"In Science, It Matters That Women Come Last"

Emma Pierson has written a very interesting article titled In Science, It Matters That Women Come Last. The article is filled with data and analysis (and graphs!) about gender trends in publishing in some subfields of the physical sciences and math. She examined numbers of papers and authorship order for male and female authors using 23 years of papers from arXiv.

If you read the article, I recommend that you read it all the way through, including footnotes. As I read it I had some questions such as, "What about fields in which authorship is alphabetical?". These questions are answered. You may or may not agree with the methods but these issues were anticipated and the analysis considers the effects of different authorship-order practices in different fields.

There are many fascinating aspects of this dataset and Pierson's discussion of the data. One that particularly interested me is this:

.. I found evidence that women tend to work together. If a paper has one female author, the other authors on the paper are 35 percent more likely to be female given the share of female authors in the field overall.

It is possible that this is largely the result of female PIs tending to advise/hire more female students and postdocs (Pierson mentions a study that seems to show this). I wonder also about the tendency of women scientists to collaborate as peers and how data/trends related to such collaborations will change with time.

I see changes in my peer-collaborations with time in my own career. For the first 2+ decades, my female coauthors were my students and postdocs, with a few isolated exceptions of female-peer coauthors. More recently (the last few years in particular), I have had many female-peer coauthors. It has become routine. I thought this was because there were simply more women in my field now -- in fact, I am sure that is part of the explanation -- but now I wonder if there is more to it. I guess we'd need to know more about how the authorship dataset breaks down by advisee vs. peer coauthors to understand what it means.

What do you think this particular result (that 'women tend to work together') means, either for you or in your particular sub/field?

Format Matters

When you are submitting a manuscript, do you format the text, tables etc. in the style of the journal or do you wait and see if the paper is going to be accepted before taking the time to do that?

Some journals (editors) get annoyed if the manuscript is not already (mostly) in the journal format at the time of submission, even if the paper may be rejected. One reason for this is that the formatting stage can add an extra step; that is, one more back-and-forth between editor and authors, so it's more efficient if the formatting is done at the beginning (and any problems fixed in the review stage). If the paper is accepted, this helps everyone; if the paper is rejected, the authors wasted some time.

Avoiding this extra step definitely makes the review process faster for the author. In my experience, it is the rare author who sufficiently takes care of all necessary formatting issues in the revision stage if they didn't previously make an attempt at following journal format in the first submission. If they try to format the manuscript correctly the first time, I can comment on any problems, and then these can be fixed in the revised manuscript. If the manuscript is not formatted until the revision stage, I typically have to send it back again for technical fixes. Some of the details of formatting can be taken care of by the diligent copy-editors employed by the journal, but the paper is supposed to be (mostly) in journal format when the editors send it along to the copy-editors.

And beware submitting a paper with flawed reference lists to some journals! Certain large publishing companies use manuscript submission software that detects even minor flaws that used to be dealt with at a later stage of the review process but that now can delay review of a manuscript. Wouldn't it be nice if these clever programs also formatted the manuscript (including references) for you, saving time for everyone? As an author and editor, I would like that. Formatting my own manuscripts and checking the formatting of manuscripts of others is tedious.

Anyway, there may be reasons beyond efficiency to format the manuscript in the style of the journal to which it is submitted. As an editor, when I see a manuscript submitted in the very characteristic style of another journal, it does cross my mind that the manuscript might have been rejected by that journal and submitted to my journal. Does that matter if this thought flits across my brain? Probably not, but, as an author, I'd rather an editor not have that thought.

A prior rejection may be irrelevant to another journal depending on why it was rejected by the other journal and whether any significant changes were made to fix potential problems. I am not necessarily talking about rejection by High Impact Journals, but also peer journals (in terms of impact factor and topic).

If a manuscript with suspicious formatting seems worthy of review, it will be reviewed by my journal despite the xeno-formatting, but on more than one occasion I have received an e-mail from an invited reviewer of one of these manuscripts saying "I already reviewed this for the X Journal and it doesn't look like they have changed anything. This is the same paper and I still hate it." That's not good. Not that formatting alone would improve the fate of the paper, but ideally the re-formatting and a serious revision would occur simultaneously, so re-reviewers (and editors) could potentially be more friendly to the revised paper.

So far I have mostly been discussing this from the point of view of an editor, but what actually inspired this post is the fact that I have been spending considerable time today formatting a manuscript for a particular journal. This journal has really bizarre and picky formatting rules, and I am sure I will make errors, but at least it will look mostly like a correctly formatted paper. Maybe that will help the editor 'see' it as a paper appropriate for this journal.. Or, at least, that is what I tell myself when I am making sure that I follow the correct rules for fonts, headings, first paragraph indentation (or not), in-text references, reference list...........

S/he

Can you think of a (good) reason why a journal would need to know the gender of authors and reviewers?

A reader wrote to me with this question, as a result of being required to select a gender-revealing option when registering on a journal's website. This option was separate from one asking for the professional title (Prof., Dr., Prof. Dr. etc.). It was not possible for this person, even after communicating with journal staff, to register without checking this box. In fact, the journal staff insisted that this information was essential because otherwise communication was too difficult and would involve the awkward use of "he/she" in letters, or perhaps embarrassing mistakes if the gender of the person wasn't clear from their name.

I can think of reasons why a woman would not want reviewers and editors to know her gender, but I can't think of a good reason why reviewers and editors would need to know the gender of an author or reviewer. It occurred to me that a journal might want to keep track of how many papers are published by male vs. female authors (or lead authors, in fields that make this distinction), but that is not the reason the journal gave to the reader who wrote to me about this issue. In that case, the concern was making embarrassing mistakes in using pronouns in correspondence or that someone would be offended if referred to as he/she instead of by the correct pronoun.

If a journal did want to keep track of gender data, those data could be separated from individual papers, so that editors and reviewers did not see it for any particular individual or paper. 

If you are writing to someone whose gender you do not know, why would you even use he/she or his/her in direct correspondence with them? This is a real question. Am I overlooking something?

In my role as editor and reviewer, I do not need it; 'you' is nice and direct, or I use the person's name or title. In correspondence about someone, I can use their title, a term such as "Reviewer 1" (if they are anonymous, you shouldn't use a pronoun anyway), or I refer indirectly to "the author/s", depending on context. The journal with which I am most closely involved is based in Europe, with close ties to Asia, North America, and Australia. It is more formal than many North American-based journals in its correspondence traditions, but even so, we do not need to know the gender of authors or reviewers.

Yes, I know about Frau Professor, Herr Professor etc., but those can be options for those who prefer those titles. There should not a requirement to inform a journal of your gender before you submit a paper or review an article.

Author Credit Check

Today in Scientopia, I open discussion of a grad student's question about how authorship is decided on a paper, and whether a research group member who did not contribute should be included as a co-author because it seems to be the advisor's philosophy to include all group members on publications.

How Many Times?

How many times can a paper be rejected before you give up submitting it to journals?

.. a reader wonders.

We need data. How many times have you (re)submitted a (rejected) manuscript before you gave up on publishing the paper, at least in a form that mostly resembled that in which it was submitted?

Do you give up after the first rejection, particularly if the rejection is quite emphatic, or do you keep going no matter what?

Most likely, the results will vary, even for a particular author, depending on how you feel about a particular paper or project. The number may also vary for individuals at different career stages.

And of course 'giving up' is a nebulous concept. A particular paper might be shelved, but parts of it may be resurrected in another paper. That might be giving up on the paper in its original form, but some key elements of the paper may yet live.

You decide how to define the various relevant terms: rejection, giving up, paper, you etc.

What's your typical number? your highest number? Zero, 1, 2, 3, more than 3?

I have no problem revising and resubmitting a rejected manuscript to another journal. I will typically revise and resubmit until a paper is accepted somewhere, although it is rare for this to take more than 2 submissions. That doesn't mean I wouldn't re-submit more times. I think my max resubmits has been 3.

The variability in interpretation of the question renders the following poll entirely useless, but let's not let that stop us from getting data:

How many times would you (re)submit a manuscript before giving up?
	0
	1
	2
	3
	more than 3
	I would never give up
pollcode.com free polls

To Author or not to Author?

Today in Scientopia, I discuss the question of what to do if you provide information (e.g., data) to a colleague for a publication but you don't agree with the colleague's interpretations and conclusions.

Wearing Two Hats: Editor & Reviewer

A few times since I have been a journal editor or guest editor, authors of rejected manuscripts have written angry e-mails railing against the injustice of the negative decision by me or by one of my fellow editors. I have written about various aspects of this before, but today I was thinking about one of the reasons that some rejected authors focus on as evidence that their article was misjudged/mishandled: the editor also acted as a reviewer.

In most cases, this particular reason should not be a cause for anger. In fact, in some cases, you may be lucky that an editor also acted as a reviewer.

Common reasons why an editor would also act as reviewer are: (1) it was impossible to get enough reviewers to commit to a review owing to (a) random bad luck/timing, (b) the topic of the paper was so highly specialized that the reviewer pool was small; or (2) one or more agreed reviewers didn't return a review and an editor decided not to hold the review process up any longer. In the case of having an insufficient number of reviews, an editor can make a decision based on the review(s) in hand, but can also decide to act as an additional reviewer.

How does this work? What are the implications of having a review by someone who acts as reviewer and editor?

I can only speak about my own experiences, but from what I've seen and done, this means that the editor provides more detailed and substantive comments on the article, rather than mostly providing context and guidance based on the reviews provided by others. Of course, some editors routinely act as a reviewer in this way as well, no matter how many reviews were received.

When my editor-colleagues and I act as reviewers in addition to our editorial roles, we inform the author that we are doing this and sign the review that is ours. It would make no sense to provide an anonymous review and then agree with it as editor. We also inform the author as to the reason for our "reviewing" the manuscript -- again, this is typically because we couldn't get a sufficient number of reviews in a reasonable amount of time.

Understandably, some authors may blame an editor for a rejection, so the fact that the editor was reviewer and ultimate decider makes it seem like the deck was stacked. In fact, from what I've seen in journals with which I have been associated, manuscripts that are reviewed by editors are not rejected at a higher rate than those in which there are multiple reviews by non-editors.

I doubt if editors act as reviewers to make sure that a particular paper is rejected. If an editor wanted to sink a paper, there are much more efficient ways to do this than to spend the extra time required to expand editorial comments into a review.

Speaking again from my own experience, editor-reviewers are likely to provide useful reviews because we know what constitutes a constructive review. And if you don't get a detailed, substantive review from an editor/reviewer, the manuscript probably didn't have much of a chance to be accepted anyway.

The most recent incident involving an angry almost-author was not directed at me, but at one of my hardest-working, most diligent, and most thorough fellow editors. If this particular editor takes the time to act as a reviewer and editor, the author is actually lucky to get the extra attention. The author is assured of a fair and thoughtful review from this editor.

The fact that it didn't turn out well for the author in this case is unfortunate, but I would advise authors to wait a little while and calm down before firing off a rude e-mail accusing an editor of incompetence because s/he was unable to find enough reviewers for a manuscript. It would be better to consider carefully other possible reasons for the rejection of the manuscript (and difficulty in finding reviewers) before focusing on the dual editor/reviewer role as the favored explanation for the rejection.

Read Me?

Some comments to yesterday's post reminded me of something I have been wondering:

If you are the (or a) major author on a paper submitted for review, how many of the references you cite have you read?

My adviser in graduate school told me that I should read every article that I cite. Minor co-authors can use their discretion about which ones to read/not read, but if you're the main author, you should read all cited works.

I think we can assume that 'read' means that you read more than the abstract but didn't necessarily spend hours poring over every word in every section, although you may well have done so, especially for a thesis.

So: For articles (or the moral equivalent) on which you are what could reasonably be considered a major author according to the norms of your field:

How many of the articles you cite do you read?
	100%
	75% or more but not every one
	50-75%
	somewhat less than 50%
	less than 25% but not zero
	zero or close to zero
pollcode.com free polls

Can You Rephrase That?

As I was reviewing a manuscript recently, I saw this sentence:

.." and existing models to explain this phenomenon are inadequate [3].

[3] FSP 2001"

So, is my model inadequate or did my 2001 paper state that existing models were inadequate.. or both?

In fact, I couldn't even tell from the context of the rest of the paragraph or manuscript, which was clearly an undigested chunk of thesis. I am not even sure the citation is appropriate in this case, at least not without significant rewriting of the statement and surrounding text.

This issue was easy to deal with in a short review comment.

In two other recent manuscripts under review, I saw something like this:

"It has been proposed that dolphins strongly prefer scones to croissants [FSP 1996]."

and "It is well known that cats who fall out of a tree from a height of at least 8 meters are likely to fracture their back left leg [FSP et al., 2009]."

Thanks for the citations, but I never proposed or stated either of those things, although I know at least one of them to be true.

Those problems were easy to deal with as well. I wrote that the citations were inappropriate, as I had never discussed dolphin pastry preference or cat/tree issues, at least not in print.

I am sure that I have mis-cited references before, too, especially in long papers with lots of references and lots of co-authors. We hope that such things will be caught in review, but in some cases they are not. As a reviewer, it's easy to catch mis-citations of work we know well (i.e., our own) but we aren't always familiar with every citation in every paper.

In another recent example, an author mis-cited (in my opinion) another author (not me). I hesitated to make a comment in my review, though, because the mis-cited author was a co-author of the manuscript under review. Shouldn't he be the one to remove the mis-citation? I was quite confident that the citation was inappropriate, so I made a gentle remark about this in my review, and the citation was not removed.

I like being cited, of course, but I don't like being mis-cited. It would bother me a lot if someone thought I really had proposed that dolphins prefer scones if I had, in fact, never said that. This is not just my being ethical, although, like most of my professorial readers, I have received intensive and largely irrelevant training in the responsible conduct of research. My objections mostly stem from my dislike of being misquoted or misrepresented.

Not to obsess about citation indices (too much), but despite the possible of loss of a (mis)citation, it is possible that fixing these errors in review might ultimately lead to more citations, not fewer. For example, if someone cited my work as having said something really stupid about dolphin/scone preferences, this might discourage future readers (and citations).

Does anyone cynically believe that the increased emphasis on citation indices increases the number of mis-citations, either because authors are more eager to cite their own papers (even if not entirely appropriate) or because reviewers are less likely to correct mis-citations of their own work?

Summarily Rejected (reprise)

A reader writes with a query about some manuscripts that were rejected without review; in one case the summary rejection was sort of understandable, but in the other, not at all. Summary rejection was a topic of a post last summer, but it is a perennial topic. In fact, I recently recommended rejection of a manuscript without review.

Why did I do it?

I don't do this often, but in this case the manuscript failed to cite or even mention (e.g., in a cover letter) a paper with a similar title published by the same authors in another journal last year, it was a matter of minutes to compare the two and see they were essentially the same, and, as if that weren't enough, it was a poorly written paper with conclusions unsupported by the inadequate dataset. I think that decision was quite reasonable.

Other situations involving rejection-without-review, like one described by my correspondent, are more difficult to understand, especially if the editor does not explain the basis for his/her decision to reject without review. Editors should explain the reason(s), even if it is as simple as "We can only publish 0.2% of the manuscripts we receive, we glanced at yours and weren't immediately gripped, end of story."

If you think a particular rejection-without-review is completely unwarranted given the interest-level of the paper and the fit with the journal, then it's worth trying to argue with the editor in a clear and calm way. Marshall your arguments for why your manuscript should at least be reviewed, and give it your best shot.

On Fecundity

A letter in the 3 June 2010 issue of Nature addresses "The role of mentorship in protégé performance". That sounds sort of interesting. I'd like to know ".. the extent to which protégés mimic their mentors' career choices and acquire their mentorship skills".

Those are two very different things, though. I can see how you could determine whether protégés follow the same career path as their advisers, but you need some assumptions to go from those data to interpretations about acquisition of mentorship skills (or lack thereof).

To address these issues, the authors (Malmgren et al.) used a large database that has tracked mathematicians and their academic "genealogy" for centuries. Despite the massive database going back to 1637, the authors analyzed only the years 1900-1960 because these data were deemed "most reliable" and this range allows the tracking of a few generations.

More recent data would be interesting to consider as well, if possible, particularly to see if the culture of academic math departments has changed. Or perhaps nothing changes the culture of math departments; the authors concluded that, despite the occurrence of some world wars etc. in the 20th century, there were "no systematic historical changes" evident in the database.

The research was designed to evaluate whether protégés "acquire the mentorship skills of their mentors". This is done by studying mentorship fecundity. I am not sure that fecundity necessarily relates to "mentorship skills" or "mentorship success", but that's how it was defined.

A brief aside: This may be a seminal paper, but I wish there were a different term that could be used than fecundity to represent the number of protégés a mentor trains. I also wish there were a better term than "protégé", although I know that technically the word is used appropriately in this paper. Advisee and mentee aren't great words either, but somehow they seem more professional to me. Or, if protégé must be used, can I be called a patron rather than a mentor?

Anyway, what we all want to know is:

Can you predict the fecundity of a mathematician?

Well, it's complicated, but you can write an equation! Also, you can make an analogy with parents (= mentors) and children (= protégés), such that a protégé's graduation date is their "birth date". I'm not sure why this new terminology was introduced, as the original concepts of mentor, protégé, and graduation date are not that complicated, but so it goes.

The results, which aren't actually explained in the paper, are "three significant correlations in mentorship fecundity", which I will condense into two:

1. Protégés of mentors with low fecundity (< 3 protégés) had more protégés than "expected".

2. The protégés of early-career mentors are themselves more fecund than "expected" and are more fecund than protégés who are advised by these same mentors later in their careers; i.e., fecundity might be influenced by the adviser's career stage.

The first interpretation did not surprise me, although one has to be clear about what the "expected" fecundity of protégés is before deciding if the result is greater or less than expected. The second one is more surprising, but whether it has any meaning depends, of course, on the methods and assumptions of the study.

It's a rather strange study and we can pick away at it, but is there anything to be learned from it about the influence of mentors on the later careers of their mentees? I doubt it, although I think the motivating question of the study is an interesting one, and perhaps impossible to study in a meaningful and quantitative way. To be relevant to modern mentorship, such a study would also have to track career paths that veer from math to engineering, or to any of various other interconnected disciplines.

And, because being a successful mentor doesn't have to mean that we clone ourselves and produce academic children who mimic our careers, perhaps there would need to be a different way of measuring the quality and success of mentorship than simply counting up the numbers of academic children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

High Impact Risk Assessment

It used to be the case that it was worth sending awesome manuscripts to the highest impact journals because, if they were going to reject your manuscript, they did so quickly and efficiently. I think those days are gone. This leads me to pose a question, based on the following not-so-hypothetical situation:

Imagine that you have a manuscript that you think is good enough for a very high-impact journal that we will refer to here only by the single-word name of Journal. If you want to be dramatic about it, imagine that you are an early-career academic (student, postdoc, assistant professor) with the dual need of rapid publication of your awesome research results and ideas in as prestigious a journal as possible.

You send the manuscript to Journal, and are lucky enough to have your manuscript reviewed rather than immediately rejected. Or, at least, you thought you were lucky, until you emerge, well over a year later, with a much reviewed and much revised manuscript that is ultimately rejected for not being "suitable" for Journal.

In the end, quite a few people reviewed the manuscript, and some of the reviews were very positive. One, however, was very negative. Perhaps not coincidentally, this review was from someone in the research group with the most to lose if your manuscript is published.

You think that you and your co-authors wrote the manuscript in a very polite and professional way, focusing on the important questions and discussing, not attacking, the work of other groups. You hoped that, if the manuscript were sent to possibly-not-objective reviewers, the editors would weigh any negative comments against this possible lack of objectivity, looking closely at the criticisms to determine if they were valid and substantive. The editors did not do this.

So there you are with a rejected manuscript after a very long time of hoping that you would ultimately survive the lengthy review process at Journal. Now you need to find a rapid way to publish your research results.

If rejection is rapid and the reviewers are ethical, the rejection can be a neutral experience. You are no worse off than when you started, although perhaps a bit dejected. If, however, the entire process leading up to rejection takes an extremely long time, then you may be worse off than when you started.

But: If publishing in Journal or another journal at a similar level is seen as very important -- or even essential -- to your career, what do you do with your next awesome paper?

Do you send it to Journal anyway despite your belief that the editor mishandled your previous manuscript, which spent an unconscionable time in review, because if you do happen to get a paper published in Journal, your career will benefit immensely? Perhaps you can convince yourself that your bad experience was a fluke. You were unlucky; maybe next time would be better. And you aren't guaranteed a better experience at another journal anyway. And you could always withdraw the manuscript and submit it elsewhere if things started to drag on too long.

Or do you decide that the risk of a lengthy and unfair review process isn't worth it and send your manuscript first to Very Good Journal, knowing that there is a better chance of having it published there, and published more rapidly? As long as the journal is well respected and in publication databases, people can find your paper.

So: Are the high impact journals so prestigious that it is worth sending manuscripts there, no matter how long the review and how incompetent the editorial process? Or are the risks of a long and fruitless review/editorial process too great, especially for early career scientists?

To What End?

It is time for the Evil Reviewer anecdote to which I alluded in a post last week.

Colleagues and I submitted a manuscript about our Transformative Science to Awesome Journal. We were pleased to make it to the review process in a journal that summarily rejects most submissions.

We waited. And waited.

The reviews came back. The identities of both reviewers were very clearly stated in the reviews. Famous Scientist 1 loved the paper. Famous Scientist 2 hated the paper. We were allowed to revise the paper.

We revised the paper, taking into account the more rational of Famous Scientist 2's comments and providing a rebuttal to those we considered unreasonable.

The paper was re-reviewed by the same reviewers. This took a long, long time. Nearly a year had gone by before we received the second round of reviews back.

Famous Scientist 1 loved the paper even more. Famous Scientist 2 hated the paper even more. The paper was rejected.

The primary author (not me) protested. In fact, he was enraged because FS2's comments were rather inflammatory and his most serious criticisms were demonstrably untrue. One comment was that the questions we addressed were not of interest, and the methods we used were flawed.

We argued against the criticisms and other comments that could be demonstrated to be untrue, using citations of recent papers about the ongoing, unresolved debate on the topic of our research. The editor agreed to send the manuscript to a third reviewer who would have access to the previous reviews and correspondence.

Reviewer 3 (whose identity is not known to us) could not believe that FS2 would deliberately shoot down the paper unless he had solid, scientific reasons to do so. The editor's decision to reject the paper (again) hinged in large part on this belief that FS2 was an "honorable" man.

In the meantime, FS2 was busy. He reproduced our results, addressing the same questions (which he had stated were of no interest to anyone) and using methods he had criticized as flawed in our work. He submitted his own manuscript on this same topic to another journal. This fact came to our attention by chance.

What to do?

My colleague, now even more enraged, was able to document the existence of this "new" manuscript, complete with date of submission, showing that at the very same time FS2 was taking an unusually long time with the review of our manuscript, he initiated research on the same topic, submitting his own manuscript soon after his second, savage review of our manuscript. My colleague wrote a long, detailed letter to the editor.

The issue remains unresolved, but it is unlikely to have a happy ending for anyone.

Fortunately, in the case of our beleaguered manuscript, none of us authors are at a career stage that hinges on having a high profile publication. We think the science in the manuscript deserves publication, and we think we deserve credit for the ideas and applications in the paper, but it doesn't really matter where the paper gets published.

It is difficult for me to understand the level of ego? enmity? selfishness? depravity? that would drive someone to say that our research was worthless, and then immediately turn around and work on that same topic using the same methods (and !surprise! get the same result). We have all lost respect for Famous Scientist 2.

This episode made me wonder:

Was it really worth it to him to do this just so that he could be "first" to publish these results?

What am I supposed to think about the other papers by this Famous Scientist? I don't doubt that much of his existing work represents his own ideas, although now I wonder if he has ever done something like this before. I have met him and I know him to be a very smart and creative scientist. He doesn't need to steal the work of others.

Do they have "responsible conduct in research" workshops at his institution? Does he attend them and feel gnawed by guilt at his unethical conduct or does he glaze over in boredom at the case studies of postdocs in biomedical labs, thinking that none of this relates to him?

How open should I be with other colleagues, students etc. about this situation? Assume that there is no reasonable possibility that we misinterpreted FS2's actions and that there is solid evidence for the scenario outlined here. Being silent about the situation might allow him to continue in his evil ways, potentially doing real harm, but openly accusing someone of dishonesty (however much documentation I may have in my files) sets up a situation of "Which person do you believe?". The answer might well be "Famous Scientist 2" (as we saw in the review process).

Is FS2 pleased with himself that he was apparently successful at getting our paper rejected, or does he feel any discomfort at all about his tactics? Or maybe it is all just a game to him, and he feels satisfaction that he has apparently "won" this round?

I don't know. In my career, I have seldom experienced anything so blatantly inappropriate associated with a manuscript review, so I prefer to think that this is a relatively rare situation. I regret that I can never again contemplate this Famous Scientist's work without a hostile suspicious feeling.

I hope that our paper will eventually be published and appreciated for its interesting science, primarily the work of my colleague, who deserves full credit for his creativity, hard work, and persistence.

Preferred People

Some journals ask authors for a list of possible reviewers, and some also ask for a list of reviewers to avoid. Are these lists useful to editors? Who should be on these lists? If someone is listed as a person who should not be asked for a review, can the editor still ask that person for a review?

In my experience, these lists are advisory only. They are suggestions of some people with the necessary expertise to review the manuscript. If the author has particular opinions about issues other than expertise (e.g., objectivity), these may also be a factor in deciding which individuals to list as preferred reviewers and which, if any, to request not be asked to review.

If authors list the obvious reviewers, I have no problem picking at least one from their list of suggested reviewers, maybe even two if that makes sense and I would have asked these people anyway. In most cases, though, I try to find at least one reviewer who is not listed. If you want to increase the chances that a certain expert person will be selected, a possibly good strategy is to leave that name off your list. Whether this strategy is good or not depends on the editor's editorial habits. You may well not be aware of what these are, so in fact probably the best strategy, if required to provide a list of suggestions, is to make a sincere list of expert people.

As an editor, if I don't think the list of suggested reviewers is reasonable, I may not select any from the list. Some authors seem to believe that the editor will or must pick from their list, and they stack the list with their close colleagues and friends in their own department. This is not a good strategy because (1) it probably won't work; and (2) why give the editor reason to question your judgment and ethics?

There are certain research topics that involve feuding research groups, and the authors in each group believe (in some cases with justification) that those in the other group(s) will not give an objective review. These groups always list those in the other(s) in the do-not-review column. If I know something about the debate and the people involved, I either respect this request or I don't, depending on the people and the situation. In most cases, however, I respect the list, but if I do happen to select a reviewer from the do-not-review request list, I remain alert (as always) for any possible problems with the review, including apparently unsupported negative criticisms or what seem to me to be overly harsh reviews of matters for debate (as opposed to problems with the data or observations).

Reviewers do not decide whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected; they make recommendations. The editor decides whether the reviews are reasonable and makes the decisions, so a negative review may not be fatal.

The manuscript management system with which I am most familiar makes it very clear what author preferences are in terms of reviewers to select or avoid. Not long ago, however, I was a guest editor for a journal that used a different system, and I found this other system difficult to navigate. At first I didn't even see that there was a place for authors to list their reviewer preferences; the list was rather hidden. Also, the journal had an inefficient system for selecting reviewers for manuscripts in guest-edited issues, so I was unable to select reviewers directly. For two different manuscripts, reviewers who were on the authors' lists of reviewers to avoid were in fact asked to review the manuscripts. Both returned very constructive, overall positive reviews in which each also made their identity obvious to the authors.

In one case, the authors were enraged that a reviewer had been selected against their recommendations. They complained to the main editor. They wrote a rather nasty letter to me. This was puzzling because the reviewer gave them a very useful and positive review; there was absolutely nothing in that review that indicated a problem with objectivity. Did they just dislike on principle the fact that this person had been allowed to give input? There was nothing time sensitive in their manuscript; nothing that needed to be kept secret from certain people in advance of publication; nothing even very controversial. In fact, it was a solid but rather prosaic paper that I spent a huge amount of time editing because the writing was so bad. The authors were in error to believe that just by listing the objectionable person on a list meant that the editors were bound to comply. I probably would have respected their wishes had I known them and had I ultimate control over reviewer selection, but I was not compelled to do so.

In the other case, the authors were pleased that they had gotten such a positive review from someone they feared would not be objective. They later started corresponding with the reviewer about their mutual research interests, and sent a nice thank you letter commending the editorial work of my colleagues and me.

Some journals ask for a reason why an individual is included on a to-be-avoided list of reviewers; some funding agencies request this information as well. If there is a reasonable explanation for why an individual should not review a manuscript, then an editor may be more inclined to comply with this request.

It can be difficult to explain some of these reasons, though. Unless you are an established researcher with a long track record of publishing, you probably don't want to write "This person hates all of my papers and always gives a negative review" because it raises the question of whether all of your papers are really bad. Something vague like "conflict of interest", however, is an all-purpose, vague-but-possibly-effective reason, should you be required to provide one.

So:

Are these lists useful to editors? Yes and no. Not really. Sort of.

Who should be on these lists? People with expertise. People who are not your close friends and colleagues.

If someone is listed as a person who should not be asked for a review, can the editor still ask that person for a review? Yes.

Let's Review

Why review manuscripts?

Reviewing can be a deeply unsatisfying experience if you end up mired in bad writing, spending a lot of time making detailed and insightful comments for an editor and authors who will ignore all of your criticisms and suggestions. Reviewing can also be a very positive experience in which you help improve the content and presentation of a possibly interesting and important (or at least useful) paper, learning something in the process, and accumulating the respect of authors and editors.

In the comments of yesterday's post, Dr. Doyenne provided a nice list of reasons why reviewing can be worthwhile for the reviewer. You should check out that list, but I have also included some of the items, in modified and supplemented form, here. Some of them are most applicable to new researchers, but can apply to reviewers at any career stage.

1. You learn a lot useful things about writing, science (or whatever), and publishing. You may even learn more about the technical aspects of manuscript writing, organizing, and publishing from a bad manuscript than from a good one, so don't assume that you've wasted your time just because the manuscript your reviewed was a travesty.

2. You will learn what is appropriate (or at least typical) in terms of length, level of detail, and subject matter for particular journals. You should get an idea about these things by reading published papers, but reviewing can help make all this more clear. For example, a common criticism of manuscripts submitted by recent PhD students is that a manuscript "reads too much like a thesis chapter". This isn't an issue if you write your thesis chapters as manuscripts, but in some cases the thesis contains much more detail than a manuscript should. Even though doctoral students surely read many published articles and should get some idea of what is an acceptable level of background material, somehow it is different when you are writing your own manuscript. If you start looking at manuscripts (even your own) through the eyes of a reviewer, you get better calibrated, saving yourself some criticism when you submit your own manuscripts.

Furthermore, some journals provide a checklist or series of questions for reviewers to fill out as part of the review. As an editor I find these lists rather useless, but they do provide some structure and continuity to a review. For the reviewer, these may give an idea for what kinds of things are considered important, in general or for a particular journal. You may also learn about this kind of thing from other means during the review process, and these may help you organize and target your own manuscripts better.

3. Once you have some experience reviewing, you can better deal with reviews of your own manuscripts, especially if there are (very) negative comments. If you are encouraged to resubmit a manuscript, you may have a better idea for how to craft the letter to the editor, explaining any reviewer comments you decided to ignore. If the editor knows you as a diligent and thoughtful reviewer, this opinion might help you in discussions with that editor about the fate of your own manuscripts.

4. If you are a reliable and thoughtful reviewer, editors may return the favor by trying to make the manuscript review process as efficient as possible for you. If you submit a lousy manuscript, the editors are unlikely to give you a break just because you are a good reviewer, but a grateful editor might feel inclined to handle your manuscript soon after the reviews come in rather than letting it languish in their inbox for a while.

5. In some fields, for some journals, editors are influential people and it can be a good thing to come to their attention as a bright and thoughtful person. This can be helpful not just with your own manuscript submissions, but just in general in terms of your visibility and professional standing in your field.

Note, however, that not everyone shares this view that editors can be important people in their fields. A few years ago, I was in a committee meeting during which one of my fellow committee members, an outspoken professor with strong opinions, tried to sink the nomination of a particular candidate for an award by noting that the candidate was an editor of a journal and this meant that the candidate was a "has-been" whose research career was so washed up that he was now an editor instead of a real researcher. He announced that most editors are "losers". There was silence in the room, so he said "I'm guessing that there are a lot of editors in this room and that you all now hate me." I said "I don't know about the others, but I'm an editor and I hate you." (In fact, I didn't hate him at all, but it felt good to say it.)

6. And finally, reviewing is considered Professional Service, a component of a faculty job at many institutions. You can list on your CV or faculty activity report or tenure dossier the journals for which you have done reviews. If editors are requesting reviews from you, this is a sign of professional visibility, and in many fields that is a good thing.

As I've written before, if you submit manuscripts, you should review manuscripts. If you review manuscripts, you should do a careful and constructive job, finding a good balance between sharing your expertise and not sharing any irritation or biases that are not appropriate to display in a review. If you are angry at an author because they gave you a bad review or you hate their former adviser or whatever, don't do the review.

I hope this is a semi-convincing list of the various reasons why reviewing can be useful for the reviewer beyond the content of the manuscript. These reasons will be cold comfort when you are deep into a ghastly manuscript, but realize that somewhere, somehow, someday, it is better to be a constructive and thorough reviewer than a mean and/or lazy reviewer.

Editorial Opinions (2)

It is completely understandable that some people who are new to reviewing manuscripts may lack confidence in their reviews and wonder whether they are commenting on the "right" things in the "right" way and in the "right" amount of detail. It might be comforting for these uncertain reviewers to see the comments of the other reviewers to gauge whether they are on track with their own review.

Consider, though, that the content and styles of reviews vary a lot from reviewer to reviewer because reviews should vary a lot. It isn't necessarily such a good thing, then, if your review comments correspond well with those of other reviewers. In fact, if you commented on completely different things that the other reviewer didn't consider or notice, this could make the reviews even more useful to the author(s) and editors.

As an editor, I try to select reviewers who will examine a manuscript from different points of view. Of course different reviewers should be able to detect any major flaws in a manuscript, but beyond that, I want different reviewers to comment on different aspects of a manuscript. Otherwise, why get more than one review?

Doing a review is not a test that you pass or fail as a reviewer. You are providing a service to your professional community by sharing your expertise.

What should a review contain?

Reviews should provide a thorough and constructive critique of the content of a manuscript, focusing in particular on the data, analysis, and/or ideas that form the basis of the work. You should consider whether you think the interpretations are justified, making it clear whether something is objectively "wrong" or whether you just don't like it.

I am not impressed when a reviewer says "This is wrong" about something in a manuscript but doesn't explain why and doesn't provide any suggestions about better alternatives or ways to get at a not-wrong result. If you want your review comments to be considered by the editor and the author, you need to back up any criticisms as much as possible. It also helps to be polite. Your comments will be taken more seriously if you write "I do not agree with the interpretation that A follows B, and suggest instead that..." as opposed "These people are seriously stupid if they think that A follows B."

Note: Some reviewers write their reviews in the active voice, directly addressing the authors as "you", as in "You should consider deleting that entire section that starts on page 17"; others refer indirectly to "the authors", as if the comments are addressed primarily to the editor, although of course the authors will read these comments. Perhaps the custom varies in different disciplines or different journals, or maybe it is just a reviewer personality thing.

In your review, if you are going to suggest the addition of a citation of one or more of your own papers, you should explain why this should be done. As a reviewer, I typically comment on citations of my own papers, or lack thereof, only if (1) a paper is mis-cited (i.e., my paper on purple kangaroos who live in lunar craters is cited after a statement noting that green rabbits live on Neptune); or (2) if there is an egregious omission (i.e., a statement that purple kangaroos live in lunar craters and then no citation of my work whatsoever, despite the fact that I have published extensively on this topic and no one else has).

Reviewers should, to some extent, consider the manuscript as a completed thing and only suggest the addition of new items (particularly those involving new research activities that may be costly in terms of money and time) if those items are absolutely essential to the manuscript; i.e., without them, the paper is not publishable. If you truly believe that a paper is not publishable based on its current content, of course you should state this in your review and back up this opinion with reasons, but if you just think the paper would be better with more data, make it clear that you are making a suggestion, not pointing out a fatal flaw.

This is where an editor can play an important role. In many cases when I see this type of do-more suggestions in reviews, I tell the author that I think this is an unreasonable suggestion and they do not need to address it in their revision. In other cases, I concur with a reviewer and tell the author that their paper is not publishable without this additional work; fortunately these cases are quite rare.

It is also very useful if a reviewer comments on technical aspects of a manuscript, particularly those issues related to clarity. Does the organization of the text make sense or does it interfere with your understanding of the major points of the paper? Is the paper too long/too short? If not, what is a better way to present the information?

I understand if a reviewer does not want to take the time to fix the writing problems in a manuscript, especially if there are a lot of problems. I don't like doing this as a reviewer and I find it annoying as an editor, especially if at least one of the co-authors is a native English speaker. I am not paid for my work as an editor, and co-authors who are able to fix their own writing problems should take the time to do so before submitting a manuscript and expecting others to clean it up. If none of the authors are native English speakers, of course I can and do help with writing issues, but I am always grateful when a reviewer takes the time to do this as well.

To those who lack confidence in their reviews: don't worry. Just do a careful job of reading and commenting on the manuscript, and there is a very good chance that your review will be helpful to the author(s) and editor.

Keep in mind that your main job is not to point out new and different research activities that the authors should have done or could do, and focus on what is in the manuscript. Provide both general and specific comments (including noting what you liked about the manuscript, if anything, not just what you didn't like), note any problems you find, make constructive suggestions, and don't take too long with your review. Also remember that by reviewing a manuscript you are doing a great service to all involved, and perhaps learning something interesting, so don't stress out, just dive in and write out your comments.

Editorial Opinion

There are many different ways that one can be involved in the editorial aspects of scholarly journals, and one's experience with the editorial universe can also vary considerably depending on whether a journal is published by a professional society or by a for-profit company.

Some variations on the wonderful world of editing a journal include:

1. being on an editorial board that essentially serves as a pool of reviewers (i.e., if you agree to be on the editorial board, you agree to review most manuscripts that are sent to you);

2. being on an editorial board that exists only as a list of names on a journal to show.. actually, I don't know what it shows. When I agreed to be on the EB for one particular journal, I assumed that I would actually do more than just have my name listed, but so far I haven't done anything. Does my Distinguished Name add luster to this journal, inspiring more people to read it? No way. The only people who would read this journal already have an intense interest in this very specific aspect of Science. Perhaps the in-name-only EB is like having a list of "fans" or "friends" of the journal.

3. being an associate editor for journals that have an extra editorial layer between the reviewers and the editor(s). I have been an AE at various times in the past. This type of editorial organization can be a bit inefficient, but this type of structure makes sense for some journals that have a somewhat broad scope. The editors need a pool of experts who are better qualified to select reviewers and provide their own comments on the manuscript and the reviews, but the editor or editors make the final decisions.

4. being the editor of a journal. Variations on this include: (a) being the one and only chief editor of a journal, and (b) being one of 2 or more other editors who are autonomous in their decision-making. And of course these editors can either be part of a system that has associate editors or an active editorial board, or may themselves be directly involved in selecting reviewers.

I have been or currently am involved in one or more of each of the above except 4a.

Somewhere in the blogosphere recently -- I am sorry I don't remember the blog, as I was roaming somewhat indiscriminately at the time -- I read someone's opinion that editors should be eliminated so that reviewers and authors could communicate more directly. I don't remember if the person holding this opinion has ever been an editor, but I'm inclined to think not.

As anyone who has received reviews for their own manuscripts likely knows, reviews vary a lot in terms of constructiveness, thoroughness, usefulness, and politeness. Part of an editor's job is to even out some of the roughness of the reviews, to provide more substance if the reviews lack it (in some cases by finding additional reviewers), to guide authors regarding revisions, and to reconcile disparate reviews or choose one review over another as being more instructive. In rare cases, editors rescind reviews or reviewer comments that are offensive. We keep the system running despite the vagaries of the reviewers (and authors).

Being an editor of a journal that covers a broad range of topics is difficult because you have to rely so much on the expertise of others, but it is also difficult editing a more specialized journal in which you know many of the authors and reviewers. In that situation, your own professional interactions with specific individuals are at stake and may be influenced by your editorial work.

In my work as an editor, I have found it essential to have a good online editing system that keeps track of reviewer data such as: time since last review for this journal (so I don't overload anyone with too many reviews), average time it takes a reviewer to submit a review, and information about the reviewing habits of an individual (e.g., do they routinely return thorough and useful reviews or are their reviews shallow and useless?). If someone is known to me in advance to be a not-so-great reviewer but is nevertheless someone who can provide an important point of view, I might try to get an additional reviewer for the manuscript in question.

I try to keep the system moving as rapidly as possibly, but of course I am somewhat at the mercy of the reviewers for this. Even so, when reviewing time becomes too prolonged, I have several contingency plans: (1) I have a small group of willing "emergency reviewers" who might be able to provide a rapid review; I try not to use this group if at all possible, but they have saved the day on a number of occasions; (2) I act as a reviewer myself, if I feel qualified to comment on the manuscript's topic; or (3) If I have one thorough review in hand, I will just use that and add my own comments (not as a reviewer, but just to make note of anything I think the one reviewer missed). In some cases a delinquent review is submitted in time to be of use during the revision process. So far I have not had any situations in which a late review contained information that would have changed my editorial decision on a manuscript if I had the review earlier, but perhaps I have just been lucky.

It has been important for me to find the right balance in terms of time I spend on editing tasks and the types of editing activities that I do. At the moment, I am quite content with my editing experiences both in terms of types and the time involved. Perhaps in the future I will want to branch out to other editorial experiences, for the challenge or for variety, but right now, things are good the way they are.

I have also served on a search committee that evaluated candidates to be editor of a journal, and this was kind of interesting because each candidate had a different combination of skills. But which was the right combination?

Some of the candidates were excellent scientists and would have added prestige to the journal, but it was clear (in some cases by their own admission) that they did not have the organizational skills or the time to do a good job. Other candidates seemed to have excellent organizational skills and editorial experience, but they were not well respected as scientists. We didn't want someone whose major qualifications were clerical skills. And other candidates had other liabilities (e.g., a candidate who had lots of editorial experience but who had been sanctioned for plagiarism). And what if someone is an excellent scientist and quite organized, but is a polarizing figure, well known for being involved in disputes that at times involved unprofessional behavior? Is that relevant to an individual's qualifications to be an editor? In fact, it probably is quite relevant.

But why be so picky? These people were interested in spending vast amounts of time for no/low pay as a professional service. Shouldn't a journal be happy just to find someone willing to do the "job"?

Fortunately, amazingly, we eventually found a person who was excellent in all respects for this particular position. I guess as long as there are people like that who have the energy, skills, and personality to succeed in the job, the system will continue to function.

I don't know what it's like in other fields, but as an editor of a journal in my field of the physical sciences, I have been impressed with the dedication and care that many reviewers take with their reviews. Therefore, despite the peer reviewing system's flaws -- and colleagues and I recently encountered a rather shocking example of one of these flaws (perhaps more on that some other time) -- my experience has shown that it is mostly a good system that involves a lot of conscientious reviewers and editors who give their time and share their expertise to make it work.

[I haven't decided yet about Monday's topic, but I have a few more things to say on the topic of being an Editor. Also, perhaps we can all share our most disturbing experiences with reviewers and editors next week, to balance out today's mostly-positive view of the peer review system. So save your stories of that sort for next week!]

Playing the Game (2)

Citation index considerations aside, have you made any publication decisions specifically because you wanted to increase your number of publications, on the cynical-but-perhaps-justified assumption that more papers = better?

For example:

1. Have you taken what probably should have been one paper and split it up into two or more shorter (but nevertheless distinct) papers for the sole purpose of increasing the total number of papers on your CV?

Figuring out how many papers should be written about the results of a particular research effort is a bit of an art, and in some cases more papers is the best decision. Sometimes you know in advance whether to write results up as one or more paper(s), and sometimes you don't know until you start writing.

My question, therefore, refers to cases in which the main motivation for splitting up a project into n>1 papers is to crank up the publication numbers.

2. Have you published what probably should have been one paper but that instead were two or more related papers that were not as distinctly separated in content as in the first scenario? (i.e., shingling)

This is also a fuzzy concept because sometimes you want to publish one short and zippy paper and then another, longer one in a more specialized journal. Is that shingling? Or what if you decide to publish some different-but-related papers because each involves different groups of co-authors and it makes logistical sense to keep the publications separate? Or maybe you want to publish a review paper that summarizes information in some of your other papers. There are many legitimate ways in which similar papers are published by the same author.

But then there are other cases. I recall one time when I brought a manuscript to review on an airplane. This was back in the Days of Paper, so I had a hard copy of the manuscript, and had turned to a page with a figure on it. I was traveling with some colleagues to a conference, and a colleague in a different-but-related field was sitting next to me. He was also reviewing a manuscript, and turned the document to a page with a figure on it. It was the exact same figure. Yes, I know that manuscripts in review are confidential, but there we were, sitting next to each other with two different manuscripts submitted to two different journals at the same time, and there was at least one thing in both manuscripts that was identical. So we started comparing. The two manuscripts had the same authors, the same figures using the same data for the same topic, and only a slightly different "spin" put on different aspects of the data. Those two manuscripts clearly represented shingling of a sort that was probably not OK. We informed the editors of the journals.

3. Have you ever submitted a paper before the project had advanced as far as it probably should have before writing up part of it as a manuscript; i.e., a premature manuscript that was probably publishable but that you knew would be much better if you worked on the research more? (but you didn't feel you could afford to wait longer because you needed publications on your CV sooner rather than later)

As with the other cases, this is not an obviously bad thing to do either. Maybe you would have waited longer to publish if you already had tenure, but there are also good aspects of publishing a preliminary paper to communicate initial results rather than waiting, perhaps years, to publish one big definitive paper. You'd want to be as confident as possible that the preliminary paper was sound, but if you feel you have something to say that is of interest, I think it can be very useful to publish early and often.

I know that that is "playing the game" and perhaps contributing to the mass proliferation of academic articles so that the flow of information is overwhelming and the very act of publishing a scholarly work is devalued etc. etc., but I think that if you have something interesting to say, it's a good thing if you write it up and get it out there.

Ideally, in the course of your career, you will publish some short papers and some longer, more detailed papers and some review papers and some papers in Awesome Journal X and some other papers in Specialized Journals Y and Z, and it will all even out. It's in the early stage of an academic career when every decision about what/where/how much to publish can seem so critical.

From what I've seen in the physical sciences, the "best" route to take at all stages of an academic career is to try for a balance between publishing a reasonable number (according to the norms of your specific field) of very good but perhaps not awesome papers in respected journals, and then some (but likely fewer) rather awesome paper(s). This is preferable to having lots of narrowly focused papers or only/mostly having "big idea" papers. Together, however, these different types of publications demonstrate the breadth and depth of your research.

When deciding how to divide up a big project into papers, I try to optimize publication quality, speed, and impact, as well as consider what is most fair to the most number of co-authors, particularly students, postdocs, and/or tenure-track colleagues. This not always a straightforward decision, of course, and sometimes I wonder if I would do just as well by consulting a Magic 8-Ball for advice.

Or maybe I should go back for yet more training in Responsible Research Conduct. Surely somewhere in all those case studies and PowerPoint presentations, there is a nifty formula for sorting all of this out easily. {note use of delusional font}

Playing the Game (1)

This spring, I have to refresh my ethics training, a ritual that is annoying mostly because the university makes it so extremely difficult for faculty and postdocs not involved in the biomedical sciences to find relevant ethics training opportunities. I am really not that interested in spending 2 days learning about research with human subjects, as my research involves no human subjects (other than grad students..).

And now all our graduate and undergraduate students who receive a salary or stipend from NSF must be trained in ethics.

Ethics training is important, but it is boring: don't plagiarize, don't fabricate data, don't falsify data. And the case studies are bizarre.

So let's forget about whether the postdoc should hide the data outliers that may or may not be due to a power fluctuation during extremely expensive analyses at a national lab even though the grad student involved in the research thinks that they should at least inform their PI, and consider some more interesting situations. For example, following on yesterday's citation theme:

Has your awareness of the importance of citation data affected your decisions about publishing?

That is, would you have made a different decision about anything related to publications (authorship, type/number/format of publications etc.) if your citation metrics were not being constantly tabulated for all the world to see?

When answering the first-order question, consider only whether you have ever considered the impact of a publication decision on your citation indices. Such considerations are not a priori unethical; it is possible that such considerations will result in your making a completely ethical and smart decision that helps your career. An example of that might be to send a manuscript to a journal that is indexed instead of to an edited volume being published as a not-indexed book. You do not change anything about the authorship or content of the paper; just the publication venue.

But now consider whether you have ever made a citation-fueled publication decision that might not have been entirely ethical but that could possibly be justified because "That's how the game is played." (others are doing it; if you don't play the game, you lose; etc.).

I don't think I've made any unethical decisions about research publications, but I definitely had citations in mind a couple of years ago when I decided to revise a much-cited technical document that was originally authored by someone else (now long retired) and that was in great need of an update. In that case, though, I wasn't thinking so much of my own citation index, but was instead intrigued by the idea of transferring citations from Journal 1 to Journal 2, in part because I am involved in the editing of Journal 2 and therefore have an interest in promoting the success of Journal 2. I hasten to add that I am paid nothing for my editorial work for Journal 2, so financial considerations were not involved. There were in fact valid scientific reasons for publishing the update in Journal 2, in addition to my personal affection for Journal 2. In the end, though, I published the update in Journal 1, but I admit that my original intentions were rather craven and driven in part by thoughts of citations.

That's the worst example I can think of for myself, but perhaps that is because I am a tenured mid-career professor. If I were on the tenure-track today, I am sure it would be difficult not to consider citation index issues when making publication decisions, although if it makes any of my early-career readers feel any better, I happen to know that at least some promotion & tenure committees at research universities are specifically instructed not to consider the h-index or other citation statistics when reviewing files for tenure and promotion.

to be continued..

Pub Pubs

When I was a graduate student, I wrote a few papers that only involved other graduate students; no faculty were involved in these papers, and therefore only students were authors and co-authors. We came up with the research ideas by talking with each other, did the work, wrote the manuscripts, revised them, and eventually saw them published.

Our various advisers were pleased that we did so, and some of us benefited from these adviserless publications in our job searches. In fact, one of my co-authors was specifically told by a professor at another university that these publications sans professors were impressive because they clearly demonstrated independence and initiative. And I was told during one job interview that these and other papers without my adviser showed that I had my own ideas.

In some fields and in some sub-disciplines, adviserless papers may be impossible or at least extremely rare. They are not so common in my field, actually, but my fellow grads and I were fortunate to have advisers who liked the fact that we pursued and published our own work. I was never supported by a grant from my adviser anyway, and I came up with my own idea for a PhD project, so I was rather unconstrained in terms of what I worked on.

At the time, I didn't think about whether these adviserless papers were unusual. Whether or not they were at the time, I think they are (even?) more rare now. I discussed this recently with one of these collaborators with whom I wrote a paper when we were both grad students. He thought it might be more rare today, and wondered why it might be more rare, if it even is. Our two main hypotheses are:

1. Science, even at the level of graduate research, has become more interdisciplinary and involves larger groups. Our grad collaboration groups were somewhat interdisciplinary (i.e., we all had different advisers), but not extremely so (i.e., we were working in related fields). Perhaps it is much less likely that a group of grad students can reasonably organize and conduct research as it is done today.

or:

2. The culture of graduate programs has changed. Just comparing grad programs with which my colleague and I are most familiar today with our old grad department, it is clear that there is a lot more active advising today. By active advising, I mean that many advisers are more closely involved in all stages of the research and therefore likely to have contributed ideas, writing, maybe even data (!) to a paper, and therefore will be a co-author. In my old grad department, it was a rather extreme example of sink-or-swim, live-or-die. We were pretty much just set loose, and those who survived were very independent (or learned to be). It was not a great system, but perhaps one outcome was that we produced some original work that did not involve our advisers.

Do I really have to say that I am not basing a major analysis of academic cultural trends on these anecdotes. Experience shows that I need to make this point, or some readers will be shocked shocked shocked at my unscientific musings. But that is merely what they are: musings.

And lest anyone think that we did these adviserless projects because we had no lives outside graduate school and therefore never left our labs and computers and had lots of time: that was only true for some of us. Others in these grad collaborations had families, hobbies, and other outside interests. My first grad collaboration was with an outstandingly smart, kind, and thoughtful older grad student who was married, worked 8-5, and was very into sports of all kinds. Although we had little in common other than our mutual scientific interests, we found ourselves frequently hanging out at lunchtime or in the afternoon, talking about Science, and eventually the ideas we kicked around turned into a paper in a high impact journal within our field.

There is one aspect of that anecdote that might be illuminating in terms of the general issue of whether/how grad collaborations occur, and it is related to the topic of (undergrad) student lounges discussed last week: we grad students had a place to hang out. We had abysmal office space, but there was a central area with a couch and a table and some chairs and a scary refrigerator, and a lot of Science was discussed in that place. There was also a subset of us who regularly went out for coffee and cookies together in the afternoon (in fact, I have published a paper with my most frequent afternoon cookie companion from grad school) or to a local pub (I have published with my pub companions as well, so you I guess you can say that I have pub pubs, and hence the strange title of this post). Because we had these other occasions at which Science was discussed at length, I don't think our grad lounge area was the key factor in nucleating grad collaborations. It was nevertheless a factor.

I would be happy if grad students in my department collaborated with each other and wrote papers. Some do, but it is rare. As an adviser paying a student from a grant, I would want to be aware of such independent student collaborations in case I needed to give any general advice about priorities or time in relation to the grant that was funding them, but overall I think that these grad collaborations should be encouraged. They are difficult things to foster because of course the whole point is that advisers not be involved, but perhaps we advisers who value such experiences can at least be supportive when such collaborations spontaneously generate.