When people ask how my research is going

shared by Taylor R. Genovese

Procrastination is not about productivity

Procrastination is “a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, self-doubt”. At its core, it’s about emotions, not productivity. 

This is from this brilliant article written by Charlotte Lieberman for the NYT, probably the best piece on procrastination I’ve ever read.

Precious advice on academic writing

Resubmitting to different journals pic.twitter.com/9cpsPvxG2e

— Oded Rechavi 🦉 (@OdedRechavi) October 7, 2019

The life of graduate students

True story.

ps. Some habits do not go away after one graduates...

credit: Sandy Serena

Working towards deadlines

Why you should probably share your preprints

Among researchers, a preprint is known as the version of a scientific study that precedes official publication in a peer-reviewed journal or book. In hard sciences and computer science, it is quite common for researchers to put their preprints openly available online, mainly through the Arxiv repository. This practice is also common in Economics, where researchers often publish 'working papers' via SSRN, NBER or their own institutions before getting the paper published in a journal. This practice is becoming more common and there are new repositories popping up in different areas such as biorxiv, chemrxiv and the SocArXiv focused on the social sciences more broadly.

Why you should share your preprints:

Preprints are not meant to replace peer-reviewed publications. Nonetheless they can importantly contribute to (1) speeding up the process of getting your ideas out in the public, (2) increasing the readership of your work, and (3) making your research accessible to people who cannot read articles behind paywalls. I've been sharing the preprints of my last papers on SocArXiv and highly recommend others to do the same. There are a few good reasons to use SocArxiv. One of them is that they create a permanent link and a permanent DOI identification for you preprint. This helps making the manuscript searchable and citable on academic databases.

Be aware, though, that some journals for example do not allow the use of preprints as they claim that this practice undermines the novelty of manuscripts. As a rule, though, social science journals published by Elsevier and Taylor & Francis (Routledge) do not see any problem in authors sharing their preprints before paper submission. There is also an interesting debate about whether preprints undermine the double-blindness of peer review and the differential impacts it might have for the publications of senior and junior researchers. As I've mentioned before, the use of preprints is not without controversy. 

Academic Outreach

While many academics would like to (or are expected to) develop research with impact on the real world outside the ivory tower, this is how the academic publication process often look like. Via SAS.

When you read the comments of reviewer 2

here we go...

The creative process lollipop chart

Stefanie Posavec came up with this brilliant 'chart' to illustrate the creative process of coming up with a great idea.

It reminds me of a story of this Brazilian band (Paralamas do Sucesso), when the lead singer/composer was asked about their success. Long time ago a journalist asked him: "When a band releases a new album, they usually get one maybe two songs in the top hits. How come you get so many top hits for every new album you release after so many years on the road?". His secrete, his said, was that every day he would write the lyrics of a new song. It took a lot of discipline, for sure, but at the end of the year he would have more than 300 songs. Most of them would suck, of course, but certainly a few would be good material that could be worked further.

Ok, I don't remember the exact words of the dialogue, but you get the idea. And frankly, I think that's a good advice for young researchers looking for good research questions. Read a lot of papers so you have an informed understanding of what are the knowledge gaps in your field. Then put yourself to ask as many questions as you can think of and write them down without censoring yourself. At some point you will have many questions (20? 50?). Revisit your list of questions after a few weeks and some more reading. You'll realize most of them won't work. Some are too ambitious, some have been answered already, some are just not that relevant etc. Once you have three or four questions that sound reasonably good, it's time to do more reading and to discuss these questions with more experienced mentors/supervisors/friends. Remember to be humble.

"You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one." (Albert Einstein )

The bottom line is this:

credit: Stefanie Posavec

When the deadline is close and you need to finish that manuscript

This is how I feel my PhD thesis looks like right now.

image source: reddit

Double-Blind Peer Review and Preprints

By the way, I'm sharing the preprints of my papers via OSF. You can read about what is a preprint here.

HT Stuart Ritchie

Following the advice of my supervisors

"Sure, it is totally doable", I said...  #truestory

many times #truestory

Migrating researchers are cited the most

This is according to a recent paper published in Nature. The authors analyzed 14 million papers published between 2008 and 2015 by nearly 16 million individual authors. Around 4% of those authors - more than 595K were considered to be “mobile,” meaning they had affiliations with academic institutions in more than one nation between 2008 and 2015. 

The study looks very interesting throughout. Here are only two of the main results:

• "[...] mobile scholars have about 40% higher citation rates, on average, than non-mobile ones"

• "Regardless of region, mobility pays in terms of citations. Across all regions, mobile scholars are more highly cited than their non-mobile counterparts. The advantage varies by region. Mobile North Americans see only a 10.8% boost in citations over their non-mobile colleagues. For Eastern European scholars, the gulf is 172.8%."

I thank Tim Schwanen for the pointer.

Note to future self

HT Jay Van Bavel

Getting closer and closer to that deadline

pic.twitter.com/VnmU3MWpLg

— Zhian N. Kamvar (@ZKamvar) 31 July 2017

What makes a good post-doc application ?

A heads up for those  unemployed  finishing their PhDs soon, by Martin Chalfie:

 

Assorted Links

1. A rank of North American Urban Planning Scholars Using Google Scholar Citation Profiles, by Tom Sanchez (twitter)
   
   
2. On a similar note, an interesting commentary on the power of the unrelenting impact factor of academic journals and some interesting arguments to why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research
   
   
3. Isoscope:  nice work by Flavio Gortana (twitter), showing how isochrones by car vary across space and time
   
   
4. How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Ocean Floor’s Secrets via Sabrina Lai
   
   
5. Possibly the greatest scene in documentary history via David Levinson (twitter)
   
   
6. Bill Rankin's new work on Mapping Slavery Against US Incarceration
   
   
7. A 15-min video giving an interesting summary of the largest US health insurance experiment in history - ht Carl Schmertmann
   
   
8. Beautiful data visualization of music, by Nicholas Rougeux
   
   
9. The Vertical City: The Price of Land and the Height of Buildings in Chicago 1870-2010, by Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt (twitter)

If you ask me how my PhD is going...

Creative Process

This comes in cycles and I'm currently at stage #2, again.

How writing to your PhD supervisor feels

In case my supervisor sees this, this is meant to be a joke of bad taste.

How writing to your PhD supervisor feels. pic.twitter.com/vertz31qJV

— Academia Obscura (@AcademiaObscura) 11 November 2015