Mailund on the Internet

The paper I described in a previous post: Investigating selection on viruses: a statistical alignment approach, just got published online today.  Yeah us!

John Hawks tells us how to combine blogging with getting tenure.

It is something that, obviously, is of great interest to me.  Blogging takes up a lot of time.  It doesn’t have to, of course, but it tends to fill the time available.  The same does research.  If you try to do both, chances are that research will suffer.  Since you are not likely to get much credit for blogging when you struggle to get tenure, this could be a problem.

On the other hand, I find that blogging about the papers I read and the research I do helps me to better understand what I’m reading or doing.

Writing down a summary of a paper I’ve read requires that I understand the paper at least in some detail.  You cannot really kid yourself into believing that you understood the paper.  Believing I understood a paper while not really getting it happened a lot to me.  Discussing papers in a journal clubs opened my eyes for this, and now I read papers more carefully.  At least when I am going to discuss them later on. Reviewing papers on my blog works in a similar way.  I have to be careful if I am presenting a paper where everyone can read the review.

So in a way, blogging doesn’t really subtract time from my research as much as it supplements my research work.

Putting my thoughts on a public web page  forces me to be more careful in what I write, which is the main benefit of using a blog rather than a notebook.  It is not without problems, though.  Quoting the post I linked to above:

Now, you face more complicated terrain. When you write a blog about your field of study, your students and colleagues are part of your audience. At least some of them will know you, and you need to consider your reputation.

This is both a benefit and drawback of writing a blog in your area of expertise. You can quickly develop a reputation for fairness, good commentary, and enjoyable writing. On the other hand, you can just as quickly develop a reputation as a crank, a partisan for a niche theory, a bully, or worst of all, a bore. Everyone expects a journal article to be boring. But if you write boring material on a blog, people will just assume you’re a boring person. Not so good.

You are risking your reputation.  You always are when you do something public, so I guess you always have to choose between risk or obscurity.  With a blog you are less careful and certainly more informal in what you write than in a research paper, so perhaps there is a greater risk, but on the other hand people do not expect as much from a blog post as a paper, so perhaps not…

There is another risk, though, and that is leaking some secret.  I’m not good with secrets and keeping research projects secret until paper submission is a bit strange to me.  There are a lot of ideas out there and most of them are crap, so why protect them?

Anyway, not all see it that way, especially the biologists I work with — I’ve learned that the hard way — so I’m trying to keep my current projects out of my blogging until papers are submitted. At least the projects where there could be problems with leaking secrets.

I would love to write about my current projects and get feedback on it, but I guess I will have to make due with published results.

At least I get a lot of practice writing in English by blogging.  My writing is not appreciated by reviewers on my papers, so I need the practice.  This is also something John Hawks mentions:

Ultimately, advancing in the world of science will take writing skill, and for this you need practice. Nobody expects a blog to be perfect, or even very well-polished. But people do expect you to update it regularly. This makes it a perfect way to practice better writing. The only way to build your skill is repetition, and whether your blog has a thousand readers or only ten, they will give you a motivation to work at it.

[...]

Personally, I think that maturity as a scientist comes with the ability to explain your work to your parents. As a graduate student, I felt the great interest and importance in my work, but was not yet equipped to articulate it very well. I’ve gained that ability over time, and have become a much better advocate of human evolution.

I’ll read John’s post carefully and hope that I can get to tenure as well ;-)

As you might have noticed I haven’t blogged for ages.  I was busy for a few weeks with projects and the last week and a half I’ve been out of the office taking a little holiday.  Not travelling anywhere, just not working, and not blogging either.

Well, that got boring so now I’m back again.  I have a deadline for a paper submission at the end of the week, so I guess I’ll be working on that.  Otherwise it is still a bit slow around here which is both good and bad.  It means I have time to focus on research rather than teaching or writing, but it also means that I am likely to slack it a bit.

Oh well, back to work :)