Nature 's roundup of the papers and issues gaining traction on social media.
Social media offers a window into the inner workings of the scientific life, for better or worse. Lately, much conversation has centred around reality checks: the odds that a particular graduate student or postdoctoral researcher will eventually run a lab, the proportion of biomedical research that is actually needless, and, for the optimists, the growing wait times for a Nobel Prize. It has also been a time for discussion of the psychology of wheat-farming compared with rice-farming, a topic with possible implications for labs everywhere.
Scientists at every point on the career spectrum are talking about a paper in Current Biology that takes a quantitative view of the mantra 'publish or perish'.
Using a sample of more than 25,000 researchers, Lucas Carey at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues developed a statistical model that predicts who will eventually become principal investigators. The team found that first authors of papers in high-impact journals have the inside track, and everyone else is likely to lag behind. Verena Seufert, a geographer and PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, tweeted that it was a “sad story from a cool paper.”
Using the model, Seufert estimates that she currently has a 65% chance of becoming a principal investigator. Her gender alone cut her chances by 7%, but being the first author of a paper in Nature ultimately shifted the odds her way. Although she appreciates the methodology behind the calculations, Seufert thinks that the model exposes shortcomings in the process for minting new scientists. “It's all about papers,” she says. “People who are driven to publish the most papers aren't necessarily the best academics.”
Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, discussed the model and its implications in his Reciprocal Space blog and when commenting on a Nature News article. The calculation, he notes, fails to take into account other crucial roles of an academic, such as teacher and mentor. In his view, the current system snuffs out far too many talented researchers before they have a chance to make their contributions. “In recent months I have spoken to more than one young researcher who has abandoned the dream of leading their own research group because of ... the sure knowledge that without a high-impact paper they are unlikely to make it in such a world,” he writes. “Is anyone counting the cost of those broken dreams?”
Scientists may feel the pressure to publish, but not every experimental result makes it into the literature. A much-discussed editorial in PLoS Medicine states that unpublished papers and inaccessible data have helped to create an epidemic of needlessly redundant research. Author Paul Glasziou cites a 2009 Lancet paper estimating that more than 85% of all biomedical research funds are wasted because of poor study design, selective publication or inadequate reporting of data. Although that 85% estimate quickly made the rounds through social media as a result of Glasziou's editorial, commentators generally seemed more interested in solutions. Many supported Glasziou's assertion that open access to published data could greatly streamline the system and cut back on waste. But others went further. Dorothy Bishop, a developmental neuropsychologist at Oxford University, UK, tweeted: “Open access alone is not enough: journals must adopt high methodological standards.”
Standards hardly get any higher than the selection committees for Nobel Prizes in the sciences. If you make your big breakthrough tomorrow, you will probably have plenty of time to plan your trip to Stockholm. According to an analysis in Physics Today, the lag time between a scientific breakthrough and the resulting prize has grown steadily in the past few decades, especially in physics. For example, the 2013 prize in physics went to Peter Higgs and François Englert for their prediction of the Higgs boson — work that was first published in 1964. Many Twitter users shared the paper's tagline: “If current trends continue, more and more potential laureates in physics will die before they receive a Nobel.” Fiodar Hilitski, a physics graduate student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, tweeted his own calculation: “In 50 years, the delay between the discovery and Nobel Prize might surpass life expectancy.”
Becattini, F. et al. Phys. Today http://doi.org/s5g (2014)
Every major scientific discovery takes a team effort, which brings us to another item making the rounds on social media: the psychology of those from wheat-growing compared with rice-growing regions. A study in Science found that students from the rice-growing south of China were generally more relational, less analytical and less individualistic in their thinking than students from the wheat-growing regions in the north. The researchers — four from the United States and three from China — note that growing rice is a much more communal enterprise than growing wheat. Although it is likely that none of the students actually grew rice or wheat themselves, the researchers speculate that agriculture helped to shape their culture and thus their psychology. The researchers also suggested that the divide between rice- and wheat-farming regions could help to explain cultural divisions between China and the West. Some observers on social media found the connection to be overly simplistic, but science blogger Lowell Goldsmith saw practical implications. In his view, the study underscores the need for cultural diversity in science labs. “The Manhattan project commandeered talented brainboxes from a large variety of scientific backgrounds and cultures,” he writes. “Diversity of strengths is an important goal.”
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Woolston, C. Papers predict future lab heads. Nature 510, 191 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/510191f
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/510191f
