Managing Your Research Career

Ward Edwards
Wise Decisions, Inc. 

Who is in this room? 

  • Researchers
  • Teachers who must cope with academic schizophrenia about research 
  • Students and others who are not yet sure whether or not they are researchers
  • Administrators, business people, etc.

How can we recognize a researcher? 

  • A researcher changes the world, usually before age 40
  • To do that, researchers publish. 4 papers per year is the standard
  • A researcher studies a narrow topic. Topic switching is usually a bad idea
  • A researcher is part of a research group. Science is a social enterprise
  • A researcher has or gets research funding

Hints for graduate students 

  • Use the criteria on the previous slide when deciding to affiliate with an individual or group
  • Above all, use them when choosing a thesis committee Chair

Where is research done? 

In Academia: 

  • Teaching Departments may actively hamper research. The fundamental business of academia is to put fannies into paid-for seats
  • Great research universities can afford research and researchers because they bring prestige and more than pay for themselves
  • Institutes and Centers in major universities often facilitate research, rarely hamper it
Non-academic settings: 
  • Research is not done in most non-academic settings, e. g. research corporations
  • There are exceptions
How to tell whether a specific place encourages research 
  • Check the vitas of key post-Ph.D. members. If they publish 4 papers a year in good journals, the place encourages and facilitates research. If not, not

Publish or perish 

  • Publications count. Researchers and administrators do, and should, count publications
  • Most publications are trivial tree-wasters; they can never change the world
  • Should individual researchers strive for fewer, better publications? No
  • The personal-p theory of  publishing

What can one publish?

What should one publish? 

  • Anything and everything. That includes case reports, clinical reports, unconventional data analyses, etc.
  • But it is a poor idea to write texts, or too many theoretical papers, before tenure. One theoretical paper and a literature review or two are OK

Journal conventions are made to be broken 

  • ANYTHING interesting and important can be published
  • For unconventional paper
    • Be sure the paper is readable and of high quality
    • Include in the submission package a defense of whatever is unconventional
    • Also include a list of appropriate suggested referees

Papers MUST entertain and charm as well as inform 

  • If your (mother, father, sibling, significant other, teen-age son or daughter) can't understand your draft paper, or finds it boring, rewrite
  • If anyone finds the draft prolix, rewrite

Authorship issues 

  • You should care a lot about whether you are on a list of authors, but very little about your ordinal position on that list
  • A good and common policy: The person who drafts the paper is first author.  Others are listed in order of relative contribution
  • Footnotes asserting alphabetical order work poorly, since they are not included in citations. 

Professors to avoid 

  • A professor who insists on first authorship of papers that he/she did not draft is personally insecure and should be avoided
  • A professor who insists on being an author of the journal version of his/her student's Ph.D. thesis has a moral disease and should be ostracized and shunned

The crucial hurdle: the first post-PhD job 

  • The first post-PhD job MUST allow you to publish 4 papers a year
  • It should facilitate your pursuit of research funding
  • Teaching, consulting, etc. are OK, but only if they don't prevent you from publishing

How to get a good first post-PhD job 

  • Publish now! The 4 papers/yr clock started ticking when you entered graduate school
  • Identify your research field. Make it narrow and deep. You can broaden it later
  • Pick a research mentor:
    • a researcher, by criteria specified here
    • funded
    • a prominent member of a topic-specific research community 
  • Go to meetings. Give papers. Correspond. Get acquainted with the gurus and greybeards of your field. Become known as a member of it
  • Start now to prepare your first post-PhD research proposal. If possible, take a draft to all job interviews. Doing so will both label you unusual and facilitate and structure discussion
  • Don't hesitate to take a postdoctoral fellowship or other job not on the tenure ladder, if it will facilitate research and publication

For professional teachers who must publish in order to get tenure 

  • Try to find a research-friendly environment (e. g. an Institute or Center) in your institution. Affiliate with the well-funded, productive group closest to your interests. Accept any role in it that justifies authorship
  • Be prepared to be tired and overworked; you must excel in two demanding full-time activities.

Is this focus on research socially justifiable?  YES! 

  • Research-based ideas change the world
  • The model is Lamarckian, not Darwinian
    • Researcher choice of topic controls WHAT new ideas emerge. Better than random mutation
    • Researchers who have produced an important new idea can and must use it to design a product, service, or institution that meets social needs. This is better than brutal natural selection