When you start your career as a postgraduate student, it is normal that you start collecting your scientific results in a slightly unorganized way. However as time proceeds, some basic rules are needed to keep track of your work. Every scientist has to develop his own systems for keeping organized. Ideally, a minimal set of rules should be used consistently by group members, including staff members and students, to facilitate data exchange. Perhaps some aspects appear trivial, but in my contact with undergraduate and postgraduate students I have seen many shocking examples of (lack of) data management. Here I give an example of how to organize data using a Windows operating system, based on my own set of rules. Again it should be emphasized that this is just one example of an organizational structure, which is aimed at avoiding some of the most common mistakes.

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Recent years, I’m in an embarrassing situation of developing hi-tech products in an institute. Those so-called hi-tech products are also defined as market-driven products, whose developing method makes my group members and me puzzled. When some industrial partners call for cooperation to develop some hi-tech products for their markets. Immediately are our possible methods and results limited by all kinds of critical requirements, including various performances, appearance, cost, raw materials, production procedures, testing standards, and so on.
According to my experience of doing academic research, it’s efficient and useful of making my ideas come true by trying again and again with less limits. With the progress of research works, we may get what we want. Or even if we can not obtain the expected results, we might gain other surprising outcome. I name it as idea-driven research.
Just like a forest hunter, academic research of idea-driven is to walk all sorts of ways and obtain various results, including expected and unexpected results. It’s so wonderful to enjoy all possible outcomes. However, the above product development of market-driven is to walk on one or several limited ways and strive for one appointed result. I’m wondering which one is better for exploiting our potential capabilities.

Over the last 6 months I have been checking regularly the journals to see if anyone has published something in the direction of our research project. This morning, when I was just going online to check some references, the article hit me right between the eyes. There it was, my idea, the result looking exactly as I had expected it to be. Only the names of the authors are different; a leading US research group has apparently pursued the same concept and has already obtained the result we have been looking for during the last months.

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Ever-increasing competition for unfairly limited funding is backfiring. Territorial allocations and research topic fixing is hurting the creativity of researchers and specially demotivating the younger generation.

The title of this post may sound too provocative, but let me quote three dialogs, which I have witnessed in the last six months, to show how real this threat is. You may have heard such conversations as well.

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1. Prof. A tells visitor B: “Your research suggestion is indeed interesting and we can do it but prof. C may want to do it as well, and he is a good friend.”
2. Young senior D replies to junior E’s proposal of trying slightly different samples: “Those kind of samples are investigated by Prof. F and this is a very competitive field.”
3. Senior G, who is planning to submit a proposal, hears about the intention of Prof. H, who works on a similar subject and wants to submit a proposal as well. He decides to make sure their proposal titles are different before submission.

Search keywords
Very recently I installed a new plugin on this weblog.  A plugin is a standard way of extending the functionality of  WordPress software for self-hosted blogs. Our blog uses the WordPress package and is not hosted by the big providers as Blogger and WordPress, but is hosted by ourselves.

The new widget in the sidebar on the right, that has as title Search Keyword Cloud, is the result of  this new plugin. The new piece of software analyzes all visits that come to our site through search engines as Google or Bing.  This keyword analysis is possible because the search term is present in the headers of the http request to our server. The most frequent keywords are shown in the widget, not as a dull linear list, but as a cloud. The idea of a cloud, a web 2.0 concept,  is that viewers see quickly what the most important items are. The keyword search data are regularly reset to allow for changing search trends to show up more quickly.

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A list & a form
All of us have many ideas while reading a paper, discussing with supervisors, chatting with friends, having lunch or even sleeping. Those ideas are random and flash across our brains very fast. What will you do for those ideas? I catch the ideas and write them down to my “idea list” immediately. If possible, I’ll make the ideas to feasible actions, such as looking for more detailed references, imaging several possible experiments and characterization methods, etc. However, if there’s no specially strong intention to carry out the relative research, I’ll let them be in the “idea list”.
Sometimes, similar ideas might occur in my mind. I try to find something new and take them down. I check my “idea list” every one or two months. If I find that some ideas repeat more times and have more and more details, I’d like to draw out the related contents and design a working plan using a form. This form is named as working schedule, in which major works for everyday or everyweek will be drafted in a period of time, like one month.
And then, I’ll start my research work in different fields.

On my desk, right in front of the computer screen, lies a pile of paper. This pile gives me headaches, keeps me awake at night, and is a source of frustration on sunny weekends. It is the pile of unfinished manuscripts, gathered and carried along from earlier positions as a postdoc. Every paper has a story attached to it. Some papers are only in their first version, hardly more than a collection of raw data. Others have seen many revisions, have passed the eyes of multiple co-authors, and have got stuck just before submission, because something just is not quite right. There are papers of PhD students, co-workers, and of myself as leading author. Some contain data taken two years ago.

I am wondering how others are dealing with their unpublished data. Do you have a drawer full of brilliant work yet to be published? Or are you completely up to date with your results? For some people, it may be a reason for boasting: look at how many data I still have on the shelf! For a starting academic, unpublished data can be a life saver in times that you are starting a new lab and you need results to cover the gaps in your publication record. However, the pile also represents months of painstaking experiments, data analysis, and theory, lying there going to waste and most importantly – not being cited.

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I would like to start a discussion about the different customs that exist in research groups when it comes to the writing of articles. This is inspired by an experience I have had as a postdoc.

I consider my PhD time as the period when I was first exposed to writing scientifically. I think everything went typical: my first article was a real struggle, but afterwards things got easier. Looking back I consider my PhD time as the time I really learned to write in a structured way. And I have come to view this experience as essential in the development of a young scientist.

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To my disgust I recently discovered that scientist hire the services of commercial art bureau’s to have them make their figures. The resulting glossy, shining figures are supposed to increase the chances of acceptance in high-impact journals as Science and Nature. Nowadays with every submission to these journals the authors include a couple of – professionally made – illustrations, as suggestions to the editors to use them for the cover in case the article gets accepted.  What is next? A ghost writer who produces the text, but who is not part of the list of authors?

Kids like illustrations
To keep the attention of children books for kids are full of illustrations, and in many cases they represent animals. Adults are supposed to be able to digest heavier texts. The French quality newspaper Le Monde, founded in 1944, waited until 1984 to publish photographs.

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I suppose that your paper has been accepted for publication in a scientific  journal. You successfully rebutted all the comments of the referees. Great.

But now, what do you do next?  Just and wait and sit for you to become famous automatically? It depends on the quality of the paper. If this was just a middle-of-the-road paper spending time on its promotion seems a waste. But what if you are very proud and you are convinced this really is an important result? An interview on national tv would be great.

Target group
Whose attention would like to draw? Colleague scientists, science writers, or the public at large?

Editor is also eager
Nowadays journal editors also are eager to promote their best papers. So when you submit your paper, or after your paper is accepted, you are usually requested to summarize the importance of your paper in laymen terms. If the journal is part of a large publishing house they will have a website that highlights their best papers; some papers will be selected to feature in their rss-feed, and if they have a monthly glossy your paper might feature in there.

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