“The gift of doctoral study is that you get the time and space to obsess about something you’re (hopefully) interested in…”
-Jeannie Holstein
The above is taken from the following link about returning to graduate school to tackle a PhD project and finding it fun. A very interesting read: ‘Academia is a very well kept secret’.
An interesting reads at TechCrunch on new forms of dissemination and measurements of scientific impact: Reputation Metrics Startups Aim To Disrupt The Scientific Journal Industry.
In a similar vein, you might want to read the excellent editorial by John R. Alder from Stanford entitled “A New Age of Peer Reviewed Scientific Journals” published in the open access journal Surgical Neurology International. The manuscript is available on Cureus blog.
Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.
In an era when most research efforts are publicly funded through federal, provincial and other government programs, open-access journals seem a natural “public” return on the initial investments. However, the existence of various levels of “open” (which also dictate how the results can be re-used) appears to blur the issue. Concerned researchers or simply interested science followers, here is an interesting read in Nature: Researchers opt to limit uses of open-access publications : Nature News & Comment.
This post is slightly different than others on this blog in that it target professors, researchers, current graduate students and alumni who have graduated from universities located in the province of Quebec. Our provincial government recently announce deep cuts, from 13% to 30% for a total of 10M$. This is on top of serious under-investments in our University system (infrastructure maintenance, professor salaries, undergraduate teaching and general student services).
The major hospital-based research centres of the province have launch a joint effort to raise public awareness on this issue. Please visit and share the link below (yes it is in French only):
Couper en recherche , c’est tuer l’espoir
This topic probably happen between you (the thesis advisor) and the first author (your grad student) for almost every paper: what is the author list and order?
Daniel Wessel at Organizing Creativity has a short and very interesting post on this subject: Authorship of Scientific Articles | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY.
A worthy read and numerous useful links.
For an undergrad student, applying and getting a summer job in a research group can be a life changing experience. This is when you will get a taste of what doing scientific research, along side graduate students, feels like. For many, this is all the necessary push needed to apply to graduate studies.
Ruminating... 