The illusive high impact paper
Sciencewomen describes a problem I know very well:
On a day when I am feeling increasingly dismal about the publication prospects of my current project, my mood was not lightened with the arrival of the table of contents for the current issue of a very high impact journal (say, cell/nature/science). One of the papers was right up my research alley and the lead author is someone junior to me. Why is it that the other guy is getting a very high profile paper and I'm struggling to get results that will merit publication at all?
I did my PhD in theoretical computer science, where high impact papers (high impact outside your own field, that is) are few and far between, and I didn't really expect to write high impact papers then.
Now I'm doing bioinformatics, and that is a hot field, so now I do want to, but I am not particularly successful. There's a few that have received some interest, in particularly this one about the speciation of humans, but I wasn't the first author on that.
Lately, I do not seem to manage to be first author on any paper...
I'm in the weird situation where I am not senior enough to be last author on any paper, but I am spending too much time on too many different projects that I can focus enough on a single project to expect to be first author on a paper.
I feel like I've substituted quantity of publications for quality. Of course, I have no one to blame but myself, so I just need to change my working habits, I guess. Spending too much time blogging probably doesn't help either.
Great, now I'm depressed. What a way to start the day... Oh well, I'll head to the office to get some work done, that should cheer me up!
May 28th, 2008 at 6:15 am
Come on, blogging is alright. Even if you blog, say, 2 hours a day, you still work for about 8-10 hours at least. Honestly, I do not think blogging is the issue. It's that everyone wants bioinformaticians to work for them, so I guess you are getting "booked up".
Well, I am guessing here, but I do not think my guess is too far from the truth.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Well, not that far from the truth, although it is other bioinformaticians I am working for when I get bugged down with other projects ;-)
Anyway, those two hours blogging are two hours that I am not working... but I find that I cannot work as long any more as I used to. It was a lot easier when I was programming through the night. Now I have to focus on thinking and reading rather than just programming, and that is a lot harder, and not something I can do after a 10 hours working day.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Well, blogging _should_ give credit also (but I am not sure it does with a lot of old researchers, yet). A good blog like this one gets positive attention to your center, and its research.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Now if I could only convince the dean about that... ;-)
May 29th, 2008 at 7:05 am
This is a common problem in bioinformatics. We tend to latch on to a lot of people with different problems, provide a computational solution, then spin off to another project. This is compounded by the fact that the data we work with is often not our own (in the sense that we didn't produce it). This adds up to lots of mid-author publications.
I think that anyone knowledgeable about the field recognizes this, and is capable of assessing usefulness without relying on first-author credentials. Sadly, those people aren't always the ones on hiring committees...
May 30th, 2008 at 10:49 am
"but I am spending too much time on too many different projects that I can focus enough on a single project to expect to be first author on a paper"
I can clearly relate to this problem. About a year ago, I blogged about this issue, too. See e.g.
http://suicyte.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/publishing-bioinformatics-papers-in-high-profile-journals/
http://suicyte.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/collaborations-in-bioinformatics/
May 30th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Just being curious: any particular reason why you deleted my previous comment ?
May 30th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Kay, I'm sorry if I've deleted a comment. If I have, it is a mistake. I've it's been filtered as a spam I haven't seen it. If it has just been delayed, it is because I've been away all day and haven't had the chance to approve it until now (I've been away all day). After you get one comment approved, though, you shouldn't have problems with delays in the future...