Author Archives: Luc Beaulieu

The best job is …

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Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Confucius

My two teenagers have started their summer jobs as instructor and assistant instructor in specialized summer camps. This reminded me that when my son started his first summer job (last year), I asked him at the end of his first week how it was, if he liked it?

His reply was, I am having lots of fun and their paying me to for it!

This is a very important feeling, maybe the most important one when it comes to employement. I told him never to loose that feeling because whatever he choses to do later on in life, this how it should feel.

I also told him that this is exactly how I feel everyday in my line of work: scientific research and university teaching. Yes it is tought to get such a position, even thougher to thrive due to the highly competitive nature of publishing manuscripts and getting research grants. At the same time, I get to chose what I am working on and the perks are very satisfying in the end.

The best job is the one that does not feel like it 😉

4th of July, Independence Day

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For those of have never looked at the declaration of independence, it is a masterpiece (even if, like me,  you are not American); the same goes for the original US Constitution document.

Benjamin Franklin who has lived through the war against the British Crown, a war on the US soil, had a great quote that is now more than ever appropriate

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

– Benjamin Franklin

Adding to the recent event of global scale and systematic spying on their citizen not just by the US government but also by many other democratic countries it would appear, there is another fourth that is worth remembering in this day: the fourth amendment, and more precisely Restore the Fourth movement.

P.S.: If you are interested to taste of how much information you can gather just by collecting metadata from your e-mails (imagine if you collect from even more sources…), have a look at this MIT website called Immersion (NOTE: work only with Gmail) as presented in this Popular Science article.

Writing Your First Scientific Paper, Part I: The “Data/Story Flow”

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You’ve been working hard, around the clock to get all the data out. You might even have submitted an abstract about your current to the great scientific meeting of your field (and maybe got to travel and present it). Now is time to plant the flag, leave your mark i.e. publish!

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29 Ways to Stay Creative [infographic]

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Lindsey Lawrence over at Daily Infographic has generated a very nice infographic about 29 things you can do in order to stay creative.  I agree with most of the items, and while creativity is not related directly to productivity, some of these items work for both 😉

Journal Impact Factor: why you should not care… too much

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I have been publishing scientific manuscripts for the past 22 years. My educated comments with regard to journal impact factor has always been the same (If you do not know what JIF is, please have a look at this Wikipedia entry). First order, you should publish in the most important journals for your field. If their JIF are low, who cares as long as your work is important to your field and well cited. For example, the scientific discovery of 2012 according to Science (very high JIF) is the publication of the experimental finding of the Higgs boson… in Phys Lett B (low JIF relative to Science)!

Do not forgot that from an historical perspective, we are awfully bad at predicting what will be the next important discovery down the road. A number of fundamental discoveries and early engineering feats were discarded at first. Similarly there are numerous example of scientists having had tremendous issues in getting those game-changing results published, even those ending up winning Nobel prizes. Karry Mullins’ PCR work is one of many examples of work was rejected by journals having top JIF but for which the application of this very technique was published in Science and Nature and the citations counts of these second generation papers also receiving higher numbers than the original, award-winning work!)

Now, you do not have to agree with this lone scientist opinion but certainly you should have a look at the The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment or DORA petition, which is supported by the “big boys” (no discrimination intended). The declaration statement is actually a very interesting read and it covers the historical origin of the JIF (which was not for evaluating researchers at all) and further call for dropping journal-based metrics in assessing scientific productivity for funding and promotion. Over 240 organizations and 6000 individuals have already signed the declaration.

In conclusion, do not loose a good night sleep over your favorite journals’ impact factors…