Tag: academia

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PhD – Pretty Huge Disaster

Dresden

This is a mini series of two posts about finding positive things in negative results. Science is often a trial and error process and, depending on what you’re working with, errors can be fatal. As people don’t usually share their bad experiences or negative results beyond the circle of close colleagues and friends, I thought (and hope!) that sharing my point of view, as a PhD student might be useful.

If you’re about to do a PhD you will fail and if you’ve already successfully finished one, you have failed. At least a little bit… come on… are you sure? Not even a teeny tiny bit? By failure, I just mean scientific failure here, as if you ran an experiment and the result was… a fail, no results, do it again. There are millions of ways to fail, from errors in the experimental design to clumsiness but in this series of posts, I want to emphasize the consequences of failure more than its causes. I think that it is an important thing to learn and to embrace as a young future scientist, as much as journal rejection and other annoying and common silent academic failures.

During the two first years of my PhD, I went from the idea of quickly testing some assumptions as a starting point for a bigger question to some detailed and time consuming simulations on a detailed part of these assumptions. The time spent appeared to be completely useless scientifically because the analysis failed leading to false negative results and kept me away from going back to the bigger question. Or did it?

When wrong is right part 1

Since the summer of last year, I was working on an intensive computational project. I was running a kind of sensitivity analysis to see the effect of missing data on the phylogenies that have both living and fossil species (that’s called Total Evidence to link back to former posts, here and here). In brief I was simulating datasets with a known (right) result by removing data from it to see how the results were affected. Because of my wide ignorance at the start in coding, simulations and the method I was testing, the project took way longer than planned. And all that was of course ignoring Hofstadter’s law (‘it always takes longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’).

The expected result, as for any sensitivity-like analysis, was that as you reduce the amount of data, the harder it would be to get the right results. That wasn’t what I found at all. Instead, my simulations seemed to be suggesting that whatever the amount of data, you never get the right results. Suspicious, I tried to check my simulations and asked advice from competent and talented people that helped me finding caveats in my project. But still, after checking and testing everything over and over again, the simulation results appeared to be the same: the amount of data doesn’t matter, the method just don’t work.

Even though these results were negative, they were intriguing and, if they were right, probably important because of the number of people willing to try the Total Evidence method over the last three years. From that perspective, I presented my results at the Evolution 2014 conference in Raleigh. There, I got even more comments from even more people but still, the results appeared to be right. Until one person that had a similar unexpected result suggested that should try an older version of some of the software I was using.

It appeared that person was right and all the weirdness in the results that I tried for months to fix, check and explain were caused by a bug in the latest update (don’t use MrBayes 3.2.2 for Total Evidence analysis, prefer the version 3.2.1).

After an obvious moment of relief, came an obvious negative feeling of having lost my time and how I should have given up instead of continuing to dig. But a posteriori, I’m actually glad of this misadventure and learned two really important lessons: (1) published software is not 100% reliable; always test their behaviour; (2) there is nothing more productive than sending your work to colleagues and experts for pre-reviewing. Even though, the bug appeared to be “trivial and easy to fix”, the amount of comments I had definitely helped improve both my understanding and my standards for this project.

Author: Thomas Guillerme, guillert[at]tcd.ie, @TGuillerme

Photo credit: wikimedia commons

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Un-reclaiming the name – I am not a zoologist

zoologist

[Disclaimer – this is just my opinion. I do not speak for everyone at EcoEvo@TCD]

Recently on Twitter there has been a call to “reclaim the name” of Botany accompanied with the hashtag: #iamabotanist. The response has been really cool – lots of different scientists working on different questions have posted pictures of themselves on Twitter, often with their plants. It’s amazing the diversity of researchers out there who identify as botanists.

But why try to reclaim the name Botany? The issue is that Botany as a discipline is seen as rather old-school and irrelevant to current scientific challenges. For these reasons it tends to be unpopular with undergraduates and also with university governing boards. More and more Botany departments are being closed or merged with other departments, and Botany courses are being revamped and renamed to attract more students. Zoology departments are suffering similar fates. Like Botany, Zoology is considered an outdated discipline. It tends to fare better with undergraduate students because there are always people who want to work in a zoo or think they might get to cuddle a panda!

I appreciate what the #iamabotanist campaign was trying to do, but I’m not sure I agree. I work in a Zoology department, but I am not a Zoologist. This isn’t because I think Zoology is irrelevant as a discipline, it’s because I’m far more interested in the questions I’m asking, than in the taxa I use to test my hypotheses. Yes, the mammals I work on are adorable and fascinating, but what drives me as a scientist is trying to understand their evolution and ecology, and how the two things are connected. I’ve mostly worked on mammals so technically I’m a mammalogist. I’m happy with this label, but it’s not what I’d call myself if anyone asked. I’d identify as an (macro)evolutionary biologist, or an evolutionary ecologist. I test my ideas on mammals because these are the group I have most data for, but I’m equally fascinated by insects, bacteria, epiphytic plants, parasitic helminths etc. I think we do a disservice to the science if we focus too much on one taxonomic group.

Zoology and Botany at Trinity are particularly diverse disciplines. We have a couple of “classical” taxonomists/systematists, but also phylogeneticists, landscape ecologists, behavioural ecologists, demographers, evolutionary biologists, conservation biologists, developmental biologists and parasitologists. We teach courses across discipline boundaries, and often the person doing research closest to our own is in the other department. But sadly the Botany-Zoology divide still exists, mostly for reasons of history and geography (we are in separate buildings). This is holding back science, rather than pushing it forward.

Maybe we need to identify as botanists or zoologists (or any other taxon specific -ologists) less often, rather than more often. Forcing general questions and principles down taxon-specific lines seems rather backwards. It also isn’t helpful to our students if they only learn about animals and not the plants they eat, or only learn about plants and not the animals they are being eaten by. This interconnectedness is particularly important in light of the challenges of global change and the current extinction crisis.

So in conclusion, I think animals are cool, but I’m not a zoologist.

Author: Natalie Cooper, ncooper[at]tcd.ie, @nhcooper123

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PhD students and the cult of busy

 

busyAcademics often remind me of the Four Yorkshire Men in the old sketch (not actually originally a Monty Python sketch, but famously performed by them in their live shows – comedy nerd out over, carry on), except rather than trying to outdo each with how deprived we were as kids, we’re always trying to outdo each other with tales of how busy we are. We do it so often that it becomes hard to draw the line between how much this reflects how busy we really are, and how much is just “bragging” to assert how important we are. Somehow, we associate importance/success with being constantly busy, and think that good scientists work stupidly long hours and rarely take a day off. This is so inbuilt into our working culture that we feel guilty when we only work 9-5 or have the occasional lazy afternoon!

Worryingly the cult of being busy starts with PhD students. It’s insane the number of times I hear PhD students turning down opportunities (both academic and recreational) because they are “too busy”. Of course there are always going to be periods where you are truly “too busy”. The last few days before you submit a paper, the weeks leading up to a conference, or when you’re in the final stages of writing up. But in general there is nothing in your PhD that is so important that you can’t delay it for a few days/weeks/months. Most times your supervisor won’t mind waiting a few extra days for a draft (they are also busy!), and you can always email journal editors for extensions when writing reviews or returning corrections.

Full disclosure – I was the kind of PhD student that drives me crazy now. I refused to go to seminars unless they were completely related to what I was working on, I rarely read papers for lab meetings, and in my final year I stopped going to morning coffee, ate lunch at my desk and bit the head off anyone who came to my office to chat to my labmates (to be fair this got totally out of control when we got an espresso machine in the office and almost every postdoc in the building came by at least once a day! I’m blaming you Ezard! :P). I regret my tunnel vision now. There were so many things I could have taken time out to learn – things that would have saved me lots of time during my PhD and later in my career. This year I finally taught myself LaTeX for example, which would have saved me months of blood, sweat and tears formatting my thesis. I also wish I’d taken more time to learn to program properly. I’m now working hard to improve my coding, but see that if I’d taken a few months to do this in my PhD, I’d have saved myself a lot of heartache.

I guess my message to PhD students is to try and be less busy, and make more of an effort to enjoy the PhD experience! Easier said than done I know! I am sympathetic – I remember how it felt as a student. I remember feeling terribly inadequate compared to the high achieving PhD students and postdocs around me. I remember the crushing sense of panic and stress as my hand-in date approached and I still hadn’t got past my first chapter. I remember thinking that every hour doing something unrelated to my PhD was an hour wasted. But what I should have known, and what I’ll remind PhD students now, is that your PhD is about so much more than your thesis. Yes, you are judged on your thesis, and you will have to defend it. But you should also be training yourself to become part of the scientific community. Whether you stay in academia or not, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll ever work on the exact topic of your PhD again. So you’ll need an awareness of other things that are happening in the world of science! You’ll also need to develop other skills, like presentation skills, teaching, and outreach. You can’t do that if you only focus on your PhD topic and nothing else.

But how can we be less busy (and hence less stressed)? This is something I’m constantly trying to deal with myself (if you think you’re busy as a PhD student, don’t ask a Faculty member how busy they are!). A few things I’ve found useful are as follows:

1. Learn to stop when something is “good enough”
Many of the traits that make us good academics, like attention to detail and the desire to do our best at things, can also lead to terribly stressful perfectionism. Instead try to establish when something is “good enough” rather than “perfect”. This is something I’m trying to improve at myself, and I’ll admit that it’s difficult. However, as a PhD student your supervisor should be able to help. Sometimes you can leave stuff like properly formatting references until you’re ready to submit a paper. If you’re really struggling with one section, maybe send the rest to your supervisor for comments, rather than waiting until it’s all perfect (but ask them first).

I find deadlines help me with this – for example, I have a habit of constantly fiddling with lectures so if I have two weeks to make one, it will take me two weeks. However as time goes on, the amount of improvement approaches an asymptote, so two weeks of effort doesn’t create a lecture much better than one that takes me a week. Therefore I give myself strict amounts of time I’m allowed to work on each lecture. After that time passes it’s done. It’s not perfect, but I doubt the students would notice the difference. The same goes for conference presentations and paper drafts.

2. Use “waiting time” efficiently.
PhD students often forget in their rush to finish something and hand it to their supervisor, that their supervisor will take time to return it with comments. If you know this is going to happen you can use that waiting time more wisely. It’s often a good time to format references, add details to manuscript central if you’re submitting a paper, fiddle around with your thesis template etc. Also talk to your supervisor about when they have time to give you comments. There’s no sense in rushing to hand in a draft chapter the day before your supervisor goes on holiday for two weeks leaving you twiddling your thumbs.

3. Schedule time for non-essential reading or for learning skills
As a PhD student I stopped reading widely near the end of my PhD. However, at postdoc interviews I often got asked about what papers I’d read recently that I’d enjoyed. These questions are designed to see how broad your knowledge is, so citing the technical paper you just read on your PhD subject is not going to impress. Additionally, if you want to stay in science (academia or otherwise), you probably should have a basic knowledge of the current controversies in the field. The only way to do this is by reading. However, it’s hard to read non-essential stuff. The easiest way to ensure you do it is by scheduling a bit of time each week (maybe Friday afternoon or Monday morning) to do it. If you choose a time you usually get very little work done it won’t eat into your productivity. I often use this kind of scheduling to learn programming skills or to play with a new R package.

4. Say yes to opportunities!
Of course there’s a limit to how much you can say yes to. But remember that your time as a PhD student is probably one of the most flexible times of your life, especially if you don’t have kids yet. Your schedule is mostly yours to make. So if you can’t get anything to work, spend the day in a local museum and catch up one evening or at the weekend. If you live in a rainy place (cough cough Ireland) and the sun is out, take the afternoon off and go for a bike ride or a walk – you can work a little longer tomorrow when the sun disappears! If you get offered skills training take it, particularly if it’s free and doesn’t require traveling too far. If your friend wants a hand on tropical field work for a couple of weeks, and you have the money, go with them! It’s a great chance to see an exciting country in a whole new light. Go to seminars and conferences. Talk to your colleagues at coffee time. Take a proper lunch break. It’s amazing how much you can get done in short bursts when you need to, especially if you’ve scheduled in proper breaks.

5. But learn to say no to time sucks…
Not everything people ask you to do is going to be useful, and/or fun. If in doubt, speak to your supervisor before saying yes to things (you can then also use the old “my supervisor is an ogre and won’t let me help you, sorry” excuse). For example, organising an event like a conference or an outreach event, is a great thing to have on your CV. But once you have one of these on your CV the gains of organising a second one are low. These things often take up ridiculous amounts of time and energy. The same goes for teaching. It’s great to get teaching experience, but try and get quality experience with different kinds of teaching rather than saying yes to everything. Be strategic in what you spend your time on, based on filling gaps in your CV, and preferably on what you want to do after your PhD.

6. Talk to someone if you need help.
Finally, if you’re really struggling with feeling busy and overwhelmed, talk to someone! Sometimes in academia we have the habit of not talking about problems. This leads us to believe that everyone else is coping, and we’re the only ones struggling. The truth is EVERYONE struggles sometimes. Talk to your friends/PhD colleagues about how you feel – they’ll soon make you feel less alone. Talk to your supervisor, or another faculty member, about ways of coping with stress. And remember most places have a student counseling service if things are too hard to discuss.

Now go forth, be less busy, more happy and more productive as a result!

DISCLAIMER – Your PhD is not all about your thesis. BUT finishing your thesis on time is the most important thing at the end of the day. This post is not about encouraging slacking off, it’s about encouraging efficient working practices. Research has shown that people working 35 hour weeks get as much done as those working 60 hours (long-term, short-term there are gains in working long hours). So use your time wisely, work hard when you have the energy and motivation to do it, and speak to your supervisor if you’re worried about your progress. They are here to help!

Author: Natalie Cooper, @nhcooper123, nhcooper[at]tcd.ie

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Learning the art of conferencing

Networking

The start of the new academic year marks the end of my second conference season. I attended two conferences; Evolution 2014 in Raleigh, North Carolina and the British Ecological Society Macroecology meeting at the University of Nottingham. They were at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of size and specificity but they were both interesting, useful and, most surprisingly for me, enjoyable.

The difference is that I knew what to expect. Last summer was my first taste of conferences along with the intellectual and social stamina required to last through a day of talks, coffee breaks, poster sessions and post-conference socialising. I was very lucky that I went to each event as part of a group, so there was always a familiar face to find in a crowd and it made networking easier but I still found the whole experience challenging.

This time around was different; the familiarity made everything easier. For a start, I finally figured out how to plan a sensible schedule which didn’t involve running from one room to another between talks. Most importantly, I’m learning how to “play the game”. I’m slowly figuring out how to give an elevator pitch about my research without making the recipient’s eyes glaze-over and how to talk to other people about their research without sounding like a complete idiot. I’m still a long way off from being a proper conference pro but I’m getting there.

Giving a talk instead of a poster made a huge difference. Last year I brought the same poster to two different conferences. Through the course of each poster session, I spoke to a handful of people, some of whom seemed at least partly interested in my research but mostly they were being nice to the student with no one else at her poster. The experience definitely made me into a more pro-active browser at other poster sessions. People usually appreciate some interaction and it’s always more interesting to talk to someone about their research, even if it’s completely outside my area, instead of just admiring their poster design skills.

This year I gave a short talk at both the conferences I attended. It was nerve-wracking but definitely much more beneficial for my research and also my conference experience. I was lucky to have some useful preparation: we’ve often covered presentation skills in NERD club and I benefited from great constructive criticism during practice talks, especially from Thomas and Natalie who could probably have delivered my talk word for word by the time of the conference! It was worth the effort. My presentation was not ground-breaking in terms of the science content or delivery but I was pleased with how my talks went at both conferences. It was also very beneficial to get the feedback, comments and suggestions from the people in the audience who spoke to me afterwards. You get a lot more feedback after telling an audience your research “story” for 10 minutes rather than hoping to attract passers-by to a poster. Furthermore, at a small conference like the macroecology BES group, giving a talk helped to identify me as the “tenrec girl” so I could speed past the normal elevator pitch opening which marks most initial conference conversations.

Some people take to conferences easily; others have to work a bit more. If you’re part of the latter group then I can assure you that everything becomes easier and more enjoyable with a bit of familiarity, practice and experience. I still have a lot to learn but I’m getting there. I’ve realised that many people, particularly the more junior researchers, also find it tricky to master the art of conferencing. So if you’re feeling awkward standing around the coffee counter or sitting in a seminar on your own, chances are that the person next to you is in the same boat and you will both be happier if someone takes the first plunge into conversation. You will add another name to your list of friendly faces in the crowd or maybe meet a new collaborator. In any case, you’ve got nothing to lose so give it a go!

Author: Sive Finlay, sfinlay[at]tcd.ie, @SiveFinlay

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Gender balanced conferences – we all need to try harder!

gender equal opportunity or representation

Recently a conference on Phylogenetic Comparative Methods was advertised online, and quickly the Twitter community noted that all six of the plenary talks were being given by men. Normally my response to this kind of thing would be some grumpy tweeting and then I’d let it go. However, this time was different; I know one of the organisers, several of the plenary speakers are my collaborators and this is the field I’ve dedicated the last eight years of my career to. Therefore I didn’t think I could let this pass by unchallenged. Continue reading “Gender balanced conferences – we all need to try harder!”

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We’re back!

Back-to-School

It’s that time of year again, the quiet before the storm of Fresher’s week and the start of a new academic year.

After our short break, EcoEvo@TCD is back and raring to go. You can expect lots more posts about our research, seminar series, outreach activities, conferences and fieldwork as well as tips and tricks for surviving in academia.

We’ve already kicked off the year with our second annual NERD club AGM. It was a great opportunity to discuss what we covered throughout the year and to make plans for the months ahead. (For the uninitiated, NERD club is our networks in ecology/evolution research discussion group but feel free to think of it in the true sense of the word too).

Here’s our NERD club prize winners for 2013/14

Best session: Paul for his talk on carnivory in plants

Best blog: Adam for “Flatland” and the “Heat and Light of Science Communication”

Best pun (aka the McMahon and Kane memorial punning prize): Adam and Thomas for “Gould Mine”

Contributor of the year: Kevin

Best PI called Andrew: What is Andrew Jackson? (No-one knows!)

We’ve had some excellent sessions about transferable skills, how to navigate the perils of academia and great discussions and collaborations on current research projects. We’ve got lots more interesting topics planned for the year ahead which will definitely make an appearance on EcoEvo@TCD.

It’s also been a very successful year for our blog. We had a winner at the ABSW science writers awards and two semi-finalists in another international blog competition. We’re also on the short list for the best science and technology blog in the Irish blog awards.

So whether you’re packing away your fieldwork gear after another season, dreading the darker evenings or sharpening your pencils for another academic year, rest assured that you can look forward to some more ecology and evolution- related musings from the EcoEvo@TCD team.

Author: Sive Finlay, @SiveFinlay

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We’re all going on a (science) summer holiday…

summer holiday

 

We’ve had another fantastic year at EcoEvo@TCD. We’ve published some high profile papers and brought back tales from our fieldwork experiences. We’ve learned how to navigate some of the perils of academia and thoroughly enjoyed hosting an excellent series of seminar speakers.

Now EcoEvo@TCD will be taking a short break over the summer so we won’t be updating the blog over July and August. We’re currently in the midst of another conference season, presenting our research at various international meetings and learning about the latest cool scientific research. Add that to some exciting travels and summer science projects and we’ll have plenty of stories to tell.

When we get back we’ll report on the highlights of conference season and bring you more ecology and evolution related news, views and advice.

We hope you have a wonderful summer. See you in September!

Author: Sive Finlay, sfinlay[at]tcd.ie, @SiveFinlay

Image Source: pixabay.com

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How to get the benefits of mobility – even when your movement is constrained

acadm_mobil

There are a long list of reasons why mobility in an academic career is considered highly desirable, both by individuals and the institutions which fund them. Scientists move around to take up jobs in a tight and international job market, communicate their work to the wider scientific community, work with new people, learn new techniques, strengthen networks or because they like adventure. However, there are many excellent scientists who are constrained in various ways to be less mobile than they would like or than would be good for their careers .

I have always loved to travel, and after almost 15 years of moving around for jobs, fieldwork, conferences and adventure, my own constraints arrived in the guise of two adorable children. My kids have taught me a lot about the benefits of a more sedentary life but I still have itchy feet and the desire to interact with colleagues internationally. This period in my life led me for the first time to really think about what it is about mobility that is of benefit and how to achieve that while staying at home.

Constraints are costly. Some constraints can be overcome by providing resources or altering institutional structures.  Other constraints are personal or philosophical and might best be considered as hard constraints (unchangeable). Common constraints include personal family situation such as partner’s career and caring responsibilities for children, parents or friends and personal mental and physical health. The costs of mobility include financial costs, disruption, adaptation to a new scientific and/or social culture, language barriers and leaving a productive group. For all of these reasons scientists may be temporarily or permanently constrained from being able to physically move locations for work reasons.

It makes sense to me to have a range of strategies for getting the benefits while minimizing the costs of mobility. Grant applications sometimes explicitly or implicitly require or evaluate mobility as a proxy for the benefits obtained. If you have had your mobility constrained it might be useful for you in grant applications to articulate what strategies you have used to get the benefits of mobility despite your constraints.

First determine exactly what your constraints are and exactly what activities are constrained. For example do you care for young children which prevents you from traveling overnight for a period of time? Do you need to be in close proximity to healthcare? Determine the boundaries of your constraints. Next estimate the benefits of mobility to your particular situation – the benefits of mobility might be largest if you are currently in a small, relatively unproductive group with limited resources and the benefits of mobility might be much smaller if you are already in a large, productive, well connected (lots of incoming visitors) group.

Determine the costs of mobility: financial, social, environmental and to your productivity. Costs may be larger as you progress through your career but are also more likely to be defrayed through relocation expenses paid or broader networks of colleagues gained. Perhaps for you the costs outweigh the benefits as you are already in the ideal group and don’t want to move because it’s working extremely well for you. Great, but be open minded about additional opportunities to gain additional benefits at low cost.

It is important to recognize that a case for gaining the benefits of mobility may be easier to make with a broad view of mobility. Mobility can be short- or long-term and can be inter-institutional, cross-sectoral, national, international or intercontinental in scale. Many benefits could be gained from doing internships in a different institution or industry but remaining in the same city for example. Below are a few strategies that might be helpful, not all will be possible depending on your situation.

Find a position in a group in your location which is large, productive & well connected. You don’t necessarily have to be employed by them if you can negotiate a day or two a week as a visitor there.

Make use of technology for virtual collaboration – Skype, Adobe Connect, Google hangouts, dropbox, telephone, email, twitter, blogs, Mendeley, Git etc. These require a bit of work to ensure efficacy and avoid the “out of sight, out of mind” problem of not bumping into collaborators in the hallway.

Attend meetings in virtual mode by accepting to give talks but ask to be able to give a video presentation, this is most effective if you can also take part in the discussion afterwards via video conferencing. Ask the organisers to record and send you the video afterwards so you can re-use it. Use twitter to keep up with what’s happening at the meeting if you can’t attend. Tweet and/or blog for others if you can attend in person. I was immensely grateful for the tweeters and bloggers when I was at home on maternity leave and couldn’t attend “my” meetings for a few years.

Attend conferences and extend your network, make sure you gain active collaboration from conference meetings. Be part of international working groups, engage or initiate global research networks.

Develop relationships with potential collaborators via social media, name recognition is important and people will be more inclined to work with you if they have interacted with you positively via twitter/facebook/whatever young people do these days.

Invite visitors to your institution. Find out if there are funds available to help visitors pay for their visit (e.g. visiting fellowships, travel funds if they give a seminar), help visitors apply for these. Paying for a few extra days of accommodation for a visitor if their flight is already covered can be a cost effective way to encourage more interaction. Offer to let them stay at your house. Parasitise sabbatical visitors to other close-by institutions by inviting them to your institution for a day/week/month.

Apply for grants to fund workshops which enable you to run working groups at your own institution and which fund the travel & accommodation of visitors.

If you get invited to present or visit and can’t do it, ask if you can send your student/post-doc/colleague in your place. Make sure you follow up with your proxy to ensure you learn what they’ve learned and if there are outputs of the visit that you can also contribute to.

Lobby funding organisations and institutions to allow your mobility constraints to be taken into account in funding applications and promotion cases (e.g. caring for family members).

Lobby funding bodies and employers to directly fund expenses associated with travel (e.g. extra care for dependents).

Record on your portfolio all invitations to speak/present/take part, even if you have to turn them down as these are useful indicators of your profile and measures of esteem.

Be creative in finding ways to relax your constraints, perhaps you can pay for a grandparent to travel and accompany you on a conference trip as extra child support, perhaps you can take your baby with you to the conference and rely on them to stay quiet enough for you to give a talk with them asleep in a sling, or pass them onto trusted colleagues willing to babysit for half an hour. I took my 2 month old to a workshop, pictured here with Antoine Guisan, where she got passed around several academic alloparents to enable me to contribute to this paper. Perhaps you can afford extra childcare by living frugally while travelling. Be flexible.

guisan

Ask conference organisers to make provisions if you need to bring your kid/s with you. For example have a family room with the talks screened via video-conferencing/skype or provide crèche facilities.

Discuss with your partner possibilities for one or both of you to take up part-time work or for your partner to become primary home carer. Move closer to extended family, especially if they are willing to help with caring responsibilities.

Finally, for funders, conference organisers and others who rely on the ability and willingness of scientists to pack their bags and jump on a plane at a moment’s notice, spare a thought for those who are constrained. Provide alternative arrangements for child-care at meetings, provide opportunities for video conferencing, encourage participation and consider evaluating CVs based on what benefits have been gained, not just how many times someone has moved.

Author: Yvonne Buckley, buckleyy[at]tcd.ie, @y_buckley

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Systematic Reviews

ploughed

Before I came to TCD, I spent my last six months at Lancaster University working with Dr Georgina Key on a systematic review of methods to make agricultural soils more resilient to threats like climate change, and erosion. What is a systematic review I hear you cry? Allow me to elaborate, and share some of our experiences from doing something slightly different.

A systematic review draws together and summarises the available scientific literature surrounding a particular topic or method. The Cochrane Collaboration, which produces systematic reviews in medicine and healthcare, defines such reviews as “a systematic, up-to-date summary of reliable evidence”. The aim of a systematic review is to provide the public, policy-makers and practitioners with a clear, unbiased picture of the latest, most reliable science on a certain practice, so that they can make informed decisions on how suitable that method is likely to be for them.

The goal of our systematic review was to produce a list of actions that could be used to improve the resilience of agricultural soils under pressure from a variety of threats. The first steps we took involved coming up with a list of key issues that would be important to manage agricultural soils in order to maintain sustainable food production in the future. We then took to the peer-reviewed literature, searching for experimentally tested solutions to the issues we’d identified, using a combination of journal trawls and keyword searches.

Journal trawls involved identifying relevant journals, like Soil Use and Management and Geoderma, then systematically searching all volumes of each journal for articles involving the issues we’d identified. Our keyword searches took a more targeted approach, using combinations of keywords to whittle down a selection of relevant articles. These approaches produced a large number of articles – far too many to summarise effectively in the time available – so we shortlisted them based on a number of criteria, foremost of which was ‘Has the action (e.g. non-inversion tillage) been tested using a robust, experimental design?’ We also filtered our keyword searches, carried out in ISI Web of Science, to the top 100 results, sorted by relevance.

Having eventually come up with a list of articles that tested the actions we’d identified, we set about summarising them. This was done according to a set template, using a specific style. This was initially restrictive, and difficult to adapt to – each article had to be summarised using specific vocabulary, within 200 words – but it ensured that the summaries would be understandable by people without a science background, and that the key message of the article wouldn’t be obscured by our own prejudices regarding the research.

Writing the summaries was the most time-consuming, but also one of the most rewarding, aspects of the project. By writing lots of summaries, we started to develop more of an understanding of how to write about science in a way that completely avoided jargon. This isn’t as easy as it sounds! But it is a vital skill for scientists to learn, in order to communicate their work to the public, and the people who will eventually turn it into policy. Having read lots of abstracts, those that stood out were the ones that communicated the message of the paper succinctly, in language that a non-expert could understand.

The article summaries and key messages from our short synopsis are now online– you can select an ‘action’, and read through the key messages, definitions, and all the evidence that we found and summarised for the use of that action, and its effects, in agriculture. I think there’s real value of having all this information collated together in one place, and communicated in an understandable way. Our soils synopsis is one of a number of synopses that you can browse through on the NERC Sustainable Food Knowledge Exchange Programme website.

Although it was only a short project, putting the synopsis together was a rewarding experience for both of us, particularly in terms of communication skills developed and networks joined. The synopsis that we produced is by no means the final product, and will need to be updated in the future to keep up with the amount of continual research in this area. The next step is to assess the synopsis, and its implicit recommendations, by asking experts and practitioners in the field how effective they think the research we covered would be, if it was implemented. This step should provide valuable feedback, helping to highlight any gaps in our synopsis, as well as improving future synopses.

Authors: Mike Whitfield and Georgina Key

About the authors

Mike Whitfield has a PhD in peatland carbon cycling from Lancaster University. Last year he helped to design and implement a long-term grassland biodiversity experiment in the Yorkshire Dales and worked with Georgina Key on the soil sustainability synopsis for six months, before moving to Dublin. Mike’s current postdoc at TCD focuses on modelling greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural land, with the aim of producing a map of estimated greenhouse gas emissions from soil for the whole of Ireland.

http://mikewhitfield.co.uk

Twitter: @mgwhitfield

Georgina Key has a PhD in ecosystem service provision, specifically conservation pest control. Having completed her first postdoc at Manchester reviewing literature on maintaining soil fertility, she is currently doing an assessment of the literature in collaboration with Cambridge University and Waitrose. In the future she hopes to work with tea and coffee companies, implementing sustainable growing practices and improving rural livelihoods.

Email:georginakey[at]outlook.com 

Twitter: @KeyGeorgina

 

Image credit: Treehouse1977 on Flickr

 

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Please consider this a polite spanking

peer_review

The recent hilarious #SixWordPeerReview hashtag on Twitter got me thinking about the first ever review I got for my first ever paper (thanks @Phalaropus for the reminder!). I thought I’d share it here (and if you want to see if you agree with the reviewer, the paper was eventually published in Global Ecology and Biogeography: Cooper et al 2008).

As a bit of background, I collected lots of data during my Masters project on life history traits of amphibians and then looked at macroecological correlates of clutch size, body size and geographical range size, and also at how these variables correlated with IUCN Red List status. My dataset contained over 600 species of amphibian – pretty much all the species I could get hold of data for at that time. Here are the “best” comments from the reviewer (the whole review was two pages long so I’m not reproducing the whole thing). My favourite comment was at the end.

“the study was done on less than 10% of the appropriate species […] Such academic laziness is inexcusable and scandalous”

“there are many instances where the authors appear to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes”

“It is a strong reflection of the workers to submit such a poorly conceived and obvious “quick and dirty” first stab at something that needs to be taken much more seriously”

“the clear misinformation in the abstract […] is obviously the kind of positive spin more associated with politics than science.”

“Who would be fooled by such tricks as claiming that data on <10% of amphibians is “large”. Certainly not this reviewer.”

“Without even a cursory explanation for such an egregiously low sampled diversity, it is hard to glean any merit at all from this study.”

“How can sane scientists think that <10% of the diversity would be sufficient to advocate involved analyses and draw conclusions?”

“This is another example of embarrassingly obvious laziness.”

“That goes beyond even forgivable bending of the truth”

“If any of the authors were thinking, they would have realized that ALL of the reasons to do a phylogenetically corrected analysis are not met by their data. In fact, if there was ever a gross and more ill-conceived reason to NOT do a phylogenetically corrected analysis, this would be the dataset to do so on.”

“Errors in basic addition are another serious embarrassment” [FYI the maths was fine, the reviewer made the error not us!]

“I could go on, but I think that it is not worth my time at this point to find more problems (there are still many other issues the authors should go back to first principles on)”

[And finally the crowning glory of all the comments I’ve ever received in a review]:

“Please consider this a polite spanking.”

As a first year PhD student this obviously upset me. But after a quick cry, a slice of Battenberg [cake], and a couple of pints of cider I was able to see the funny side! I still keep a print out in my office as a reminder that even when I get a bad review, it can never be as terrible as my first review! I’ve never worked out who the reviewer was, but as the editor said they were clearly having a bad day! I hope things got better for them! This review also reminds me to always write constructive comments, especially for PhD students, and if I don’t have anything nice to say I write a short review rather than airing all my grievances in print!

Author: Natalie Cooper, ncooper[at]tcd.ie, @nhcooper123