeremy and Phagenista Show"... but at least we were all the students!

The visiting student is likely going into science journalism after getting her PhD, and she seemed receptive to my ideas on how to spin many of her previous and current activities (volunteering for AIDS organizations, writing for the local left-wing rag) into sections on her CV. So at least one person got something out of the workshopping. Not uncoincidentally, she also brought her CV with her for us to discuss. The new postdoc said that he would consider putting his teaching experience on his CV (he never has before). Frazzled female grad student was pretty silent throughout the whole thing.

Next time, and yes there will be a next time, I'll make everyone bring their CV, and I might not invite any senior profs... or invite them for the second part of the meeting... I do think there is a value in looking at the CVs of successful scientists, and seeing that there isn't one "right way" to do things.

And, true to Senior Prof's point, one of the recently-hired CVs we went over has utterly stellar content, but was the most cluttered of all we looked at. Clearly, that postdoc been allocating his time to those many (many) high-impact papers instead of gussying up the CV, and it didn't hurt him (at least three great TT offers)!

Conformity Vitae?

Lab meeting this week is going to be a CV workshop, which is something I haven't done before, and isn't something I ever experienced as a student... but always struck me as a good idea. Application documents can always benefit from other pairs of eyes, and who better to help guide your CV than people who work in the same field, on similar questions who might have already solved common problems? (For example do people really write out "Gordon Research Conference on Cool Phage Things", or are "GRC on Cool Phage Things", or "Gordons" just as acceptible?) Plus, we're a lab group who generally knows what all the other members do and what their qualifications are, so there shouldn't be any discomfort sharing ones laurels with the group... or will there be? I have some nagging sense this will be like asking everyone in a group to share one's salary, that we'll be revealing something we normally don't compare against one another.

I'm also don't want to steamroll over the individuality of each of my labmates in my desire to streamline and improve the styles of their CVs. I did a ridiculous amount of research on CV development when I was applying for jobs (thanks for the week(s) of no research productivity, Chronicle of Higher Education!), and I do want to get as much mileage out of that as possible... but even though I think my CV is pretty well-formatted, I definitely don't want my lab to just clone my CV without thinking. So far, even though I favor a certain sans serif font, I've been finding other fonts (most recent: Optima) for each person who has asked me to help with their application packets. However, some formatting issues seem beyond discussion, like two carriage returns between sections to create more visual separation between unlike items rather than like items, and I actually now notice when a CV doesn't have that kind of thoughtful spacing.

So my plan is to download a number of CVs that I like (mostly of colleagues, because those are the CVs I see) that don't look much like mine to show a wider range of successful (in my opinion) options. Some are great on showcasing content, some are wonderfully formatted, and some do both. I'm throwing in a CV of a friend of mine, which I like except for the font... I know there will be at least one other formatting/sans serif font snob in the group (she uses keynote and pages... and favors Helvetica Neue) so this should be fun.

Beyond looks and which sections can/should be on a CV, I have two take home messages for the group:

1. We all need a master kitchen sink CV file.

This is a [insert your favorite word processing program] document file that lists all sorts of details that one might never, ever put on a CV, and any and everything you have done that might even vaguely be considered (when squinting) relevant to science/your future jobs. For instance, the exact dates and names of guest lectures. It's absolutely no work to remember this the day you give the lecture, and would require websearching to reconstruct that information if it were ever needed, years down the line. However, when writing a detailed teaching statement for a particular position, it could be useful to mention relevant lecture titles to show you have direct teaching experience in a certain field. Or maybe it will never be relevant... but if it is, you've got it, ready to go. All tenure-track faculty members are advised to have kitchen sink CVs as tenure packets in progess, but there's no reason that it's not useful at other stages in academic science.

2. Tailor your CV to (nearly) every application.

This can be as small as inserting an award or changing your "selected presentations" to favor the conferences that your search committee will recognize, to as large as bringing in whole sections from your kitchen sink CV. For example, an extensive non-scientific writing section is very appropriate for an application for a job in science journalism, but might not be relevant for many other academic positions. That being said, there's always the risk of introducing mistakes into an application document when you modify it. To save your trusted proofreaders the grief of infinite drafts, have a strong CV that many have looked over and modify it in small ways that you check over and over before you submit the CV for important purposes.

I'll post how the first (annual?) CV workshop goes! There are three people who need polished CVs in the next month (two committee meetings, one NSF predoc application), so we'll also get some external feedback soon.

area scientist finishes 'pretty complete' draft of manuscript

The kinds of writer's block I encountered as I struggled to draft my latest manuscript:

1. Existential. Only after the I'd collected and analyzed the data did I question whether this study was worth the time and energy (compared to the other studies/manuscripts on my plate). As nonsensical as it was, I dragged out writing the study up because I felt it was a small study that wasn't particularly compelling. Even after I added another, smaller, but very compelling story to the manuscript, I still had a hard time finding the narrative that would make me want to write the paper and want to share the data with the world.

2. Sleep-deprivation. Writing is one of the few science activities that is noticeably impacted by my not getting enough sleep, which is usually caused by my working very very late on science activities. Or, perhaps in the future, blogging.

3. Temporal. Especially for the introduction and discussion, I need large blocks of time for writing. I need to immerse myself in the literature, to reassure myself that I'm not overlooking an already-published discussion point that I had been thinking was my own novel observation. I know there are books that advise how to write papers or dissertations in 15 minutes a day... but I tend to write best when I don't shift gears. Even to the degree of one week of only doing lab work, one week of only writing.

None of this excuses taking nearly a year (!) to go from finishing the analysis to complete draft... but it amused me to realize that my writer's block with this manuscript never involved sitting down in front of a blank word document with no idea of what to work on.