"Scientists should be adventuresome people, restless and imaginative. They should be generous souls - poets at times, but always romantics - and they have two essential qualities. They scorn material gain and high academic rank, and their noble minds are captivated by lofty ideals."
In this process of bolstering my curriculum vitae to attract graduate schools, I am inundated with the mean face of academic politics. It demands that I be recognizable within the scientific community before I am even part of it. Academia must be able to identify me as unique before they accept the burden of my education, but this uniqueness is rightfully represented only by my publications.
While I am the first author of several abstracts, I have not yet published any articles. And while being a first author before having a PhD is impressive, it is significantly less so than being a co-author on a published article. I have a qualm with this particular rule of hierarchy - and with Academia's perspective on publication in general. To be published as a co-author in a scientific paper, you need be involved as little as collecting a key piece of data without having any clue as to its importance to the paper itself. To be a first author, you are either the primary investigator (head of the lab) or you have performed/analyzed/written a substantial portion of the piece. The latter is my case.
I recently mined a book on this subject by Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States. Among other discussions is that of Academia's role in determining the evolution of science by publication, and how scientists are evolving to become defined by the magnitude - quality and quantity -of their publications instead of their contributions to scientific stride through their careers.
In Cajal's day (the late 18- and early 1900s), publication was a serious achievement, like Galileo's 550 printed copies of The Starry Messenger. Today, it is not unusual to expect an undergraduate student to have their name planted among a list of authors on a paper or two. This is a blessing and a curse. The circulation of scientific discovery has skyrocketed to a point where many articles are freely accessible to the public. However, credit for scientific discovery has become such a bilious diatribe that publications include up to ten co-authors, and the tiniest inkling of participation in the tiniest piece of the article gets your name on the list. Students are recruited to graduate schools based on their publications. Academic scholars are recruited to run labs based on quantity of publication alone, which may or may not sound absurd only to me. The physicist Richard Feynman was asked to head an engineering lab at Princeton because his name was on an unapplied patent that came out of Los Alamos. During the war, Los Alamos was flooded with some of the brightest minds in physics, and the opportunity was taken to exploit any random idea that popped into their heads. A lot of cool shit went down at Los Alamos.
I can't fairly condemn the evolution of publication's importance to Academia, nor Academia's reliance on publication to determine the worth of a scientist. My hope, however, is that quality does not become lost in quantity. I hope that my curriculum vitae communicates that my lack of publication does not represent my throughput or ingenuity...
I have spent over two years with my boss developing a huge project which has evolved from my own undergraduate thesis. The process has involved a scrupulous amount of project design, methodology, animal model development, endless amounts of research and, as goes without saying, an infinite amount of experimentation. As we have been too busy writing grant proposals and collecting alternative data, we have not yet published anything on the many results of this project. Fortunately, my boss has offered me the opportunity to co-author on a textbook chapter and set aside time to write an article on the novel mouse model I have developed before I submit my graduate applications. My boss reminds me of Cajal.
I maintain, sanguinely, that many graduate institutions still have the integrity to investigate the entire portfolio of a scientist before deeming woth investment. That ideal, however, may prove to be too lofty...
While I am the first author of several abstracts, I have not yet published any articles. And while being a first author before having a PhD is impressive, it is significantly less so than being a co-author on a published article. I have a qualm with this particular rule of hierarchy - and with Academia's perspective on publication in general. To be published as a co-author in a scientific paper, you need be involved as little as collecting a key piece of data without having any clue as to its importance to the paper itself. To be a first author, you are either the primary investigator (head of the lab) or you have performed/analyzed/written a substantial portion of the piece. The latter is my case.
I recently mined a book on this subject by Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States. Among other discussions is that of Academia's role in determining the evolution of science by publication, and how scientists are evolving to become defined by the magnitude - quality and quantity -of their publications instead of their contributions to scientific stride through their careers.
In Cajal's day (the late 18- and early 1900s), publication was a serious achievement, like Galileo's 550 printed copies of The Starry Messenger. Today, it is not unusual to expect an undergraduate student to have their name planted among a list of authors on a paper or two. This is a blessing and a curse. The circulation of scientific discovery has skyrocketed to a point where many articles are freely accessible to the public. However, credit for scientific discovery has become such a bilious diatribe that publications include up to ten co-authors, and the tiniest inkling of participation in the tiniest piece of the article gets your name on the list. Students are recruited to graduate schools based on their publications. Academic scholars are recruited to run labs based on quantity of publication alone, which may or may not sound absurd only to me. The physicist Richard Feynman was asked to head an engineering lab at Princeton because his name was on an unapplied patent that came out of Los Alamos. During the war, Los Alamos was flooded with some of the brightest minds in physics, and the opportunity was taken to exploit any random idea that popped into their heads. A lot of cool shit went down at Los Alamos.
I can't fairly condemn the evolution of publication's importance to Academia, nor Academia's reliance on publication to determine the worth of a scientist. My hope, however, is that quality does not become lost in quantity. I hope that my curriculum vitae communicates that my lack of publication does not represent my throughput or ingenuity...
I have spent over two years with my boss developing a huge project which has evolved from my own undergraduate thesis. The process has involved a scrupulous amount of project design, methodology, animal model development, endless amounts of research and, as goes without saying, an infinite amount of experimentation. As we have been too busy writing grant proposals and collecting alternative data, we have not yet published anything on the many results of this project. Fortunately, my boss has offered me the opportunity to co-author on a textbook chapter and set aside time to write an article on the novel mouse model I have developed before I submit my graduate applications. My boss reminds me of Cajal.
I maintain, sanguinely, that many graduate institutions still have the integrity to investigate the entire portfolio of a scientist before deeming woth investment. That ideal, however, may prove to be too lofty...
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