Category Archives: AcademicLife

How I deal with work overload (without working too much)

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I have several posts I would like to do, but this month has been very hectic. This encouraged me to revise how I deal with my tendency to overcommit myself with new projects, while managing to accomplish deadlines and still not working on the weekends. The result is that I am posting this instead of other alternative posts. See why.

1) Externalize fun work for out of the office. When I arrive home I play with my daughter so there is no way I can do actual computer work there. However most of my work involves thinking. I can think in many places. My favourites are on my bike on the way to work or when running.  I not only think about work then, I also wonder about other stuff or picture myself in a tour de france time trial. However, I find that some fun problems are better solved in that context. Why? Because if you don’t come up with an idea in 5 minutes while sitting in front of your computer you feel desolated, but is ok to not have ideas if you are already doing something (e.g. running). Also, because if you are on your computer you tend to try (and put hands on) the first thing your intuition tells you will work. This way is easy to get lost in the details or do overcomplicated things that won’t work at the end. However, while running, you are forced to develop all the steps necessary and abstractly think if they will work discarding bad ideas way faster. Plus, blod is pumped to your brain continuously  boosting your potential (or this is what I hope). But take notes as soon as you get out of the shower!

2) Minimum effort rule. I usually start by the task that requires less time to be completed. That way I can take it off my list and maximize the chances to move on any project. If I can solve something (e.g. a review or a simulation for a coauthor) in 1 to 4 hours, I just do it and have it done fast. Answering a question by email? I’ll do it asap and archive it. This short tasks are usually related to collborations and that also make happy those people and allow the project to keep moving. 

3) Block time. The minimum effort rule fails when you start spending most time completing short tasks so there is no time left to work on long daunting (but exciting) projects. Then, I decided to block at least 2-3 full mornings or days a week to work on that kind of long term projects. No answering emails, no improvised meetings, no multitasking on the blocked time slots.

I thought about that post on my bike ride this morning, I knew it will be written fast, so I did it as soon as I have some spare time, but not this morning. This morning was blocked to do some other analysis.

I’m still on the process, so comment on what works for you!

How to decide where to submit your paper (my two cents)

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Following Jeremy Fox interesting blog post, and at least three other people follow-up (here, here and here).  Here are my thoughts on where to submit your paper. In a nutshell, I think times are changing. If you are in a strong position, you can bet for the model you think is best. But if you are not settled yet, I think is wise to have a compromise between publishing some old school papers based on journals prestige, but also make your bet by submitting other manuscripts to faster and open access Journals. That way you can defend your position in a variety of situations.

Following Jeremy’s points:

  • Aim as high as you reasonably can. Agreed, but “high” is a vague term. Impact factor is not a reliable measure and “prestige” is difficult to asses. I think like Jan, that the difference is between the 3 top interdisciplinary journals, the top journals of your field, and then everything else. Within this categories, I don’t worry anymore about the journal in terms of “high impact”. (OA discussed below)
  • Don’t just go by journal prestige; consider “fit”. I do think fit is important, but not in terms of people finding your paper (despite lots of researchers keep using TOC’s of a few well-known journals), but because having a type of journal (or reader) in mind helps you frame your article. For example, I’d expect different things from the same title in Am Nat, than in Ecology.
  • How much will it cost? Important only if you don’t have the money.
  • How likely is the journal to send your paper out for external review? I liked Ethan’s advice on the importance of the speed of the process. By maximizing your chances of being sent to review, not only you can accumulate citations faster but also it reduce the amount of frustration.
  • Is the journal open access? Ideally, Yes, is very important for me. In reality, well, my projects rarely have the money to pay for it, so I end up not making them open.
  • Does the journal evaluate papers only on technical soundness? I think this is a model that will substitute all low tier journals. I’m writing mainly three types of papers. Papers that I hope can make a great advance on Ecology and that I would like to see in a top journal. Papers that has an specific niche, and where I want to target people working on this niche. And good papers that I think can make its moderate contribution, and I want them out there fast for people to read. This papers are ideal for open access and evaluated on technical soundness.
  • Is the journal part of a review cascade? Again, completely agree with Ethan. In fact I would love a model where papers are valued on technical soundness and then there is an “editors choice” or something like that.
  • Is it a society journal? I value supporting Societies. But most important: Is the publisher making profit? Is Copyright retained to the author? Society journals or other organisational journals (i.e. PLOS) has the great advantage from my point of view that revert the benefits to the community, and usually they require a licence to publish, but not a copyright transfer. It’s important for me to avoid as much as possible making a business of science.
  • Have you had good experiences with the journal in the past? I don’t think that’s relevant.
  • Is there anyone on the editorial board who’d be a good person to handle your paper? I’ve never thought on that.

Extra stuff:

  • Publish in a diversity of journals: If you want to increase your readership, increase the spectrum of journals you publish. Publish in general ecology Journals, in more specialised journals, Plos ONE stile. That would help you gain experience with the system too.
  • Listen to your feelings: Is there any journal you like (rationally or irrationally) specially? Forget the pros and cons. Publishing is hard, and its also important to fulfil your whims.

More on editors (now that I am one of them)

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I am excited to join Journal of Ecology as an associate editor. I argued previously here that communication should be better along the publishing process, and now I have the opportunity/pressure to apply that to myself, so If I am editing your paper, let’s have a constructive conversation!

Anyway, this is a good moment to revise my thinking on the publishing scene. Of course, all opinions are only mine, and I like my opinions to change overtime (if needed), because things are not static, and change is good (specially if change is not random, but with some directionality). Panta rei.

First of all, I am happy to be involved in the editorial process, because only by participating actively in a community you can help shaping that community. I learnt a lot about science from reviewing papers, and I hope to also learn a lot from editing papers. (Of course it will also look nice in my CV). There is a lot of conversation on how to reform academic publishing. I agree that some things need to change, but I don’t think we need a revolution of how we publish, but rather an evolution. Why throw away all we learned so far and start from zero with a totally different system? Is better if we build upon what is there. The more pleasant is the transition, the better. May be the differences on what actions revolutionary people and I would take are not that different, but conceptually is important for me to construct in positive. I am not saying I can do much to change things from my position now, but I certainly can try to move things step by step.

Second I want to support more consciously open journals and society based journals. That means thinking more where to publish and for who I am reviewing. J Ecol is good example of a society based journal, which benefits doesn’t goes to some investors, but to the society. Fernando Maestre has a good post on this point.

Third, after some thinking and reading I decided that we do need an editorial process. I think that several journal models are compatible, and I support the idea of PLOS ONE type of journal, but with thousands of articles being published every week, the role of an editor (post of pre peer review) selecting the most influential papers is needed. How to do that is debatable, but for now is good that different systems co-exists: Prestigious Journals selecting your article, F1000 prime post-evaluations, my colleague recommendations on twitter, etc..)

If you get that far, may be you want to know a few more good things about J Ecology: All papers accepted remain copyright of the authors, All papers have free access after two years of publication. So my 2010 paper is already free! And if you are interested on getting more visibility, J Ecol blog is a good place to explain your results in more informal format (videos, podcasts,…).

That’s it for today!

Treat editors as if they were human beings (Tip: helps when they behave like that)

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Authors, editors and reviewers are people, why we don’t behave like that? When I receive an invitation to review a paper I can’t picture an editor writing it, but only a software program sending emails. The same nice program thanks me when I agree to review, and tells me how “the journal” appreciate my dedication when I complete my task. If I am lucky it also sends me the final decision (which should be a no-optional courtesy). Usually there is not a real communication, but just one direction speech.  In that situation, I feel no empathy, and that lowers my motivation. I argue that manually writing all communication emails would have a low cost, compared with the potential benefit on the overall satisfaction of authors, reviewers and editors.

After some years in the publishing game, I’m still surprised how impersonal the publication process is. Here are some ideas:

1) Engage people on the process

Being impersonal can save some minutes of writing, but it doesn’t speed up the process because anyone is engaged in the process. I am more likely to accept and do a fast review if I get a personal email, saying for example, that the authors suggested my name, or that the editor likes my work on the topic, or that the authors build upon a previous paper I authored. I know this things are implicit, but humans are weird animals, and need to be told things in the right way. I even got invitations from editors I know very well personally with a default template. But to be fair, I also had friendly correspondence with an editor I didn’t know personally, and that was after rejecting to do the revision. I am sure I will consider her future requests more positively, because I felt she cares.

2) Give feedback

Reviewers need feedback too. Especially in early career stages one needs to know if they are doing a good job. Editors can spend two minutes answering to your review briefly instead of the automated email. Do they thank you for a thoughtful review or for your short review? That clue would be enough for most people to understand, if they want to understand. I’d be also happy if editors asked me further what do I think about any missing point once in a while. Science should be more conversational.

3) Ask questions

I found editors to be always very happy to answer questions. Surprisingly, most people I know rarely ask anything, and I think this is because authors (and reviewers) have this feeling that they are talking with machines, instead than with people. I learnt that is ok to update the editor during the revision process “that we don’t plan to include the simulation proposed by Reviwer 1, because it would imply 5 extra pages of appendixes and no relevant new information” above hand. He completely agreed with us. That way you can have an early feedback before you point your work in one direction. Some editors are great on explaining what they feel important to amend, but others not. I recently got a two-lines “reject and resubmit” decision.  One reviewer was very positive and the other one only said “too narrow for that journal”. What do this mean? should I change a few things highlighting the novelty? or should I engage in a major rewriting of the focus of the paper? I still don’t know what the editor wanted. I didn’t ask this time.

4) Always sign your reviews

Feelings are going to interfere in your actions anyway, so is better if you are aware of that. Sign whatever you do makes you more aware of your biases. That’s why (after a lot of thoughts and advises not to do it) I decided to sign my reviews. That puts my suggestions in a context for the authors (i.e. a non-native english speaker, postdoc, with experience in temperate systems), but more importantly, as an author I take suggestions from a colleague way happier than from an unknown person. From the reviewer perspective, it forces you to write more carefully, and if you did a good job, authors will be happy (sometimes even if the paper is rejected), and they will know about your work. Once in a while an author will get pissed off, but I hope for each one, 100 will be pleased (or at least 10?).

This week I am reviewing your article, but next week I will be the author and you the reviewer. People behave different when they are into a rol, than when they are themselves (see extreme cases). Why not be more personal, then?

Why analysing your data is like being in a romantic relationship

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Last year I was working on a big dataset to assess how bee phenology has changed over time. Here it is the first cool figure I produced. I was quite excited so I didn’t even bother to make beautiful axes.

I am pretty sure the stats I finally used changed quite a lot, and I also added many more data points before publishing the results (it toke me a year to sort out all details), but the main result held. Bees are emerging earlier in recent time periods that they used to emerge. The final published figure looks like that:

While cleaning my computer today, I realised that my first plot looks way more colourful and exciting than the final figure I ended up publishing. Then, I remembered a text I wrote about analyzing data…

“I almost forgot the fun of first analysis when everything is new and exciting, when you want to know everything about “data” and you learn from “her” everyday… it’s a shame that after that it becomes repetitive and monotonous. You’ve lost the magic, but on the other hand, it’s also nice to really get to know each other, you gain compromise and confident results.”

So maybe my own plots can prove I was right, and Data analysis is like a love story. Are your first drafts also more pasional than the final version?

 

Long-term goals

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I was skimming trough “How to Do Ecology” book from Karban and Huntzinger*, when I read that is important to have a long-term goal in your career. Something to use as a reference tool to see how your articles contribute to that goal and help you focus your career. I just panic for a second, not sure of having one. What if I am constructing my research program in an opportunistic way? Given I published on organisms as diverse as plants, birds or bees, or topics like biological invasions, pollination, or climate change, I was not sure that all this articles contribute to a long-term goal. The panic only lasted for a few minutes, as I realised that my main interest (and now my goal) is to understand human modified ecosystems. Indeed, I was quite happy to see that most of my research can help understand how this human dominated ecosystems work, or which species can survive in human modified ecosystems and which not, or how species adapt to live in human modified ecosystems. By that time I started thinking that Human Modified Ecology needs a good acronym, so I spent the next ten minutes trying to find a funny one… but that is less interesting (and I didn’t succeed). So the take home message is that I am glad to have verbalized my long-term goal, and be conscious of having one. I’ll take Karban’s advice and try to be more conscious of what I do and why I do it.

*I recommend that book to any grad student starting the PhD. Also good advice for everyone from Alon here and here.

Why Postdocs are the teenagers of academia.

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I’m starting my third postdoc. After two postdocs, I thought it would be nice to have my own lab, but given the situation in my home country, doing another postdoc is more appealing, specially in a good lab and with a flexible project. Then, I realised I should stop thinking about the future and enjoy up to the last second of my postdoctoral stage. What’s the hurry? We, Postdocs are the teenagers of Academia. We are not leaving with our parents anymore, but we still don’t have family responsibilities. And just to be clear, by parents I mean PhD advisors, and by family your own grad students. All teenagers want to grow fast, but hey, once you’ve grown you miss your teenage instability, experimenting with new things, the lack of long term responsibilities, the hormonal up-and-downs with high days just after submitting a ms to Science and the down days where you get rejected and nothing makes sense. I don’t want to be a teenager forever, but while I am here, I will use my time to hangout with other teenagers, keep trying new risky things and enjoy this period I know someday i will miss.

Something to say

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I enjoy reading scientists blogs. They made me think, they amused me and sometimes they make me feel understood. Most importantly, they help me see that ecology is dynamic and at least some ecologists are thinking out of the box about how to do and discuss science. I was also taking notes and ideas to myself in a variety of physical supports, including napkins that unfortunately I will never find again. I think it’s time I open my ideas and participate in this growing community of ecologists at once. Open ideas, open science and a feeling I have something to say. As scientists we have good formal ways to communicate our final, carefully thought and highly curated outputs, but science also needs a more informal and less serious fast forum. This will be a place to keep an informal open notebook for me. I hope you find something useful too.

Why marginally significant? ok, I know that there is not such a thing as a marginally significant result in statistics. If your p is 0.06, that’s ok, don’t complain, look at your effect sizes, see the power of your analysis, discuss it. Hey, but If your p is 0.04 you should do the same, so it’s not that important. I am not sure if my posts will be always significant for you (and I am not going to test that!), but I want to report them anyway, and I hope discussing them will increase the power of the ideas…