NERD club Archives - EcoEvo@TCD

20/02/201925/02/2019

One Thing For Nature

If you could do one thing for nature, what would it be?

Invent a new way of automatically cataloguing species? Put location trackers on every single individual of a threatened animal population? Start collecting DNA sequences of threatened species so we can de-extinct them, Jurassic Park style?

The answers I got to this question when I posed it to our Tuesday lunchtime group of PhD students, researchers, and academics, was far less sci-fi and much more pragmatic.

05/12/201605/04/2019

Research haikus

Last month, the Zoology Department’s Dr. David Kelly launched his first book of Japanese short form poetry, Hammerscale from the Thrush’s Anvil. At the launch of the book, David invited us in the audience to try our hand at writing our own haikus.

Taking him up on his challenge, and taking inspiration from his book, a few of us in the School of Natural Sciences have penned our own poems based on our areas of study. We even have a contribution from David Kelly himself!

Trying not to sacrifice coherency at the alter of syllable number was a rather new struggle for most of us, but we managed and, I’d like to think, emerged with a greater appreciation for the poets in our midst. Read on for our science-y foray into the arts!

(Paula Tierney @_ptierney)

_______________ Continue reading “Research haikus”

23/02/201623/02/2016

The up-goer five: Explaining research using the “ten hundred” most used words.

At today’s NERD club, we tried our hand at explain our research using the up-goer five, which limited our available vocabulary to the “ten-hundred” most common words (thousand isn’t one of them).

After some brief hesitation, the 9 of us present found out that despite being quite challenging, this can be an incredibly fun and useful activity when it comes to explaining our often jargon-filled research to the public. While this system is rigid, and a tad extreme with words such as “plant” and “science” unavailable, it forced us to find alternative ways of explaining what we do.

Here’s what we came up with:

Prof. Yvonne Buckley

Original version

Decision makers and land managers are increasingly required to manage landscapes for multiple purposes and benefits. However, despite progress in the development of frameworks linking natural capital to the provision of ecosystem services and human benefits there remains little guidance for how management interventions can improve ecosystem service provision. As ecosystem services cannot be directly influenced, interventions need to be directed towards natural capital stocks. We provide a framework that explicitly links natural capital stocks to ecosystem service provision and identify manageable attributes of natural capital stocks as the critical intervention point. A structured decision making process based on our framing of the ecosystem services concept can facilitate its application on the ground.

Simple version

How to manage the living things that help us to live and enjoy life
People need many different things like food and wood from the land and I am interested in helping them to manage their land to get lots of good things from it. People have come up with ways of finding out the relationship between living things and the good things like food but it is still hard to find out how to manage the land for what we want. This is because when we make living things different it is hard to tell what will happen to the good things we want. We think the best way of getting out of this problem is to understand how changing where living things are and how many of them there are changes the food and other good things that we want. We help by giving people a plan for how to manage living things that will give us more of the good things we want from the land. This plan will help people to talk about what they want from the land and how to get it.

Olive Heffernan

The world is getting warmer, much warmer and quickly. It’s hot outside, in the air and in the water, even deep down in the water. Ice is becoming water, land is getting drier, so in some places its too wet and in others its too dry. People are having a bad time in lots of places. Animals are sad too. We know all of this because of the hard work of people’s brains.

What can be done?

We can drive less. We can eat fewer moving, living things. We can wear more clothes and not make our houses hot. Or we can do nothing. And wait until it is much hotter. Then we can try to change the world by putting things in space that will block the sun out. Or we can put stuff in the sky to make it cooler. If we do none of these things we might end up in the water, in hot, hot water.

Dr Kevin Healy

Two legged animal eating animals were around for 160,000,000 years but are not anymore. We do not really know what they ate. Some were as small as a dog while others were as big as a bus so they would have needed more food. One type of food that they might have eaten was already dead food. We know animals today eat food they found that was already dead so animals that are not around may have also eaten dead food. But did the big animals that are no longer around eat more or less dead food than the small animals? We made computers games to show that actually both big and small animals are very bad at eating dead things, while animals in the middle are much better at eating dead things. This was true even if we changed how far they could see, how much dead food was there, how many other animal eating animals were around and how much food they needed. We show that dead things might have been important to animals no longer around and that how big you are might still be important to how much dead stuff animals eat both today and in the past.

Luca Coscieme

“If I have everything I need, to do whatever I need to, I am happy. Just to say, if I have food I eat and I am happy. If I don’t have enough I have to eat less, or take food from somewhere else. If I take it from somewhere else, maybe another person will not have it for his own.

To do food I need land. The problem is that after I use land to do food this land gets bad and is not beautiful anymore. But if I have a lot of money, I can buy land and food from somewhere else and keep my land beautiful and clean.

If people can buy the land and the food they need, there can be a person with more money than you that buys all the things you need, and you can’t eat and live. So, it is important to control what people do with their money. It is important to check that no one is taking food or using land that is needed for another person to live.

People with no food get angry and one day they will come where people with money live and take back their land and their food.

I am studying a way to control if people with money is taking food and land from other persons that really need it (more than these people with money).

We can stop that by checking if these people really need these things and if they can find these things where they live. If they can, they have to use them, instead of going somewhere else to make less beautiful the land of other people.

Maureen Williams

Mean animals that live in other animals and how they make the other animals do weird things when its hot

Mean animals that live in other animals and then hurt the other animals are in many places. The animals I study all live in water that does not run. The mean animals sometimes make the house animals do things they would not do most of the time. When the house animals do strange things, this can make everyone else in the whole water group do things different to how they usually do and power from food can go to different places. When the water gets hot, everyone in the water does things not how they do them in cold water. I study how the mean animals and the house animals do things when the water is hot and cold and how this makes everyone in the water different. I also study how all the animals doing different things can make the power from food go different places and can change who eats who and how often. I study these things in the water outside and in small water inside.

Aoibheann Gaughran

How large a group of animals is can change how they act. It is important to know how big or small a group of animals are so we can understand how they play with one another and live in their home. Small night time animals with black and white faces are important to study because they get a cold that they can pass on to bigger black and white animals that live in fields eating green stuff to make the white stuff we put in our coffee. We carried out a study of papers that looked at the grouping of small black and white faced animals, how many of them lived together, how big their homes were and how many there were in total. We showed that how many animals there are in an area, changes how they act, their relationships with one another and with other animals that may not be their family or friends. All of this means we can better understand how these animals pass their colds onto one another. We have come up with a group of names that you can use to quickly and easily tell other people many animals there are in an area and how it makes this group different to other groups. We hope that our study will help people who want to save the small black and white animals as well as those people who want to do away with the colds that the animals get in a much better way than they do now.

Dermott McMorrough

I want to know how the brain understands what it sees in the world. When we see the world through our eyes, they send this to the brain telling it what they saw. The way the brain understands this is important because when the brain talks to the eyes, the pictures can be slow or might not get to the eyes at all. When this happens in people, they think they have a friend when they do not. They are talking to themselves.

We try to understand how the eyes talk to the brain by making simple games on a computer that make animals play with each other with an angry animal chasing a smaller animal. We set up roads between the cells in the brain and then make the brain bigger to see is the angry animal better at chasing the smaller animal in the computer game.

We try to understand this by looking into the animal brain while it plays around in interesting worlds on the computer. By changing the number of roads in their brains before and after the games, animals change what they catch, we hope to learn more about the brains power to understand these games.

This study will make new games of animal moving by bringing good ideas from old people in white clothes to the field of moving studies. Doing so will allow us to answer simple questions about the relationship between bodies of angry animals and their food and to add for the first time why food matters in such relationships. These relationships explain how animals talk with the world around them, and are at the heart of our entire idea of world.

Alain Finn

We study how and why trees and other green living things live and grow where they do. To do this we have to go to where the green living things live and look at them and what other things are living beside them. Green living things need to live in the ground, the ground is different all over the world and some things can live in some places and not others. We try to understand why this is by changing what’s in the ground and seeing what type and how many of each thing continues to live there.

Green things what live in the ground can also change themselves to fit the type of ground, rain or sun they get every day. They can change many things such as how big or small they grow or how thick their leaves are but quite often to make a good change to one part of their body they must also make a bad change to another. We try to understand what causes these changes by looking at one green thing that lives all over the world and seeing what changes are made and where the things with those changes are living.

Attempting to describe population ecology

If you’re interested, ESA’s new sci comm section has some useful tools for science communication: https://advancingecocomm.wordpress.com/

With thanks to the members of NERD club. You can find them on twitter at @y_buckley, @O_Heffernan, @healyke, @lucacoscieme, @MoDubs11, @Aoibh_G, @derm_mcm, @finchyIRL

INSPIRED BY XKCD. (THE IMAGE IS FROM #386.)
CREATED BY THEO SANDERSON. HOW DOES IT WORK?

09/01/2015

Career planning for PhD students

The Royal Society has published a new set of guidelines for managing the career expectations of PhD students in STEMM subjects (science, engineering, technology, maths and medicine). The publication was the result of a series of roundtable discussions held at the Royal Society with PhD students, supervisory teams and University careers professionals.

This blog post from the British Ecological Society provides a good overview of the document and discussion of how it fits into existing career development opportunities for PhD students.

With ever increasing numbers of PhD graduates and restricted academic jobs, academic careers are becoming the exception rather than the rule in many STEMM disciplines. The report highlights the need for PhD students to be realistic about their career expectations and goals and the importance of continuous professional development during their studies.

The document contains guidelines and recommendations for students, supervisors, career professionals and higher education institutions. It’s very encouraging to see that the training and mentoring of ecology and evolutionary graduate students at TCD already follows many of the principles.

This is mainly due to the success of NERD club, our weekly meeting of ecology and evolution researchers. The primary purpose of this group is to develop research projects and encourage new collaborations but many sessions are also devoted to career development. We have discussed academic careers advice and application tips but also non-academic careers and the transferrable skills such as public communication and teaching that can be applied to any career choice. As students, we’re very lucky to benefit from the mentoring and advice of enthusiastic and dedicated staff members.

One aspect of the Royal Society guidelines which I hadn’t considered previously is the recommendation that PhD students should seek a mentor who is not their supervisor for career advice. It’s an interesting suggestion, especially since many supervisors have limited personal experience of non-academic careers, and a good thing to consider for any PhD student.

Hopefully these new guidelines will encourage more students, supervisors and institutions to make broad career planning an integral part of every PhD student’s experience.

Author: Sive Finlay, @SiveFinlay

Photo credit: http://sironaconsulting.com/2009/10/29/my-top-10-funny-job-interview-cartoons/

10/09/201419/09/2014

We’re back!

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

Image source

16/05/201412/05/2014

Bumblebees are not deterred by ecologically relevant concentrations of nectar toxins

In a previous blog post I wrote about my work on “toxic nectar.” This paradoxical phenomenon occurs when potentially deterrent or toxic plant secondary compounds, usually associated with defense against herbivores, are found in floral nectar rewards. Throughout my PhD I’ve spent countless hours in the lab performing experiments on toxic nectar, discussed this work at Nerd Club, and presented it at conferences. After what seems like an awfully long time, our first article on nectar toxins has been published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Here I want to describe what I think are the most exciting findings of the study, and also talk about how this work came to be part of my PhD.

When I first started my PhD I had what seemed like a never-ending list of questions about nectar toxins: do they impact plant fitness? What about pollinator survival? Are there sublethal costs to pollinators that ingest nectar toxins? But before we could tackle these bigger-picture concepts, we kept on coming back to a very simple question: are bees deterred by naturally occurring concentrations of secondary compounds in floral nectar?

We know that many plant secondary compounds, such as alkaloids, phenolics, and terpenes, play a role in deterring herbivores form consuming plant tissues, and that’s why toxic nectar is such a paradox. Why would plants have deterrent compounds in a tissue that is meant to act as a reward for pollinating flower-visitors? Nectar secondary compounds, however, tend to occur at much lower concentrations than those found in leaf or floral tissues. Previous work found that whether or not bees will forage on artificial nectar containing secondary compounds depends on ecological context, i.e. the availability of other food sources. However most work on this subject focuses on only one compound (gelsemine) and tests concentrations that are well above those found in floral nectar.

One might hypothesize that secondary compounds at nectar-relevant concentrations should not be deterrent to pollinators. If nectar toxins do deter legitimate pollinators, plant pollination and hence reproductive success could suffer, leading to selection for lower concentrations of nectar compounds. In addition, the direct impacts of nectar toxins on pollinators are still understudied; deterrence behavior might indicate a cost in terms of health or fitness for the pollinators. So we were convinced it was well worth determining deterrence thresholds for several of the most common/popular nectar toxins, and comparing these thresholds to nectar-relevant concentrations, but how did we do it?

The experimental design was very simple (my favorite kind!); we used an economically and ecologically important pollinator, Bombus terrestris, in a series of controlled, paired laboratory bioassays. In each assay, we offered bees two solutions of identical sugar content, one containing a secondary compound of interest and one without it. We repeated this 24-hour assay at a range of concentrations that included the nectar relevant dosage for each compound we tested. The deterrence threshold was determined when bumblebees significantly preferred the sucrose solution over the sucrose solution containing the compound. We also measured the total food consumed and bumblebee survival. I spent a lot of time in the laboratory and the bee room, weighing feeding tubes and counting dead bees; I’m not going to lie, I may have succumbed to talking to my bees now and again. It gets lonely in the lab! It was all worth it in the end though, because what we found was pretty interesting.

IMG_0038 (1) — These were my friends for many hours!

Our experiments showed that bumblebees are actually rather bad at detecting nectar toxins. The most deterrent compound was the alkaloid quinine, which was avoided at concentrations as low as 0.01 mM. All the other compounds we tested (caffeine, nicotine, amygdalin, and grayanotoxin) had deterrence thresholds 7-60 times greater than the concentration range naturally found in nectar. Previous work on the honeybee found that it too has poor acuity for the detection of nectar toxins, especially compared to insects in the orders Diptera and Lepidtopera. So why is it that social generalist bee species are relatively insensitive to the plant secondary compounds in their food? One hypothesis we highlighted in the discussion is that the relationship between bees and plants is largely mutualistic, as opposed to the antagonist interactions between plants and herbivores. There may not be strong enough selection pressure on bees to develop more sensitive gustatory receptors, especially because in eusocial bee species, individual bees are the consumers, but selection pressures act on the colony as the reproductive unit.

For decades, researchers of plant-animal interactions have been asking how and why toxic nectar evolved and is maintained in plant populations. Our work helps us to better understand the functional significance of toxic nectar. If legitimate pollinators fail to be deterred by nectar compounds at low concentrations, the plant is less likely to suffer from reduced pollination. This trait therefore may be maintained in plant populations, especially if it confers some sort of fitness advantage to the plant. What kind of fitness advantage could these compounds provide you ask? There are a plethora of possibilities, including antimicrobial resistance and selection against more sensitive nectar robbers or thieves. Possibly the presence of the compounds in nectar is simply a consequence of defense of other plant tissues. The results from our study, however, suggest that these other factors affecting nectar secretion and production are more likely to select for the production of toxins in nectar of bee pollinated plants, rather than pollinator preference.

Check the paper for more details and to read the whole story!

Author: Erin Jo Tiedeken, tiedekee[at]tcd.ie, @EJTiedeken

Images: Wikicommons and E.J. Tiedeken

28/04/201406/04/2019

Dying without wings: Part II

Last week our newest EcoEvo@TCD paper came out in PRSB (it will be Open Access soon but currently it’s behind a pay wall – feel free to email me for a copy in the meantime. Code for the multiple PGLS models can be found here). This paper is exciting for me for two reasons – firstly because the science is really cool and secondly because of how it came about. In a previous post I explained the results of the paper. Today I want to focus on how it came about. Continue reading “Dying without wings: Part II”

31/01/201421/01/2014

NERD club transferrable skills: reviewers, rejections and responses

Academic publishing: the currency of any research career. It’s all very straightforward; take your most recent ground-breaking results, wrap them up into a neat paper, choose the perfect journal, allow said paper to persuade an editor and reviewers of your brilliance and bask in the reflective glow of getting your research out into the world. Whether you see this rosy scenario as a target or delusional and unattainable aspirations, things rarely work out so smoothly. Instead, every researcher must learn to deal with the topic of one of our recent NERD club discussions; reviewers, rejections and responses. As a collective of staff, postdocs and postgraduate students, here are our thoughts on the dos and don’ts of dealing with the three r’s of academia.

1) Reviewers

Some journals invite authors to suggest reviewers or editors for their papers. If this happens, pick who you think is the “best” person whether that’s because the person is an expert in your field (although see our final point below), likely to give a fair review or because they are familiar with your work. Only suggest people to be reviewers if they have published themselves i.e. aim at the level of senior graduate student or from post-doc upwards. It’s also a good idea to choose someone that you’ve cited a lot in your manuscript (no harm to get on their good side). Equally, if you gave a conference talk recently, remember that person who seemed so interested in and enthusiastic about your work in the pub afterwards – chances are that they might be a fair and favourable reviewer. We also thought that, if you feel it’s necessary and you have a good reason, it might be a good idea to make an editor aware of people who you would prefer not to review your paper. However, be warned of the rumours that some editors may prefer to ignore such preferences and deliberately choose people from that “exclusion” list as reviewers.

In contrast, when selecting potential reviewers or editors, don’t choose someone who you have thanked in the acknowledgements of your manuscript. These are usually people who helped out or offered advice at some stage during the research so they would have a conflict of interest when it comes to reviewing the manuscript. Of course, you can also use this guideline to your advantage by seeking advice from and therefore acknowledging people who you definitely want to avoid as potential reviewers… Also from a conflict of interest point of view, don’t suggest your main collaborators, close friends or people from your own institution as potential reviewers. Similarly, for obvious reasons, don’t choose someone as a potential reviewer if you know that they dislike you or your work!

Once you have considered all these points, our final piece of advice about choosing reviewers or editors is don’t get hung up on it! Your preferred reviewers may not accept the manuscript, particularly if they are the senior, time-limited experts in your field. Finding reviewers for a manuscript is ultimately a lottery so, having thought about a few of our suggested guidelines, there’s no point in agonising over the process too much.

2) Rejection

It’s never pleasant to think about but your chances of rejection in all aspects of academia are high. Rejection of a manuscript can be particularly disheartening as it represents a dismissal of months if not years of your hard work. Our main piece of advice is not to do anything hasty. However unfair, pedantic or ridiculous the reasons which “justify” the rejection may initially seem, their bitter sting usually mellows if you take the time to sleep on it (after getting cross and having some comfort food/drink/other activities…). Similarly, don’t ruin your Friday evening/weekend/holiday by obsessively checking your emails for an editor’s response which will more likely than not be negative.

After hopefully returning to a somewhat more rational state, try to take the reviewer’s comments on board. The constructive ones will help you to make a better paper and parts which reviewers didn’t understand are often because you could have clarified your points better. Ultimately, it’s important to be realistic; the chances of rejection of a manuscript are high so be prepared to resubmit elsewhere (think back to our previous advice about working down the list of journals for which you feel your paper is suited). You could even have another version of the paper drafted and formatted for the next journal on your list even before you receive a response from your initial submission. It may take an initial investment in time and energy but at least the next version of the paper is then ready to go if you’re unlucky enough to receive a rejection from your first journal of choice. The most important advice to emerge from our discussion was to be thick skinned and not to take rejection personally. You can’t publish without experiencing rejection so it’s important to share your experiences (both good and bad) and to listen to the advice and woes others. You’re not alone!

Our final cautionary point was that you don’t necessarily have to accept rejection. If your paper was rejected on the basis of reviews which you think were poor, biased, unfair or just completely off the mark, it might be worth arguing your case with the editor and/or reviewers. HOWEVER, only take up this tactic in exceptional circumstances where you have a VERY strong case to back up your points. If you get a reputation for being petulant, argumentative, obstinate or just downright rude it can only serve to seriously aggravate an editor and damage your future publishing prospects if not your wider research reputation.

3) Responding to comments

Hooray! You’ve got through the reviewing gauntlet, dodged the cold blow of outright rejection and now there are just a few reviewers’ comments standing between you and potential publication glory. We came up with lots of dos and don’ts for how to deal with reviewers’ comments.

Most importantly, be polite and positive. No one was obliged to review your work so thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions and consider adding them into the paper’s acknowledgements. Never be aggressive or rude and only write responses which you would be happy to say to a reviewer or editor face to face. Respond to all comments, no matter how trivial they may seem and show that you’re willing to make more changes if necessary. Don’t just ignore the bits that you don’t agree with. Show the editor that you have dealt with every comment by cross referencing the changes you made to the manuscript. To do this, either refer to the revised line numbers or, more preferably, cut and paste the sections that you have modified into your responses so that the editor doesn’t have to keep moving among different pages to check what has been changed.

Being polite and positive doesn’t mean that you have to be a push-over. If you receive a comment which is impractical, beyond the scope of your paper or just downright wrong, argue your point (with legitimate back up) but always retain a courteous tone throughout. If you have to deal with a whole slew of comments which are particularly off the wall or aggravating, ask someone to read your response before sending them to the editor – it’s always easier for someone else to pick up a passive aggressive tone which, despite your best efforts, may have crept into your writing.

If reviewers disagree on a particular point, either justify the changes you have made (don’t just ignore one reviewer’s comment) or your reasons for not making any changes. Don’t feel obliged to do everything that a reviewer suggests. Don’t ruin the flow of your text with awkward sentences which were clearly just inserted to please a particular reviewer. If you have good reasons (not just stubbornness or obstinacy) for sticking to your original ideas then make them clear. Remember that you can always get in touch with the editor if you get unrealistic or conflicting instructions or if you’re unclear about what you are expected to change.

So there’s our collective field guide to the trials and tribulations of academia. They’re by no means exhaustive but they’re definitely a good starting point. However, as academic publishing seems to require good fortune and timing as much as scientific rigour, research merit and an eye for a good story, there’s no magic formula for how to succeed, no matter how carefully you follow NERD club’s collective wisdom…

Happy publishing!

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

Image Source: justinholman.com

20/01/201414/01/2014

NERD club transferrable skills: academic authorship and journal submissions

We rolled out of bed on January 6^th, 2014, with the somewhat comforting- but mostly jarring, give-me-a-cup-of-coffee-immediately-inducing- knowledge that the holiday season was over and it was time to get back to our normal schedules. And that happily means everyone once again gathers for Nerd Club before lunch on Tuesdays. Aided by left over boxes of Roses, the first Nerd Club meeting of 2014 kicked off with a transferrable skills session discussing the submission of papers and how to cope with the peer review process. Many of the PhD students in the group (myself included) are working towards our first, first author paper. It can be a long and discouraging process, so we were eager for advice from our more experienced members.

We wanted to cover four topics; (1) issues of authorship, (2), choosing a journal, (3) choosing and responding to reviewers, and (4) dealing with rejection (sniff!). I’m going to summarize our discussion on the first two points, which we talk about during week one of this two-week session.

Issues of authorship

Who should be included; criteria for authorship

We came up with several ways to determine exactly who should be included as an author on a scientific publication. A popular method is asking, “could this paper have been completed without his/her contribution?” A common issue with this method is considering technical support. A research assistant or undergrad for example may spend hours helping with an experiment; perhaps without them you wouldn’t have completed the work. If there was no intellectual contribution however, some argued there may be grounds for excluding such a person as an author. A similar question one can ask is, “has the paper been made materially better by the person?” Again, you run into the same problem; what about editors, and how much exactly does someone need to contribute to qualify? One extreme view is that you should refuse authorship on a paper unless you feel you could give a talk about it. While this is a great goal to aspire too, there was some controversy in the room on the feasibility; what if you did a substantial amount of modeling for a paper and without your contribution it would not have been published, but the paper was on an area in which you have little expertise? You may understand your contribution completely, but that doesn’t mean you’re ready to discuss Type I diabetes or the complexities of insect flight. In general the group agreed that you should at least be able to discuss the main goals and conclusions of the paper, even if you wouldn’t present it at a conference. More and more journals (Proceedings B, Science, etc.) are requiring a section listing each author’s contribution, so it’s a good idea to make these decisions early as you will be held accountable for them when you submit.

Another piece of advice that seems to fall under the “who” category is how to decide on the author affiliations listed on the publication. Usually the affiliations from where the person did the work are the ones that should be included, even if the person has moved on to another job or institution. It is possible, however, to add a current address so that authors can still be contacted by readers.

Two final piece of advice: first of all, if you’re the first author on a paper, it is probably your responsibility to start this discussion and to make final decisions on who will be included (of course for PhD students it’s going to be necessary to consult your supervisors). Second, if your name is listed as an author you should at some stage read the entire paper in detail and make helpful comments, not only to improve the quality, but also to ensure you understand the work and conclusions completely.

What are the most important names on the list?

I think most of us were aware that there are two important places in that sometimes-long list of authors, first and last. First author is the person driving the work, who usually claims the most ownership. The first author will get the most recognition for the paper among the scientific community as well. Some journals allow co-first authors, however someone’s name will have to be placed first on the list. When I read a paper, if there are more than two authors I almost always remember only the first, and I’m not alone.

The last author is considered the senior author, the person who likely received the funding to do the work and who probably leads the lab or research group the first author is working in. Surprisingly to some of us, it is possible in some journals to have co-senior authors as well.

Finally, the corresponding author is the person who will physically submit the paper and is responsible for responding to reviewer’s comments. They are also the one to contact if someone has a question about the work. Overall we decided that corresponding author singles one of the people on the list out, but it doesn’t really distinguish them in any other way.

When to discuss it and make changes?

The consensus from our group was that yes, issues of authorship can sometimes be awkward and complicated, but it is important to have conversations about it early and often with your collaborators. Otherwise a slightly uncomfortable situation can turn downright ugly, and can cause rifts between research groups and partners. So, to avoid discomfort, talk about authorship as soon as possible and throughout the writing process.

We also discussed adding and removing people from your author list. It is usually fine to add an author at almost any stage, so long as you feel their contribution was worth authorship. Removing an author at almost any stage is usually uncomfortable. Because of this, if you’re in a situation where you feel you did not contribute enough to a paper to be an author, it is best practice to ask to have yourself removed. If your coauthors refuse, then at least you can publish with a guilt-free conscious. Of course if at any stage you don’t agree with what is said in a publication or you feel something unethical or unscientific was done, you have the right to insist that your name be removed. Never publish anything you don’t believe in or agree with!

Where in the list your name appears; highlighting your research

A really useful piece of advice: if you find yourself in the middle of a long author list-but you know you’ve contributed in a significant way to a paper- don’t be afraid to star or highlight this on your CV. It’s really important to show future employers that you had a meaningful role in the process, and to highlight you skills.

Choosing a journal

After a rather lengthy discussion about authorship, we had a little time left to talk about how to choose a journal for your publications. We did come up with some helpful methods and tips. First, your paper must obviously fit the aims and scope of a journal. Second, you can choose a journal based on its readership- will your research get to the people you want or the people that will care about your work? We thought that in an age where people rarely if ever sit down with a physical journal or magazine, this isn’t always the best way to go (although perhaps you can choose by who you think will receive the table of contents in their email box!) Third, some choose by the impact factor of the journal, a perhaps less idealistic but more realistic view of the process. Yet another method is looking at where most of your citations came from, and trying to submit to that journal. And finally there are practical reasons to choose a journal such as word count or number of figures allowed.

There were two pieces of advice I found particularly helpful in this discussion. First, consider having a list of possible publications you would submit to, in the order you would attempt, before writing. It can be soul crushing to write a beautiful paper for Biology Letters, with its strict structure and word count, only to be rejected and required to completely rewrite a draft for a different journal. Perhaps you have the time to do this, but if it’s the final year of your PhD that may be a poor idea. Finally, when constructing said list, have the top 20 journals in your subject(s) printed out, and highlight the ones you tend to like to make the choices easier.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, where we will summarize our discussion on choosing and dealing with reviewers and dealing with rejection- a topic we’re all sure to face throughout our scientific careers.

Author: Erin Jo Tiedeken, tiedekee[at]tcd.ie, @EJTiedeken

Image Source: phdcomics

16/09/201316/09/2013

NERD Club AGM

And we’re back!

The tea room is fuller, society stands are being dusted down to create the Front Square Fresher’s week gauntlet and venturing out of the office during the lecture change-over times will soon be inadvisable unless you have a particular affiliation for crowd control. Trinity is gearing up for the new semester and our blog has returned from its summer hiatus.

We marked the end of the summer with NERD club’s first annual AGM. Theoretically an acronym for our networks in ecology/evolution research discussion group but practically far more appropriate if you take the true sense of the word, NERD club is our weekly meeting for people working on any aspect of ecology or evolution. It’s a diverse collection of people and certainly one of my favourite times of the week as, fuelled by the necessary provision of biscuits, we discuss each other’s research or wider topics relating to academic research and scientific careers. It is also the origination of many of our previous and, I’m sure, future blog posts.

The AGM rounded off a very successful year for NERD club’s members. Between us we attended and presented our research at 19 different conferences or workshops, received 4 new grants and produced 28 new papers, one of which was a collaborative effort arising from a NERD club discussion. We also contributed to an eclectic mix of science communication and outreach projects including radio and television interviews, blog and magazine articles and guided tours of the Zoology museum. We came up with plenty of new topics for discussion and teaching sessions along with ideas for future collaborations so I’m sure the year ahead will be equally if not more interesting.

Our NERD club awards were a fitting conclusion to a great year. Here’s the honour roll!

1) Best NERD club session of the year: Erin Jo for her research on toxic nectar and bees.