Fer every PhD student, there comes a moment that she is “upgraded.” At this moment, she turns from a premature trainee to a reliable coworker for her group or in her institute. In my opinion, this moment in not necessarily the promotion day. It can happen much earlier or much later dependent on the group culture, the country, the age differences, or the research-type.

Unlike the PhD-promotion time, which is decided by the supervisor after considering a balance between scientific qualifications and PhD contract years, PhD upgradation cannot be individually decided by anyone. It is about being trusted by the close community of the researcher: the other group members, the institute staff, and all other group-leaders.

When talking about the Survival Guide, I have heard from several people some strikingly similar opinions. The first and the second sentences are usually something like “I agree with [the author: Ad]…” or “I checked it for preparing one of my presentations. It was rather helfpul…”. By the third sentence, many readers whom I talked to cannot avoid expressing their surprise about the style of the book. Here are some examples:”It is written in a very strange way.” “I did not like the [imperative] tone.” “Ad must be a tough guy.”

One writes a scientific article when she thinks she has enough new material in which a sizable fraction of the community is interested. In the time of writing, any article should be written with a lot of enthusiasm, as if it is going to appear on the cover of the most cited journal in the field. But sooner or later, one should decide about the submission destination.

Choosing the journal where you want to publish your article is a very nontrivial task. Frankly speaking, my mind gets occupied with this question, from a very early stage. It may be partly due to my lack of experience or because of my light-weighted publication list.

A few month ago, I met a Professor who is now a very successful Biomedical physicist. I knew him before from his very nice articles, which he had published in high-impact journals during his PhD research. Those articles included very fundamental theoretical results and at that time very progressive experiments on deep physics. For reasons unknown to me, he had decided not to continue in the same field after his very successful PhD, and got involved in the more application-oriented field of biomedical physics, which naturally results in less PRLs but more publications in medical journals and patents.

Entrepreneurship is a personal character that is mostly used for businessmen, but can also be found in scientists. In fact, as creativity is an essential ingredient for a successful scientific career, I may even claim that there sit more entrepreneurs in a research institute than a company, but I do not insist.

Some business-psychologists describe entrepreneurs as fire-starters because they love to initiate new projects and are always eager to bring a new idea, which they never lack, into reality. But, unfortunately, as soon as the project is in action the joy is over for the fire-starter. Soon it happens that he makes himself busy with a new idea and abandons the older one, even though the harvest time of the previous project has just started.

In my previous post I described why I find a two-day course, an ineffective training for reducing PhD-supervisor miscommunications. In this post I like to present a suggestion, which I think may be more effective.

By my critical essay I did not want to question the good will of the FOM personnel service and the trainers. Indeed, it is a great challenge for many PhD students to stabilize their position in relation with their supervisors. With all the respect for all supervisors, I also think that they are not classified as the best human resource managers, which is the main duty on their shoulders from the time they become group leaders.

A few days ago, I participated in the second day of the training course “Taking charge of your PhD-project”. This is a one-time mandatory course for all PhD-students employed by FOM, which I estimate to be more than 100 persons per year.

To make a long story very short, I must say I was deadly bored.

My impression from the whole course was the following: “A successful PhD is one who can manage his/her supervisor in such a way that he/she can write a thesis within the exact four years of his/her contract (so no prolongation). Within two days we teach you, all 10 students at the same time, techniques and skills you will need to control your disobeying supervisor.”

A young scientist in his early thirties, with more than 40 publications and a permanent position at a European university, has gotten the following comment in the judgment of his research proposal: the candidate writes articles with many different coauthors. And, that is listed in the weak points of the proposal.

I assume a scientific proposal is to be judged based on its scientific value, and not based on the personality of its author. The number of coauthors relates very much to the history of a scientist’s activities and has nothing to do with his scientific qualifications.

There are a couple of different opinions about the length of sentences in a scientific article. A scientific argument should be precise. It usually contains many technical terms that must be well-defined, thus should be described verbally. Descriptive phrases or sentences need to be linked somehow to the central message of the paragraph, which can be an idea, a claim, a result or a fact.

I have encountered two different guidelines for constructing paragraphs. The “survival guide for scientists” insists on short sentences. On the contrary, “academic writing for graduate students” insists on the “Flow: moving from one statement in a text to the next” and provides us with a full table of linking words and phrases that can be used for introducing clauses and phrases; it means making sentences longer.

Is it true that articles in high-impact journals involve, in average, more coauthors?

A while ago, I was involved in writing a review article, which finally included around 270 references. Being not very experienced in using BibTeX, I had to manually enter many references in my TeX-file. There I noticed that Nature and Science entries took more time to handle because they usually come with more than 4 coauthors.