Category Archives: Research and Academia

Systematically reject requests to review: a shameful behaviour?

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I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions – and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
– Bill Vaughan

Every time you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, you mobilize anywhere from 3 to 5 persons who will work absolutely for free on your manuscript. Minimally, you will have two reviewers and an associate editor, all who will take the time to read and critics your work. On the top of that, the editor will also spend times on it. If needed, a third reviewer will also be requested. 

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Former Student becomes CEO!

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***UPDATE: URL to MedScint website corrected

François Therriault-Proulx, a former PhD student of mine, decided sometimes ago that he would transformed a technology he co-developped during his graduate studies to a commercial product. Here he is in his first booth (right) at the premier medical physics conference, the American Association of Medical Physicists annual meeting in San Antonio Texas with partner, co-foudner and CMO Jonathan Turcotte (left).

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100% made in Quebec City. Congrats MedScint!

The reviewers are always right…even when they are wrong!-

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Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.
– Al Gore

One important aspect of scientific research is dissemination of the results through peer-reviewed publications. In a previous post, I discussed the choice of venue and the relative (un)importance of the journal impact factor. In this post, I address what happen in-between that first submission and the actual publication.

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Dealing with E-mails in Academia II – Emails to actions to Inbox Zero

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This is the second (and last) installment in dealing with e-mails. It assumes that you have read the first one, basic ethos. If you have not please take a few minutes and read it here. In this second part, we will see how to transform the “good” e-mails into action items in order to reach the famous, not so unicorn-like, inbox zero and file e-mail intelligently for future use. These blog posts will be permanently part of the E-offices series (digital office).

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Dealing with E-mails in Academia I – Basic Ethos

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E-mail is at the same time an efficient communication tool and a big productivity disruption that can occupy up to 23% of your daily working hours. In fact, if you do a search for e-mail and productivity on Google you will get over 260 000 000 (that is right!) hits. This should tell you that for many managing e-mails is a serious modern problem. Furthermore, considering that your brain require a reset time to get back to a deep focus level needed to accomplish key tasks such as writing manuscripts, grants and so on every time you are disrupted, looking at your e-mail you essentially trigger that “reset” timer. The toll on your work could be disastrous.

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Some public shaming is in order

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I do not know about you, but I am getting tired and even a bit frustrated by all the e-mails asking me to come to meeting X, publish my papers in journal Y, or even worse like the one below about being a member of editorial or advisor board of a journal Z. The problem is most of these are not even closely connected to your field of expertise; they are simply fishing and a very simply Google Scholar and PubMed search would reveal that in a matter of seconds. This basically means that these requests are coming from ill-intended individuals and companies that have no sense of ethics what-so-ever. Their meetings and journals should be considered predatory at best. Thus, public shaming is in order. The latest in this category is below with my comments.

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