Research culture shock

A couple of years ago, when the Ecological Society of America meeting was in Austin, a few students from my institution went to give posters. One of the women showed up in a dress and four or five inch heels, and one of the men showed up in a jacket and tie. This at a meeting where sandals are typical footgear.

The students did not understand the culture of the ecology meeting.

It might come as a surprise to beginning students that there is a distinct culture around academic research. And just like someone moving to a new country, there can be culture shock, and new students can have a hard time adjusting to the culture of research.

Here is my attempt to identify some of the key elements of research culture.

1. Science is not utopia.

I can’t say it any better than Dr. Rubidium did here.

There are people that believe science is above all the bullshit. Because science is facts and reason and shit, so scientists are totally above bullshit of any kind. Scientists have achieved a Utopian State Of Bliss which non-scientists can only dream of.

To those science-as-utopia people, I say this:

Come join us in the real world.

When I asked on Twitter about what surprised them about research, a very common answer was that people were surprised by how big the egos are, and how much that drove science.

Students, this means that some of the crap you hope might not be an issue any more... can still be an issue.

2. There are hierarchies.

One example of hierarchy was in titles. It grates someone with a doctorate to be called “Mister” or “Miss.” Someone with a Ph.D. is referred to as “Doctor” if you’re using titles.

There are hierarchies of all sorts in academia. Some of them are formalized (academic rank: undergrad, grad, post-doc...), some are about individuals (tenured over non-tenured faculty), some are about institutions (university “tiers”), and many are informal. It pays to understand what the ladder is is and what rung you are on, even if your particular lab or institution doesn’t play the game of trying to climb the ladder.

3. Work ethic

Researchers have a strong work ethic. Being in the lab on the evening or the weekend is not seen as unusual in the slightest. Some labs essentially demand it. Personally, I don’t think such labs are healthy, but they do exemplify the attitude that anyone who wants to do research should not hesitate to come in at hours outside of 9 am to 5 pm, Mondays to Fridays, at least occasionally.

If you think being asked to come in on an evening or weekend is an unreasonable demand, always, you’re not going to be happy in research.

4. Reading the literature

Part of that work ethic that I just mentioned is an expectation of reading original journal articles. I think many beginning students expect that research is only about getting, and maybe analyzing, the data. It isn’t. Reading is part of the job. And not just the research in your field; there’s an expectation that you’ll be somewhat aware of what’s coming out in the glamour magazines, and that you will keep pace with science news generally.

Subscribe to the table of content alerts for the journals in your field.

5. Criticism is the norm

A lot of beginning students have a very hard time getting criticism. Sometimes, the reaction is that professors are just mean. It takes a while to realize that the criticism can be coming out a very pure desire for the work to be good, not just to tear down students.

Related to point #4 above, you’re not only expected to read papers, you’re expected not only to read, but to dissect papers. Pull them apart. What makes them tick. And what are the weaknesses? You not only have to be ready to take criticism, you have to be willing to give it, too.

6. Labs work in many ways, but many are tight knit

For many (but by no means all), being part of a lab is almost like being part of your own small tribe, or even a second family. It can be a very intense working environment, and it can, at its best, draw people together in a good, powerful way.

Maybe it’s no accident that academics trace lineages much like people trace their family trees.

7. Financial considerations

Beginning students have only the haziest ideas of the cash flow in academia. A very common question when I talk about publication and I show one of my papers is, “How much of that $30 for the paper do you get?’ Well, none.

Researchers fret about money. A lot. I think some researchers try to keep those issues away from students, but it bleeds out. I sometimes think students might be aware of money, but don’t learn how to manage money in research in any practical fashion.

Corrosive culture?

If there is something that is common to all of these elements of research culture, it is that all of them have to potential to be malicious when taken to their extremes. When I was giving a talk about this, I worried that I was being too negative. But the important thing to realize is that a culture need not lead to its worst behaviours.

A culture of a strong work ethic does not necessarily mean overwork.

A culture of criticism does not automatically lead to nastiness.

Being aware of the culture gives people a chance to recognize what might be places where to guard against falling victim to the more negative parts of that culture.

External links

Science Online Oceans science geek fashion show

Photos from here and by niznoz on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for first half of November 2013

Deevy Bishop talks about psychology’s self-publishing, including going it alone on Kindle.

Erin Podolak writes about the irrelevance of Carl Sagan, a familiar topic to me.

Texas may be nearing the end of textbook battles over evolution

The Dallas Observer has an excellent, lengthy feature about the ongoing tussle about the teaching of evolution (and a few other subjects besides) in Texas. There are useful profiles of several players that I hadn’t seen before, such Ray Bohlin. Bohlin, a creationist, has published proper scientific papers on biology, but stopped.

Faith in a theory for which there is no experiment turned out to be a dead end.

And therein lies the problem with all efforts to tie evolutionary biology to creationism.

Recommended reading.

External links

Creationists' Last Stand at the State Board of Education

Naming a new university

Five names for the new university that mine will morph into have gotten enough suggestions to warrant serious consideration from the University of Texas system. Here’s my take on them.

The acronym kills this idea. “UTI” already has an unpleasant meaning: “urinary tract infection.” Eeeewwwww. No, no, no, no.

Even if you go “UTIN,” it makes you think of a cheap, malleable metal that you can food in.

How did this suggestion make it onto a list of suggested names? Not enough people with any sort of biological background, and probably not many women.

“University of Texas International” also has problems shared by our next two candidates.

“...of the Americas” was featured in the background of the original announcement for the formation of the new university. I suspect that there is someone in the University of Texas System, maybe the chancellor, who is very fond of this idea and just won’t let it go.

“Las Americas” is the same idea, just running further with the notion that we are somehow going to be a bilingual university.

All three of these suffer from the same problem: it is disconnected from the community that the university serves.

The University of Texas System wants the new university to be big and ambitious. Hence, we have three names that try to suggest that this is an international institution. But 93% of the students enrolled at UTPA come from the four counties of the Rio Grande Valley (page 11 here). That’s where our students come from.

I suspect the stats for University of Texas Brownsville are similar, and that this will probably also be true of the new university.

We’re not an international university. We’re not even a state university. We’re a regional university. That is not going to shift anytime soon, grandiose plans notwithstanding.

A new university has to connect with the supporting, surrounding community. “International,” “of the Americas,” and “Las Americas" send a signal to the local community: “This is not for you.”

“University of Texas South” sounds a little grammatically dodgy, but that is not my main problem with it. I’ve introduced people to my university for over a decade. I know what the reaction of people is when I tell them “Southern Texas.”

“San Antonio?”

“No, near the coast and further south.”

“Corpus Christi?”

People who hear “University of Texas South” will think of the wrong place. I guarantee you that.

To make matters worse, like the three names above, it doesn’t connect with the community. People here don’t refer to this region as “South Texas.” This is what people from outside the region call it.

To make matters still worse, this name would be confused with South Texas College, a completely separate institution.

Several people have suggested “The University of Southern Texas.” This sounds smoother, but the University of Texas System won’t allow it. The name has to begin with “University of Texas.”And people would still confuse it with South Texas College.

I wish I had blogged about this so I could prove what I am about to write: I have been saying for years that my university, The University of Texas-Pan American, should be renamed “University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley.”

People living in this area call it “The Valley” all the time. The name is more specific than “South.” And the acronym, UTRGV, has assonance: the repeated long “E” vowel sound in “T,” “G,” and “V.”

A poll on a local newspaper site suggests this name is the most popular among residents by a long, long ways.

I hope that the the UT System will catch up with what I’ve said all along!

Meanwhile, in other good news, $196 million has been approved for infrastructure on the new university. This including $70 for a science building. That’s great, because we are full here.

External links

What’s in a name?
Regents approve PUF funding for new university, medical school in South Texas

Save the Day essays #3: Family

For a show about a lone wanderer through space and time, ironically, Doctor Who has been at its most successful when it’s been about family.

It’s easy to forget that the very first companion in the TARDIS was Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter.

Since then, there have been a lot of crews in the TARDIS, and the most memorable ones have been the ones that felt most like a family.

The second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria had the sort of close-knit feel of a family, which was, somewhat amazingly, retained with Zoe joined. (This was no doubt due partly to the good working relationship between actors Frazier Hines and Pat Troughton.)

During the third Doctor’s exile on Earth, the U.N.I.T. team – Jo, the Brigadier, Benton, and Yates – was often described as a family. Even the villain, the impeccable Roger Delgado’s Master, became part of the family.

That sense of family weakened for a long while. The fifth Doctor had a little TARDIS crew for a while, but it always felt more thrown together and lacked a certain closeness in the scripts.

When the series returned in 2005, it was a family drama in more ways that one. “Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been slapped by someone’s mother.” Mothers and daughters and boyfriends and fathers and all those relationships were there in full force.

It may have been a dysfunctional family, but Rose and Jackie and Mickey and Captain Jack and Sarah Jane – how wonderful, Sarah Jane again, better than ever! – gave the Doctor an odd new family. I think that one one of the elements that contributed to the huge success of the series’ return.

Amy and Rory? Family again. And didn’t the dynamic get even more interesting when Rory’s dad got added to the mix?

While the Doctor and companion as pals and partners-in-crime can work (the seventh Doctor and Ace, the eleventh Doctor and Clara), the times the show has had the tight-knit, frequently recurring cast have been some of my favourites.

Related posts

Save The Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery

Watch how “might” vanishes

Hey, I Fucking Love Science, let me fix this photo you posted on Facebook:

To their credit, there was a link next to the photo. But when you click the link, it goes not to the primary article, but to another I Fucking Love Science site, which claims:

Earlier this year, it was discovered that Jupiter can form diamonds in its atmosphere.

If you click that link, you get a secondary news article from Nature with a sub-heading that reads (my emphasis):

Lightning storms create carbon soot that might be compressed into diamonds as it falls through the atmosphere.

“Might.” As in “maybe.” As in a possibility. Not definite. Not that you would get that from I Fucking Love Science, which presents it as a fact.

The photo includes Neptune as a diamond weather spot, but the Nature article doesn’t (my emphasis again):

Forget diamonds in the sky — it may actually be raining diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter, according to two planetary scientists.

The Nature news article provides reasons to rule out Neptune for diamonds:

Luca Ghiringhelli, a physicist at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, Germany, is also sceptical of the pair's conclusions. His own previous research showed that the concentration of carbon is not high enough in Uranus and Neptune — which are several times richer in carbon than Jupiter and Saturn — to grow diamond from the 'ground up', building the crystals atom by atom.

IFLS, you’re increasingly becoming part of the problem, not the solution. It takes as much time to make a picture that’s right as one that’s wrong. Why not make it right?

Tuesday Crustie: It’s a fact!

From Fake Science.

Academic search team-up

This is big news for academics.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Google Scholar. It has transformed how I do research. After Google Reader shut down (I still mourn it) a lot of academics were worried that Scholar might be next on the chopping block.

That fear seems to be over with a major, major announcement that Scholar is partnering with one of, if not the, other heavy hitter in the academic search market, Web of Knowledge. And, as the article notes, this could be just the beginning. Other scientific databases might start to play nice.

Not long ago, David SHotten wrote:

In this open-access age, it is a scandal that reference lists from journal articles — core elements of scholarly communication that permit the attribution of credit and integrate our independent research endeavours — are not readily and freely available for use by all scholars.

This announcement by two private companies could either mark the start of greater availability to scientific literature than ever before, or it could mark the start of greater efforts to make citations into a product to be controlled and sold. I am hoping it will be the former, since you can’t this sort of complex data integrated in a way that is useful to users without considerable effort. Making the citation data open might be a logical step for the companies, and maybe their product would move more towards thinks like analysis tools.

Related posts

Research Google
PubMed vs. Google Scholar
Google Scholar profiles
Finding self-published papers
The terrifying death of Google Reader

External links

Thomson Reuters-Google Scholar Linkage Offers Big Win for STM Users and Publishers
Publishing: Open citations

Picture from here.

SfN 2013 bingo!

I’ve done these before, but this one was easy. Thank you, Twitter hashtag game.

Additional, 11 November 2013: Here’s the story behind row 1, column 4, as told by the inimitable Doctor Becca.

Related posts

Neuroethology bingo

Tuesday Crustie: Rub-a-dub-dub

Patrick Stewart in a tub. He tweeted this for Hallowe’en, but appropriate for any occasion, I reckon.

Breaking Bio design chat

Earlier this year, I chatted with Morgan from Breaking Bio during Science Online 2013. That interview never made it to air, because it was a little too short.

I contacted Morgan and pleaded with them to let me have another shot at it. They were good enough to indulge me, so I sat down with the Breaking Bio boys again to do a little chitting and chatting (plus a substantial rant in the middle) about poster design.


I need to work on avoiding that slow blink.

The Captain Canuck post I mention in the beginning will be up this week!

External links


Episode 48: Let anarchy reign with Zen Faulkes!

Breaking Bio YouTube channel
Captain Canuck
Captain Canuck YouTube channel

Comments for second half of October 2013

Reaction Norm has a surprising figure about the age of directors at the NIH. They’re old.

If you ever want to go to Science Online, you should try to figure out what you want to get out of the experience, as Kelly Hillis suggests. Then tell Karyn Traphagen (karyn AT scienceonline DOT com) what your answer is.

Ethan Perlstein does some analysis on science crowdfunding across four crowdfunding platforms.

DrugMonkey asks who has busy posters, and who’s neglected, in the poster sessions at conferences.

Small Pond Science has a series of observations from his travels around universities that are interesting.

Down with Time think nobody reads his blog. Prove him wrong!

This blog makes a cameo on a post about self-publishing science. at the Neuroconscience blog.

Save the Day essays #2: Recovery

I went to a Doctor Who convention in 1986. John Nathan-Turner, then producer of the show, was asked about efforts to recover the old missing stories. He said something like, “They may have dried up, and there may be no more to find.”

He was wrong.

We got back most of “The Ice Warriors” in 1988. We got back all of the epic “Tomb of the Cybermen” in 1991. We got back an episode of “Galaxy 4” in 2011, to name a few. But there is always this fear that the next recovered episode from the 1960s could be the last to be recovered.

If, not too long ago, you had told me that during the fiftieth anniversary year of Doctor Who, that there would be nine episodes recovered (completing one story and almost completing another)...

And that one set of those (“The Web of Fear”) would be a story featuring the Great Intelligence, a villain that had been brought back to the current show just months before (“The Snowmen” Christmas special from 2012, “The Bells of St. John,” “The Name of the Doctor”)...

And that I’d be be able to download them online and watch them mere days after their discovery had been announced...

I would have brushed that off as the most wishful of wishful thinking. It sounds too improbable, too good to be true, to have so many coincidences align.

The moral of the story is that sometimes, the improbable happens. And it can be wonderful.

Tuesday Crustie: Nibbles

Yes, there are crustaceans in this picture. Enlarge and look closely at the second and third toes from the left...

Photo by Michela Simoncini on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Save The Day essays #1: Restoration

My “Save the Day” essays will be a series celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, which is less than a month away.

I didn’t start watching Doctor Who at the beginning. I was part of the early wave of Doctor Who fandom in North America. Like a fair number of people, I’d started watching Doctor Who in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the fourth Doctor series were syndicated to public television in the United States.

I learned many of the old Doctor Who stories were lost. Many original tapes had been wiped, because the BBC considered television ephemeral. Most of the old black and white stories from the 1960s existed because someone had pointed a 16 mm camera at a TV screen and filmed episodes for overseas sales.

I was excited when I learned that our nearby American public television station would be showing all the existing stories from the show’s beginning. But at first, I was disappointed. So many of these stories felt so bad to me.

It wasn’t until years later when I started seeing some of the DVDs that I realized my judgment had bee compromised. I wasn’t just reacting to the show; I was reacting to the low quality of the images. What I saw on public television were unrestored 16 mm prints, with scratches on the frames and hiss on the audio.

Seeing the restored versions on DVD were a revelation. This comparison of an original and restored frame (from Seeds of Death, a second Doctor story) shows how huge the difference could be. Here’s the sort of image I saw broadcast:

And here’s the DVD.

The difference is stunning. Episodes that looked cheap and tired suddenly looked professional and even ambitious.

I realized that I was responding to the scratches on the film far more than I’d even thought. I hadn’t been judging the old stories on their own merit, but I’d been heavily influenced by the presentation of them.

I had a similar reaction when I started to watch DVDs of old Godzilla movies. Like Doctor Who, I’d seen the movies on low quality prints that had scratches and crummy reproduction. I love them, but they seemed cheap. Seeing them remastered on DVD from original negatives, and with subtitles instead of dubbing, completely changed my thinking about the movies. They looked glorious. What I thought was a bad production was actually bad reproduction.

It makes me wonder how many things I rate lower than they deserve because of incidental flaws in how they are presented.

External links

Doctor Who Restoration Team

How common is “co-first” authorship?

Deciphering authorship of scientific papers is an esoteric task. Something that raises red flags for those in the tribe of science (like 300 publications with 40 as last author) means little to anyone on the outside. “Why do you mention last author? Does it matter?”

In many fields, it is viewed as good to be the first author. But only one person can be first author, which leads to the practice of some labs having “co-first” authorship. This is usually designated by a footnote to the effect that “authors Smith and Jones contributed equally to this work.”

In one of my classes, I was discussing the practice of co-authorship, and I commented that this was rare. As it happened, later that day I had occasion to review a couple of sets of CVs, from different fields of biology. One set of CVs fell on the “basic organismal biology” side, and the other set tilted much more heavily towards the “biomedical” side.

Only 5% of the organismal biologist listed papers with “equal contributions,” compared to 45% of the biomedical scientists. Note that this isn’t percent of publications, but the percent of scientists with one or more papers with “co-first” papers. This surprised me; I didn’t think it would be that high.

I wonder if this reflects a real difference in the two fields. I think it might be. Biomedical research, I suspect, is a field where there is more money, more competition, and more team members. I think this creates an incentive for people to try to scrape together any additional credit, no matter how tiny. I have yet to meet anyone who cares about “equal contribution” footnotes when reviewing publication records.

I dislike co-first authorship, but it’s just a symptom of another antiquated part of scientific publishing that dates back to the days of small numbers of scientists. Trying to figure out who did what under current authorship practices is like trying to slice bread with a club: messy.

Related posts

Letter in Science!

External links

Co-first Authorship is a lie and a sham and an embarrassment to our profession (DrugMonkey has written extensively on co-first authorship; search his blog for much more.)

That’s the best evidence for a STEM shorage?

The National Math and Science Initiative blog claims there is a STEM crisis. We just aren’t producing enough skilled STEM graduates, it claims. The article advances three pieces of evidence for a "STEM shortage." All are problematic.

Less than 40% of students who start out as STEM majors in college receive a STEM degree.

The number of students who leave does not address whether the number of students who remain are adequate to meet employment needs. A lot of students start off university wanting to be physicians and health professionals. Not all of them make it. That doesn’t automatically mean we’re failing in education or that there is a shortfall of qualified individuals. It might mean it is a stringent, selective, difficult profession.

Nearly half of the Army Corps of Engineers are eligible for retirement.

First, it is risky to extrapolate from a single subset of one STEM discipline to all disciplines, with all degrees. Second, "eligible" to retire is not the same as "planning" to retire. Shortfalls due to retirement were routinely predicted for academia in the late 1980s, which never materialized.

More than half of the fastest growing jobs in the nation are in STEM fields.

That demand is growing fast does not in and of itself tell you about whether there is adequate supply. Also, those “growing jobs” are likely a widely varied mix, with different skill sets and qualifications. As Biochem Belle noted, it doesn’t make much sense when talking about a STEM shortfall to lump jobs that need a bachelor’s in computing with those that need a doctorate in chemistry, and call them all “STEM jobs.” And probably most of those fast growing jobs are computing and a little engineering.

External links

Once more, with feeling: computer science job growth dwarfs all others

Tuesday Crustie: Venom

Bonus Tuesday Crustie! Because breaking crustacean news!

I’ve featured remipedes before, because they are cool in many ways. They are cave-dwellers, and probably the closest relative to insects.

This remipede, Speleonectes tulumensis, is in the news today because it has become the first crustacean discovered to have venom. Check the links below for great summaries!

Related posts

Tuesday Crustie: Insect cousin

External links

First venomous crustacean discovered – Nature News
Of 70,000 Crustacean Species, Here’s The First Venomous One – Not Exactly Rocket Science
The first venomous crustacean is found – Why Evolution is True

Picture from here.

Tuesday Crustie: Better than Darjeeling or Earl Grey

From here. Hat tip to Craig McLain and Andrew Thaler

Do you know what your professor does?

Last week, I gave a talk on research culture, about which I shall write more later. I wanted was feedback from people who work with or hire starting research students, especially at the undergraduate stage. I took to Twitter, and was grateful for the feedback on this question (and several others). I asked, “What do students do right, or wrong, when they first contact you about research opportunities?”

The most common answer, by a long, long, looooooong ways was, “I want students to have some idea of the research I do.” To give few examples:

Wrong = have no idea what my lab does.

– OdysseyBlog

I want someone who knows why they want to work in my lab.

– Elena Bennett

Read some lab pubs before talking to PI.

– Laura Williams

Wrong: they don't know that my lab is computational. Right: they have checked some of my publications.

– Gabo MH

Do show up in my office having read a few of my publication abstracts (on my web site) with a specific possible interest.

– Christopher J. Cramer

Show that you have actually looked at my website and read some papers, and explain what skills you have that are aligned.

– Lorena Barba

Prospective student claimed interest in my lab, then asked what I study & if I have pubs. Informed her about Pubmed.

– Emilie Reas

This reflects a larger aspect of research culture: the expectation that people who want to join in research will read the literature. Of course, new people may not know what “the literature is,” thinking we mean Dickens, Chaucer, Homer, and the like. But we can explain that to them.

That said, back at a mentoring workshop I was participating in a while ago, when I told students that they should have an idea of what professors do, one student spoke up. “Isn’t it egotistical for you to say you’ll only work with students who will work on projects interesting to you?” I can’t remember my answer. I’m still struggling with this question. Research opportunities on any given campus are finite, and I do wonder how many people get turned away who might be able to make good contributions.

Photo by Thompson Rivers on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.