Reference letter season

It turns out, I love writing letters of recommendation. Although time consuming, it is such a positive experience. Not only are you doing something helpful for the career of a (hopefully) deserving young mind with lots of potential, it also brings all the positive experiences with these students to the forefront of your mind. There are often many headaches that involve undergraduate students (complaints about grades, that super fun subset of students who obviously couldn't care less about their education, etc.) and it's easy to become increasingly frustrated and negative as the semester wears on. Letter writing is a good reminder that there are some really great ones in the bunch who make this job a real pleasure. Cheers to you, awesome students who fill me with hope!

Getting distracted by new research

We've all been there - suddenly you have a brilliant idea for a new experiment and the excitement is high. You program the experiment, start collecting data, and, if you're lucky, the idea pans out and you start getting great results that are super interesting. You then realize you need to run a few follow-up studies to avoid some potential confounds or test alternative hypotheses, so you start collecting data for those as well. The problem? Chances are you had old data sitting around just waiting to be written up that is being ignored while you pursue this new exciting project. And in the end, it doesn't matter how many incredible projects you come up with if none of them ever get disseminated to the academic community. There will almost always be a new project that is more exciting than your old data.

I've seen this happen to people at every level (I'm guilty of it) but it seems to be particularly common amongst graduate students, who get excited about new data and ideas but find writing (and re-writing, and re-writing) not very appealing. The first time you get feedback on a manuscript draft from your supervisor asking you to almost completely revise it SUCKS. Getting negative reviews back from reviewers SUCKS. Being outright rejected from journals SUCKS. Lets not deny it, there's a lot about the publishing process that can be really disheartening. So a lot of the time it's easier and more pleasant to focus on these new, exciting ideas than to deal with a manuscript for data collected a year ago (or more, in my case - I'm trying to get papers done for 5+ year old projects).

Oftentimes these projects are presented at conferences as posters or talks while still in their exciting phase, but then new things come up and the manuscript writing gets put on the backburner. This is particularly problematic if someone at the conference gets excited by the work, starts following up on it, and publishes their own paper that essentially scoops you. The longer your data sit unpublished, the more likely that someone else will either do the same thing or do some related study that makes your data entirely unpublishable.

The moral of the story - balance time between new projects and finishing up old ones. It's great to be excited by research, but if you don't finish anything you won't get the credit for all your great ideas. Having run 30 experiments doesn't make you employable - but publishing 15 papers from those experiments will. I once heard some great advice, which was to always have one project at each stage in the pipeline (e.g. on project you're collecting data for, one that you're analyzing, one that is being written, one that is submitted) and not to start a new project until the old projects have moved up in the chain. That way you always have one manuscript that is in progress and you don't get backlogged in data collection. I'm sure there are lots of other ways you could organize your time, like doing all data collection in the first half of the semester and dedicating the end of the semester (when participants are notoriously crappy) to writing. No matter how you balance it, the key is to make sure that things get published, because in the academic world your projects mean nothing until they're in a peer-reviewed article.

Now I'm going to try and take my own advice and get some writing done.

Guest Post: The "Anonymous" Reviewer

A quasi-true tale of meeting your peer reviewers in real life, an anonymous guest post

‘Not an easy thing to meet your maker’

-Roy Batty (as played by Rutger Hauer), Blade Runner (Final Cut (2007), because it is the best version and I don’t want you to think I am quoting an otherwise great version that was forced to pilfer footage from the opening helicopter sequence in The Shining to provide the hastily assembled happy ending American audiences seemed to demand)

That is one of the more poignant quotes from one of my favorite movies. Context: the primary antagonist, a genetic replicant whose predetermined number is almost up, seeks, like so many academics, an ‘extension’ from the man/authority ultimately responsible for his existence.  It is poignant within the confines of the storyline and the film itself, but I think this quote captures an experience I had in graduate school pretty aptly. 

Let’s define the key term in this parallel:

Maker: he/she who determines our conduct and identity as a researcher.

Research conduct and identity: the message we broadcast to the world: our peer-reviewed journal articles summarizing our experiments, findings, and what we make of them.

Is the maker supposed to be the PI, then? Well, in my case, definitely not. He isn’t hard to meet. He is warm, jovial and fun to be around. Not too bad looking either.

So then the maker must be the funding source? Again, no. Even though my ultimate funding source is, like many of yours, the American taxpayer and, by extension, myself (ew), my boss covered my costs with his grant and was kind enough to let me pursue my primary interest (his ancillary).

Think of it. Who is it that most determines the content of you peer-reviewed- and ultimately-published- message?

The reviewer.

They often, explicitly or otherwise, override the decisions made by you, your boss, and even your own mother concerning the content of your message. They ask for different wording, they get it. They ask for more subjects, they get them. They ask for new analyses and interpretations, they get them. (Even in the borderline suicidal case that you don’t give them these things, you will absolutely still give them a well-thought-out and kindly-worded explanation as to why you are ‘so very sorry, really, no offense, but we didn’t do that because X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, etc. No offense, honest. Your review was really perceptive and you are a master wordsmith. I wanna give you a foot massage from which I would derive no pleasure. You’re really great. I want to fast for 3 days and take you out to dinner just to watch you eat as I light-headidly pay you a steady stream of compliments about your various prowesses.’

My core ideas usually are intact at the end of the whole thing, but I have no illusions that reviewers are my maker, and in the case of one ‘anonymous’ reviewer, who seems to get ‘his/her’ hands on everything I submit, it was surely not an easy thing to meet him. 

But it happened. After my first set of reviews, I met my maker at a conference.

Oh, before I forget, you have probably been thinking about that Blade Runner scene, when Roy meets his maker (Tyrell, played by Joe Turkel, who was also Lloyd the hallucinated bartender in the Shining, which makes that the second link between these two movies in my post…can you tell I have a thing for movie trivia yet?). Remember what happened when he met him? Well, they talked, things got tense, and Roy pushed his thumbs through Tyrell’s eyes, killing him.

Suffice it to say that in the case of me meeting my maker, the parallels end just between the pushing in of the thumbs and the maker dying. So, you can look forward to a cathartic end at that conference as I meet my maker face to face and figuratively push my thumbs through his eyes…but I don’t kill him. Jesus, I am not a monster.

In fact, my reviewer and I became friends.

No we didn’t.

But we are on good terms.

No we’re not.

But he hasn’t gotten any of my manuscripts since then.

He has almost certainly gotten all of them.  

…

Our story begins with me receiving my first set of reviews from 3 experts in the field. 

Reviewer 1:

This is a good study. I enjoyed reading it, and your obscure references to cinematic works were not lost on me. Please re-reference your data to a common-reference, which seems more appropriate for lateral occipital components you are tracking than the algebraic average of the left and right mastoids. You forgot to capitalize the first letter of the second sentence of the third paragraph of the fourth page.  Please do that. Good job and see you at the movies!

(Signed - Someone who doesn’t mind being held accountable for their statements and will still give honest criticisms to the benefit of the quality of the paper. Also, this ensures that I spent a fair amount of time thinking, as well as writing.)

My (Mental) Response: Wow. Way more positive than I thought. Definitely some things to take care of though. Consider them done, good chap, as you definitely know what you’re talking about and I was very new to the game with this first article. 

Reviewer 2:

The design of the study was sound, the analysis and comparisons were appropriate, but I have a bit of a problem with the interpretation. I don’t think you gave enough time to this alternate view, which is well-supported by some very recent but good work. You may want to start with these articles:

Grad student, Post-doc, Well-respected PI. (2010). A new way to look at your question, supported by good data. Journal of pretty good studies, (12): first edition of the year…ring it in with some great science! 

Founder of entire field. (2012). Holy shit, we were dead wrong. Look at this shit! Nature Reviews important things, (10): 4

…
etc.

(Not signed)

My (Mental) Response: Oh man, I can’t believe I didn’t see those. These are hugely relevant and make sense of that weird data point I couldn’t explain before. I really need to get better at lit searches, and paying 32 dollars to view a journal of obscure research our R1 institution didn’t spring for. 

Reviewer 3 (the maker):

You son of a bitch. I am at a loss for words. That is, all words except for ‘crap, invalid, stupid, false, ignorant, reject, rejection, son, of, and bitch.’ I can’t begin to outline the myriad errors in design, analysis and interpretation here. You did it wrong. It was done before, only right, by this group:

Probably me, some other folks, THE biggest deal in Europe (1999). Using the same method but with different stimuli and subtractions to address a question other than yours. Nature, (1): 1.

You should consider using the above-mentioned method (that is, if you’re not a totally hopeless (bad word), which you most certainly are), as well as going back in time and punching your mom in the gut so you couldn’t foist this mediocrity on the unsuspecting scientific community in the first place.

God. Damn. It.

Well, it seems you will likely resubmit, given the uninformed opinions of the other ‘experts’, and that this is a democracy. Frankly reviewer comments should be weighted by Primary Investigator Clout (PrIC). A PrIC-index, if you will. I happen to have quite a big PrIC, and you need to know and respect it. If you must resubmit, please consider citing the following papers in your discussion:

(No less than 6 articles in which I am an author, padded out by 3 in which I am not, but done in the same institute)
Because unlike yours truly, my H-index isn’t going to stimulate itself. 

(Not signed, but smeared with an unknown, foul-smelling substance)

My (Mental) Response: Yikes, this person is really upset with me.  I wonder if they know the people they suggested so much to me. They are obviously really knowledgeable about those 7 papers… 

...

Fast-forward 2 months. Biggest conference in the field. Three weeks left to resubmit. I was presenting a poster based on data from the study. I had with 99% certainty identified the ‘maker.’ I had done new research (not the kind he had hoped for) and knew what he studied, where he lived, where he liked to travel, his relationship status, and what he looked like (thanks to an inexplicable but highly visible personal page linked in his professional one). I saw the editor of the journal. She was super nice and was interested in the data. I saw other regulars in the field. Patient people. All my reprints were taken and I had a nice email list going. My tie matched my shoelaces. My shirt was bright. My hair was finally doing what I wanted it to. The haircut had been timed perfectly. Grown out just enough to have kind of an Egon Spengler intellectual-looking pompadour situation. I elected to stay for the whole 4 hour poster session. I like talking to people.

Then I saw him. He was making the rounds. Through a dispersing crowd to which I just gave the run-through, I saw him at the poster before mine. Not hard to spot. It was like his internet picture was a uniform he wore everyday. Short, but solidly built, wide-set shoulders, likely high muscle density, though not a massive fellow. Wide bright eyes, laugh lines. A cabbie hat (likely his signature, I would later determine) covering his perfectly, and purposely smooth head. Only a shaved head is like that.

He was coming to mine next. Alone. I was about to meet my maker.

He was smarter than I; of this at least one of us was sure, as he turned his name tag around to hide his identity; to maintain his anonymity he thought was intact in the first place, as my maker. I pretended not to know. Pretended not to be jumping out of my skull on the inside. It was like meeting a movie star you knew and loved as a child. My mental representation of him was closer and more real than his actual self in this moment. But this was the moment.

We spoke. He asked all the questions and more, that he had raised in his review. He made more declarative than interrogative statements. And pointed right at my poster. Up close. It isn’t an LCD, but I tend to respond as though it is when touched with the fingers. We agreed to disagree and he was about to be on his way when I stopped him. I wanted to have a real moment.

I spoke as I reached to shake his hand, "Thanks for taking the time to come by. Also, I wanted you to know that we took your suggestions really seriously and your input was instrumental in making my first paper publishable, at least in our eyes."

He replied, chin raised, a slight smile, "What are you talking about? You don’t even know who I am."

(Roy takes Tyrell’s head in his hands, leans in and delivers a last kiss)

"Um, well, I am afraid that is not entirely true. I definitely appreciate that you turned your tag around, and I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but as of last year, they have taken to printing the name of the society member on both sides of the conference name tags."

(Tyrell is screaming. Blood pours from his eyes. Roy winces at his act, but continues.)

I wish I could say my maker’s reaction was as theatric or satisfying. He didn’t die, literally or figuratively. In fact, he didn’t say anything else to me. He left, silently, but quickly.

I had met my maker.

It was not an easy thing.

But it was fun.

I saw him later. I was on my cell after the poster session. He walked out onto the terrace of the convention center. I got excited and inadvertantly said with surprise and volume into my phone, "Oh shit, there he is, that little bitch I pwned at my poster."

He had sunglasses on this time.

Probably to protect his eyes…