I am really concerned about making mistakes in my research. I am really cautious in how I interpret my results and triple check stuff all the time, add in all kinds of caveats in my discussion sections.
For example, I re-ran a huge set of analyses five different times for one paper, which took me months of extra time, on top of the year delay before I was convinced that a somewhat weird part of the dataset was legitimate to analyze in the way that I did (and it was really only "weird" because I lucked into discovering the resource so no one had ever applied a data set like it for that kind of analysis).
I am always amazed, impressed and kind of jealous at my colleagues who publish lots of glitzy papers with big sweeping interpretations. They totally aren't afraid to be wrong.
And, may I also point out, reviewers never seem to call them on it.
I want to be more gutsy.
I am at the point with a project that I have been working on for the last 14 years that it is time for big conclusions, broad sweeping ideas to be made. In fact, I am starting to get worried that someone is going to compile all my papers and do it themselves. Actually, there was a paper just published in a pretty high impact journal last month that sort of started this. And the authors did a sucky job of it.
So it is time for me to grow me some balls.
Any advice on how to do this? Any of you ever have this same problem?
I definitely suffer from the same problem. I think I have been getting more and more ballsy with time, but am nowhere near the level of some of my colleagues. It has to do with insecurities, and some people are just very confident.
ReplyDeleteI did my PhD with a very well-known advisor in an applied field, but my work was more on the fundamental science side, and he didn't have much clout in that direction. At that point in my career, I was thrilled to be able to get into certain good society level journals. Now I consider it routine to get into those same journals and even their higher-profile brethren. I still don't feel able to shoot for the GlamourMags all on my own, primarily bacause I never deem the work good enough -- then I roll my eyes when I see what does get published there.
I think a lot of it is academic breeding. I see some fearless young profs who have no qualms about shooting very high -- they are all supremely confident, and invariably went through BS, PhD, and postdocs at very highly ranked places, where high-impact pubs are the norm. Of course they fully expect that high-impact pubs are perfectly within their reach, and act accordingly. This confidence goes a long way.
As I remember seeing on someone's blog "Getting into Science (or Nature or another high impact journal) is like having a threesome -- if you don't ask, it will never happen."
Realizing what you need to do is half the job. Just do it. What's the worst that could happen? You get rejected. You get a crappy review or two.
Having Maddy is much harder than any of it and you are doing it like a champ, so go kick some Glamour Mag butt! :-)
For me a big thing has been realizing that yes I may be wrong and that's ok. Not in the sense that I did something wrong but that you know it's true with more data, new tools, etc someone may find that I'm wrong in either whole or part (part please!). Ok - that's science and if no one puts out the ideas that appear to be true based on our current data and understanding we don't push forward. I would never put anything forward I don't believe is true but I've opened myself up to the idea that I can only publish from my little time window in the world and recognized that too is a contribution. If I end up being wrong I might as well be 'importantly wrong' i.e. it pushed the field forward. So send it big - why not?
ReplyDeleteNo concrete advice here, but I'm hoping hard that you'll find the right line between glitz and integrity. Maybe you should play the Rocky theme song while you write the paper. And when you're done, maybe you can come and dig my "California flora" paper out of the ditch where it's currently mired... :)
ReplyDelete-Lesley (can't sign in for some reason)