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…

The pros and cons of blogging about work

Nearly a year ago there was a number of blog posts I wanted to comment on, but this past year has been so hectic that I never got around to it. Until today!

It all started with blog posts about some problems the faculty blogger was having with a student and discussing two students and their ability to be successful in academia. Not long thereafter, another blogger commented, saying that one shouldn't post about people that work for them under the guise of anonymity. Based on some of the comments on that post, a second blog post made the comment that you wouldn't want to be as honest with your trainees in person as you are anonymously on the web (including some comments from a reader who claims that while she enjoys reading these blogs she would not want to work for any of the people writing them because it makes them seem like bad leaders). There are really two big issues here, and I agree with one and disagree with the other.

First, there is an issue of blogging 'anonymously' and discussing real interactions with real people. I agree that this can be a huge issue. If you are giving a lot of details about your work and the people you work with, at some point someone is going to figure out who you are in real life and who everyone in those posts referred to. Basically, it could come back to bite you in the ass one day. This is why I chose to blog openly as myself and link to my blog from my google+ page and even my lab website. It was a conscious decision I made to ensure that I would be careful about what I posted and only say things online that I would be willing to say to someone in person. Fortunately, I am pretty ballsy and willing to say a lot of things to people, so it hasn't really impacted what I blog about too much. But it does mean that I won't ever discuss specifics about my students, because I know how much it would've killed me if my supervisor had done that. However, a lot of the issues that get brought up in those posts about students/employees/other faculty are important to discuss, they just need to be discussed in a way that can't be linked back to the specific person. It's not always an easy thing to do, but since I want to keep my job I'm willing to work at it.

The second issue that stemmed from this is that all the unpleasantness about our jobs needs, to some extent, to be kept from our trainees to maintain our authority as a leader. I do not like this at all. You do not have to be perfect or unemotional to be a good leader that students will respect. There's nothing wrong with being human, and in the same way that you probably cut students some slack when you know they're going through a rough time, I bet students would be a lot less demanding of their supervisors if they really knew how much was on their plates and how stressed out they were about it. Moreover, this form of leadership keeps giving students a highly idealized vision of what being an academic is like, which is doing the student a huge disservice. Students should know what they are getting in to if they choose an academic career, not find out the hard way their first year on the job.

Lastly, the idea was put forth that perhaps academics who blog about their experiences make worse supervisors. I whole-heartedly disagree, but I am admittedly biased because a) I blog and b) I think I'm an awesome mentor. My experience has been that the people who actually spend time thinking about their role as a supervisor and whether or not they are being a good mentor are usually much better mentors - they are self-aware enough to notice when they make mistakes or things are going wrong in their labs and care enough to try to do something about it. I'm sure there are bloggers who are bad mentors, but there are also many non-bloggers who are bad mentors. To me, the fact that someone is taking the time to organize their thoughts about their job is probably a good sign.

Diversifying your research portfolio

Recently, I've had conversations with a number of graduate students who are not particularly enjoying science at the moment, and a lot of this seems to stem from either supervisor-related issues (see my previous posts about this issue here, here, and here) or from the despair that is common when a project that you invested a ton of time in just doesn't work out. This got me thinking about how investing your time and energy in research projects is much like investing your money. I think it's safe to say that no good financial advisor would recommend that you invest five years worth of salary in one risky company. But that's pretty much what you're doing if your dissertation project is the only project you have (particularly if it's a risky project that has a minimal chance of working out).

As with investing money, research investments tend to follow the pattern of high-risk research yielding potentially high rewards (e.g., a paper in Science, lots of citations) but having a large probability of failure. Conversely, low-risk research has a high probability of succeeding and leading to publication, but the payoff is lower (e.g., publishing in a low or mid-tier journal, low or moderate citations). For me, one of the keys to maintaining motivation and productivity has been to have a diverse research portfolio with projects that vary in their riskiness. I have some projects that are lower impact but are almost guaranteed to lead to a publication along with some riskier, more exciting projects that could potentially lead to high-impact papers... but could also totally flop. So, even when one of those risky projects fails I still have papers I can write and projects that are going well, keeping me from falling into a pit of research-induced despair.

My advice, to grad students in particular, is to make sure that you aren't betting everything on one project. If your dissertation project doesn't work out you can usually still get a PhD, but you'll have a hell of a time getting a postdoc or faculty position without any publications. Having some side projects of varying riskiness can help ensure that you end up employable. And, as a bonus, some of those projects that you initially thought were low-impact could turn out to be really interesting and exciting to the field!

My first month as an assistant professor

If I had to estimate, so far my time each week is partitioned as follows:

Some points of interest include

• an insanely large proportion of time devoted to preparing for lectures, far more than I actually spend giving the lectures
• an abysmally small proportion of time devoted to doing research
• a much larger proportion of time spent dealing with other people's fuck-ups than I would like

Let me relate a few of these fuck-ups for entertainment purposes (yours, not mine). For about two weeks I was unable to get into my office because no one had a key to the door. I had a TA waiting for a copy of the course textbook for three weeks, and it turned out it was sitting in the dept. office the whole time. I am still waiting for computers because the purchase orders never got submitted.

The time spent preparing to teach is largely because it's a new prep, so hopefully in the future that will be pared down some. Also, it's because I'm OCD about my lecture slides being beautiful. That I can't blame anyone else for. Except maybe my PhD supervisor, since he is OCD about his lecture slides and he trained me to be just like him. Yes, it is all his fault.

Now, how would I like to be spending my time? Assuming that I can't just lie on a beach all day reading a good book:

A lot more research, a lot less dealing with other people's fuck-ups. Now that would get me out of bed in the morning.

Career resources for postdocs and new faculty

Today, in an effort to avoid working on lecture prep, I thought I would share some resources from around the web that I have found useful for my career preparation so far.

Psychology job wiki - This wiki is not only a useful place for perusing available faculty positions, the forums are really interesting. There is a lot of discussion about the job search process as well as issues relating to being a new faculty member. There are similar wiki's for other fields as well, and I imagine they also have useful forum discussions worth perusing.

Duke Postdoc Services YouTube channel - Duke has held a number of panel discussions and workshops for postdocs which they have helpfully recorded and made available via youtube. There are a number of videos on the job search and interview process, discussions about non-academic careers, lab management, funding... lots of good stuff.

Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty - this is the lab management guide I have just started going through. It is based on a course in scientific management offered at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and contains a ton of information on things like the job search process, staffing a lab, getting funding, effective teaching, and time management.

Other blogs that write about academic stuff and often provide some good food for thought:
Academic Jungle
The Professor is In
Female Science Professor
Female Computer Scientist
Academic Panhandling
Professor in Training
Prof-like Substance