My move to my current undisclosed location has been taking place one carload at a time. Just before the car was loaded up for the first time, I was telling a friend that the first carload would carry several of the boxes containing my collection of references. "There are about 700 articles in those boxes, and who knows if I'll ever even need them again," I told him. To my surprise, his eyes lit up. "How are they organized?" he wondered. At first I thought he was humoring me, just carrying on conversation. It takes a true geek to want to talk about the pros and cons of different reference organization systems, but a true geek he is. So there we sat, chatting over milkshakes about my references.
Keeping your references organized is a bit like being on a stairmaster: you can keep climbing, but you're never going to get to the top. The way I see it, there are a few major challenges here:
1. Taking the time to put a system into place and stick to it. It's relatively easy to alphabetize your references, but is that any good if you can't remember authors' names? Or if you tend to accumulate piles of papers on your desk that you then don't have time to file away?
2. Being able to find a particular reference once it's filed neatly away. I've never met a scientists who is completely happy with his or her organization system, and most of them admit that it's often faster to find the article again online and print out a new copy.
3. Unread vs. read articles. For me, filing away unread articles means that I'm never going to read them.
4. Digital vs. hard copies. I still can't fully digest papers that I'm reading on a computer screen, and I print a lot of papers out that I never read. As the stacks of unread papers grow, so does my liberal enviroguilt.
Half my references are currently filed alphabetically, and half are by topic. I've lost track of which ones I've read and not read and which onces have been entered into BibTeX. Things are complicated by the fact that, in my new position, I need to be reading articles on a wider range of topics but in less depth. So my current system is useless.
Enter CiteUlike, a free, online system for your references. After signing up (which takes 5 seconds), here's how it works:
1. Enter the URL of the article you want to add to your reference library. CiteULike parses the information on that page, pulls out the title, authors, journal, even the abstract (!) and creates an entry in your library.
2. Add tags. This is the feature that makes the site powerful. Let's say you're adding an article on The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation. In my old, topical file system, this might fall into the bottlenecks folder or maybe the phenotypes folder or maybe the evolution folder. The power of tagging is that I can add the tags "bottlenecks," "phenotypes," and "evolution" to this paper and then search for it later using those categories.
3. Rank your reading priorities. Some papers, I'll never read, and I know it. Others I want to read ASAP. CiteULike gives you five options from "Top Priority" to "I don't really want to read it."
4. Upload a personal pdf of the article, if you want to.
5. See who else has that article in their library. Unlike most social networking sites ("We both love soup...and snow peas..."), this actually seems useful because I can get a glimpse into the libraries of other people who are reading the same articles I am. In other words, I might actually learn something.
6. Export references to EndNote or BibTeX.
So CiteULike addresses a lot of the challenges of developing and maintaining a functional a reference system.
On the eve of new organization projects, I always feel a bit giddy. I don't have any interest in entering all of my old references into CiteULike, though they do have an experimental 'Import from BibTeX feature.' For me, the real value here is going to be organizing new references, many of which I only need to read at the abstract level.
If you're into this idea, Connotea is also worth checking out. It looks a bit slicker than CiteULike, and has the benefit of having an "Add to Connotea" button that you can stick on your browser that makes adding references super-easy. I'm a bit turned off by Connotea's 'Recently Used Tags,' though, which include Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. CiteULike's users look like straight-up geeks who wouldn't mix their Britney clippings with their articles on Boltzmann brains.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
when the line between faculty and staff gets blurry...
Despite the feeling of slowness brought on by the kind of weather that makes you feel like you're walking through a bowl of beef broth, things have been rather busy -- and rather interesting -- on campus lately. More and more, I find myself treading a very blurry line between faculty and staff. And while it's not at all unpleasant -- kind of nice, actually -- it does make me think a lot about where this job is headed and where I want it to be headed.
When I interviewed for my current job, almost all of the faculty members I met with asked something along the lines of "Are you going to continue your research?" To which I politely answered, "Well, I think this position will keep me more than busy with other things," while I tried not to look too wan as visions of sample vials danced menacingly in my mind.
People have continued to ask the research question since I arrived, except now it's usually followed by "Will you be teaching?" I suppose these are natural questions, given the fact that I work at a university and have my Ph.D. Admittedly, I was starting to think that these people were missing something when I introduced myself as a program coordinator rather than an assistant/associate/full/research professor. Didn't they realize that coordinating was a full-time job? Then after a conversation with X a few weeks ago, I realized that it was me who had been missing something.
I've seen the official, administrative description for my position. It lays out a wide range of duties and responsibilities, none of which mention the words "research" or "teaching." So imagine my surprise when X says to me "I'm teaching a class on [basically the research you did as a grad student] this fall. Do you want to co-teach it with me?" Before I could even think about it, I had agreed. On some gut level, I really want to teach, and I'm really psyched to have the opportunity to.
A week or so later, I was even more surprised when X said "Would you be interested in working on this little research project I've been thinking about?" To my amazement, my gut and heart (and mouth) said yes. Granted, X caught me at a weak moment -- I'd been on a journal reading binge for the first time in years, and scholarly research was looking kind of interesting again.
So here it is, mid-summer, and I'm looking at the September calendar wondering how I'm going to pull off co-teaching a course, spinning up a little research project, and putting together three (yes, three) proposals for our interdisciplinary initiative.
Before you know it, I'll be editing thesis proposals and telling concerned parents that their sophomores did actually earn those C minuses.
When I interviewed for my current job, almost all of the faculty members I met with asked something along the lines of "Are you going to continue your research?" To which I politely answered, "Well, I think this position will keep me more than busy with other things," while I tried not to look too wan as visions of sample vials danced menacingly in my mind.
People have continued to ask the research question since I arrived, except now it's usually followed by "Will you be teaching?" I suppose these are natural questions, given the fact that I work at a university and have my Ph.D. Admittedly, I was starting to think that these people were missing something when I introduced myself as a program coordinator rather than an assistant/associate/full/research professor. Didn't they realize that coordinating was a full-time job? Then after a conversation with X a few weeks ago, I realized that it was me who had been missing something.
I've seen the official, administrative description for my position. It lays out a wide range of duties and responsibilities, none of which mention the words "research" or "teaching." So imagine my surprise when X says to me "I'm teaching a class on [basically the research you did as a grad student] this fall. Do you want to co-teach it with me?" Before I could even think about it, I had agreed. On some gut level, I really want to teach, and I'm really psyched to have the opportunity to.
A week or so later, I was even more surprised when X said "Would you be interested in working on this little research project I've been thinking about?" To my amazement, my gut and heart (and mouth) said yes. Granted, X caught me at a weak moment -- I'd been on a journal reading binge for the first time in years, and scholarly research was looking kind of interesting again.
So here it is, mid-summer, and I'm looking at the September calendar wondering how I'm going to pull off co-teaching a course, spinning up a little research project, and putting together three (yes, three) proposals for our interdisciplinary initiative.
Before you know it, I'll be editing thesis proposals and telling concerned parents that their sophomores did actually earn those C minuses.
Monday, July 9, 2007
when in doubt, don't be subtle
The authorship awkwardness has ended! In my last post, I mentioned that I was preparing a new report for our dean and one of our state senators. In a not-so-subtle hint that I wanted credit for the preparation of the report, I stuck my name on it...twice. And it seems to have worked. After passing along the final draft to X, he forwarded it to the dean and said that I had written it. Better still, he said that if the senator's office needs more information, they could contact one of *us*.
The question still remains as to whether X realized that he had stolen my thunder regarding the first report to the dean. My guess is that he didn't think of it at the time, but that a very important seed was planted in his mind when he saw my "Prepared by Ivory Shower."
Thanks for your advice and suggestions on my last post :)
The question still remains as to whether X realized that he had stolen my thunder regarding the first report to the dean. My guess is that he didn't think of it at the time, but that a very important seed was planted in his mind when he saw my "Prepared by Ivory Shower."
Thanks for your advice and suggestions on my last post :)
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
authorship awkwardness
The academic storybook is full of tales of advisers who mysteriously become first authors on their students' papers at the last minute and students who don't get credit where credit is due. Authorship and attribution are frequent topics of angst on the ScienceCareers forum, and stories like this one and this one are as common as tales of alligators in the sewers of New York City*.
As a grad student, I was lucky in that I never had issues with authorship. Sometimes I included people as co-authors because it seemed like good karma, and sometimes I just needed to do a little groveling. Whether it was out of appreciation or duty, one of my thesis papers ended up having five karma co-authors in total, though 100% of the writing and 100% of the data generation was mine. But I was first author, and I no one disputed that I should be. My adviser never insisted on being first author on my work, and never left me off of papers I'd contributed to.
My current boss, X, and I published two papers together while I was a student. I was first author on one, and second author on another. We collaborated well on those papers, and in each case the issue of first authorship was always clear cut. Because we never even had to discuss authorship before, I'm bewildered to find myself having authorship issues now, when the things I'm writing aren't entering the academic journal circuit.
A few weeks ago, X was asked to provide a report of our Initiative's recent activities to the dean and the president of the university. At this point, I'm more familiar with recent activities than X, so X asked me to write the report. But somehow, X was the one who sent it to Dean, who passed it along to President as X's work. Dean also sent the report to our U.S. Senator, who apparently is curious about what we're doing. So suddenly, I find myself in a position of having a senator (!) reading my work and thinking it's X's.
The senator's office was pleased with this report, and promptly asked Dean who asked X who asked me for a more detailed report. This one is much more work, and I'll be damned if my name isn't on it somewhere.
How should I deal with this? X isn't a power grubbing kind of person, but is clearly fine with attribution on the first report. Since we've dealt with attribution seamlessly in the past, I'd like to believe that this was just an oversight on X's part. But I don't want this to become a pattern, and I sense that it easily could.
I'm trying to figure out a way to bring this up casually, but clearly with X before we send of the latest report. Anyone out there have advice?
* Turns out that there actually was an alligator in the sewers of New York in 1935. If you've got Times Select, the article is worth a read.
As a grad student, I was lucky in that I never had issues with authorship. Sometimes I included people as co-authors because it seemed like good karma, and sometimes I just needed to do a little groveling. Whether it was out of appreciation or duty, one of my thesis papers ended up having five karma co-authors in total, though 100% of the writing and 100% of the data generation was mine. But I was first author, and I no one disputed that I should be. My adviser never insisted on being first author on my work, and never left me off of papers I'd contributed to.
My current boss, X, and I published two papers together while I was a student. I was first author on one, and second author on another. We collaborated well on those papers, and in each case the issue of first authorship was always clear cut. Because we never even had to discuss authorship before, I'm bewildered to find myself having authorship issues now, when the things I'm writing aren't entering the academic journal circuit.
A few weeks ago, X was asked to provide a report of our Initiative's recent activities to the dean and the president of the university. At this point, I'm more familiar with recent activities than X, so X asked me to write the report. But somehow, X was the one who sent it to Dean, who passed it along to President as X's work. Dean also sent the report to our U.S. Senator, who apparently is curious about what we're doing. So suddenly, I find myself in a position of having a senator (!) reading my work and thinking it's X's.
The senator's office was pleased with this report, and promptly asked Dean who asked X who asked me for a more detailed report. This one is much more work, and I'll be damned if my name isn't on it somewhere.
How should I deal with this? X isn't a power grubbing kind of person, but is clearly fine with attribution on the first report. Since we've dealt with attribution seamlessly in the past, I'd like to believe that this was just an oversight on X's part. But I don't want this to become a pattern, and I sense that it easily could.
I'm trying to figure out a way to bring this up casually, but clearly with X before we send of the latest report. Anyone out there have advice?
* Turns out that there actually was an alligator in the sewers of New York in 1935. If you've got Times Select, the article is worth a read.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
an expert jackass
When it comes to the concept of expertise, there are two types of academics: those who would never claim to be experts in anything that lies outside of the papers they're currently writing
and those who think that being an expert in one thing (e.g. histone deacetylace inhibitors) makes you an expert at everything else (e.g. parenting). You can probably tell which group lies within my crosshairs this evening, but the reality is that I don't think either attitude is healthy.
The first type of "expert" is one I can sympathize with. As an academic, your research becomes more and more focused with time. Eventually it becomes a stretch to say that you're studying an overall concept -- say, malaria, for instance -- when you actually spend your day analyzing the mechanics of flight of satiated female mosquitoes. Because science is constantly evolving, your knowledge of every other aspect of malaria quickly becomes dated, and you wouldn't dare to call yourself an expert on malaria.
To some degree, I fell into this category when I was a grad student and a postdoc. My field owed its existence to current problems facing society, and we used those problems as a justification for funding, yet I wasn't comfortable really discussing that current societal problem because I didn't consider myself qualified.
This is kind of a sad way to be, as it implies either that you don't have a sense of how your work really fits into the real world or that you don't have the confidence to discuss topics that you're not intimately familiar with. Either way, society loses out because you're not sharing your knowledge.
But the academic that's more dangerous is the one who thinks that being an expert in one thing makes him an expert in, well, everything. I started thinking about these toxic experts after I had a email spat with one of these self-aggrandizing windbags last week. Here was the situation:
Our university recently adopted a system of templates for university web pages. They're really nice, and were even vetted by a web designer friend of mine. The goal is to make all of the university's web pages look and feel consistent so that we're sending coherent signals to our visitors. Makes sense. The templates also make building a new website really straightforward. Since I, having basically never built a website, was charged with building one for our new multi-disciplinary initiative, I was relieved to have these templates at my disposal.
Last week, I emailed a few people who need to provide content for the website. And the first comment I get about my weeks of hard work was from Windbag, who didn't like the template. I begged off, explained the university's policy about website styles, etc., thinking I was in the clear. He spat back that no one had consulted him when these templates were being developed, so he doesn't think we should use them.
Uh, right. So we should let the professors decide on how the university presents itself to the world? Better yet, we should just let Windbag decide. He seems to know a lot about nanotechnology, so we should definitely have him make that final decision on what color the navigation bars should be.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even crazy Windbag professors. But these "experts" don't seem to recognize the difference between opinion and expertise. In thinking that he was an expert of web design, Windbag was essentially saying that his opinion should be given the same weight as the opinions of the graphic designers and web developers who came up with the templates. Academics like Windbag have a lack of respect for different types of work, for different avenues of research, and for different opinions. On a deeper level, they fail to recognize that the experts in any field have worked hard to become so.
This is a bit of an extreme example -- my jaw literally dropped when I got these emails from Windbag. But the Ivory Tower is crawling with Windbags, some more subtle and some less. These are the creatures who go to talks on topics unrelated to their own research and then harangue and belittle the speaker without having any basis for doing so. Their voices drip equally with impatient condescension whether they're talking about the papers recently published in their field or the relative merits of the Bahamas versus the Florida Keys for sailing.
They're also the creatures who decide to leave academia and are then shocked when people out in the real world aren't clamoring for their knowledge (guilty).
and those who think that being an expert in one thing (e.g. histone deacetylace inhibitors) makes you an expert at everything else (e.g. parenting). You can probably tell which group lies within my crosshairs this evening, but the reality is that I don't think either attitude is healthy.
The first type of "expert" is one I can sympathize with. As an academic, your research becomes more and more focused with time. Eventually it becomes a stretch to say that you're studying an overall concept -- say, malaria, for instance -- when you actually spend your day analyzing the mechanics of flight of satiated female mosquitoes. Because science is constantly evolving, your knowledge of every other aspect of malaria quickly becomes dated, and you wouldn't dare to call yourself an expert on malaria.
To some degree, I fell into this category when I was a grad student and a postdoc. My field owed its existence to current problems facing society, and we used those problems as a justification for funding, yet I wasn't comfortable really discussing that current societal problem because I didn't consider myself qualified.
This is kind of a sad way to be, as it implies either that you don't have a sense of how your work really fits into the real world or that you don't have the confidence to discuss topics that you're not intimately familiar with. Either way, society loses out because you're not sharing your knowledge.
But the academic that's more dangerous is the one who thinks that being an expert in one thing makes him an expert in, well, everything. I started thinking about these toxic experts after I had a email spat with one of these self-aggrandizing windbags last week. Here was the situation:
Our university recently adopted a system of templates for university web pages. They're really nice, and were even vetted by a web designer friend of mine. The goal is to make all of the university's web pages look and feel consistent so that we're sending coherent signals to our visitors. Makes sense. The templates also make building a new website really straightforward. Since I, having basically never built a website, was charged with building one for our new multi-disciplinary initiative, I was relieved to have these templates at my disposal.
Last week, I emailed a few people who need to provide content for the website. And the first comment I get about my weeks of hard work was from Windbag, who didn't like the template. I begged off, explained the university's policy about website styles, etc., thinking I was in the clear. He spat back that no one had consulted him when these templates were being developed, so he doesn't think we should use them.
Uh, right. So we should let the professors decide on how the university presents itself to the world? Better yet, we should just let Windbag decide. He seems to know a lot about nanotechnology, so we should definitely have him make that final decision on what color the navigation bars should be.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even crazy Windbag professors. But these "experts" don't seem to recognize the difference between opinion and expertise. In thinking that he was an expert of web design, Windbag was essentially saying that his opinion should be given the same weight as the opinions of the graphic designers and web developers who came up with the templates. Academics like Windbag have a lack of respect for different types of work, for different avenues of research, and for different opinions. On a deeper level, they fail to recognize that the experts in any field have worked hard to become so.
This is a bit of an extreme example -- my jaw literally dropped when I got these emails from Windbag. But the Ivory Tower is crawling with Windbags, some more subtle and some less. These are the creatures who go to talks on topics unrelated to their own research and then harangue and belittle the speaker without having any basis for doing so. Their voices drip equally with impatient condescension whether they're talking about the papers recently published in their field or the relative merits of the Bahamas versus the Florida Keys for sailing.
They're also the creatures who decide to leave academia and are then shocked when people out in the real world aren't clamoring for their knowledge (guilty).
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