Otto Muskens
19 May 2010
Tags: competition, originality, papers, Scientific community
Posted in Miscellaneous, PhD life

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.
Read more... (623 words, 1 image, estimated 2:30 minutes reading time)
Sanli
14 May 2010
Tags: collaboration, competition, grant proposal, Scientific community, social networking
Posted in Ethics, Presentations quality, Research and education
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.
Read more... (518 words, estimated 2:04 minutes reading time)
- 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.”
- 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.”
- 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.
Ad Lagendijk
1 September 2009
Tags: comment, competition, ego, priority claim
Posted in Conferences, Getting published, Tips for junior scientists
Successful scientists are driven by curiosity and by ego. Lay people find
it disappointing when told that egos of individual scientists play a crucial role in the progress of science. But the same people complain that their country has produced too few Nobel prize winners.
First discovery claims and disputes have always been part of science, from Newton to Montaigner (Nobel prize medicine 2008). Big ego’s and accompanying priority claims will always be part of science.
Example 1
Today I read an amusing story by Herman de Lang in the Dutch magazine Tijdschrift voor Natuurkunde (September 2009) about Millikan, the physicist who was the first to determine the charge of the electron. Robert Millikan had such a big ego that people at Caltech, where Millikan was president, had defined the unit of vanity as the “Kan”. But to classify people on the vanity scale it was easier to use the milliKan.
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Ad Lagendijk
10 April 2009
Tags: competition, grant proposal, originality, stealing
Posted in Ethics, PhD life, Presentations quality, Tips for senior scientists
Writing grant proposals is a fact of live for every group leader. This writing can be quite time consuming. Your chance of success depends on a number of factors. The factor I want to discuss here is the originality and the detail of the proposal
.
New idea
Pursuing a new idea is what makes the life of a scientist fascinating and challenging. But also
demanding. Just continuing one’s research on old ideas is much easier. But a new idea is very difficult to come by. Continuation of old stuff is much easier. Grant organizations want new ideas. Supporting continuation is in our society never appreciated. ( Unless it is Scottish whisky.) So even when you are just going to do the same research you have to package it in the form of a new idea.
Read more... (518 words, 3 images, estimated 2:04 minutes reading time)
Ad Lagendijk
15 January 2009
Tags: collaboration, competition
Posted in Ethics, Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists
Finding a suitable research subject is about the most difficult task in the life of a researcher. And professional scientists are confronted with this task continuously all through their career.
You do not want to work on a field that has existed for a long time and where great scientists have made large contributions. The suicidal defense that people bring forward when they embark on an almost exhausted field is: “there is still so much to do”.
I suppose you have found your almost virgin territory and that it has made, or will make, you famous. You will however only make a large
impression with your activities in your new field if many other people will work on this field as well. But if the field is indeed as promising as you think it is, you do not have to wait long, and your terrain will be rampaged by the competition.
Read more... (597 words, 5 images, estimated 2:23 minutes reading time)
Readers' comments
Thanks for the advice. It sounds almost too simple and like something people should come up by themselves. Unfortunately, most ...
19 Jul 2010 8:46, Julio E. Peironcely
Getting grants funded is a much less platonic enterprise than the science itself. I recently ran into a science professor ...
20 Jun 2010 19:32, Gijs
Hi, One question - where would you include correspondence? Some journals e.g. Nature publish "Letters" as full articles, whereas, correspondence elsewhere ...
11 Jun 2010 23:09, MH
I agree with what have been said above. Should the normalization be done against the total number of publications he/she authored/co-authored ...
8 Jun 2010 23:08, labuddy
I spent the spare time on the unfinished ideas,because the working time is controlled strictly by the boss and ...
7 Jun 2010 14:26, danxian