WHY COMMUNICATE?

The most basic answer to the question “why communicate?” is simply that scientists are human beings, and communication is one of the defining characteristics of being human. More specifically, here we elaborate on the value, both to individual scientists and to their profession, of communicating the findings of research.

Likely, a major factor that initially drew you into and has kept you in your chosen scientific career is the simple joy of intellectual discovery, of uncovering new ideas about how the physical world works. For many highly capable scientists, the internal satisfaction they experience in such discovery is reward enough. It is time-consuming and can be laborious, indeed burdensome, to detour from the scientific pursuit to share one's findings with others, through either publication in peer-review journals or presentation at conferences. Painful as it might be to devote energy to that detour, for several reasons expect communication of results to be of great value to you both personally and professionally. More broadly, publication is the breath of life for future progress in the sciences.

As emphasized in the next section, communication is difficult, and effective communication, whether in writing or delivered orally, is especially difficult. There must be some reward for taking such pains to share what you have been doing. Potential personal rewards are many.

Just as for all activities in life, research has its principles and standards of conduct necessary to ensure that it be carried out in an honest and honorable manner. Such principles and standards, which may collectively constitute or define the “ethics” of an activity, too often are neither objectively nor well defined. This, however, by no means makes them less important than the Federal and State laws that are used in our society to distinguish between behavior that is acceptable and that which is not. In this chapter, we offer a synopsis of what we consider to be the ethics of research, some examples being quite subtle.

SET GOALS

It's difficult to imagine embarking on a journey, adventure, activity – any endeavor – without having a goal, however vague that goal might be. Even if you don't study a map before going on a road trip, you at least think to put gas in the car. Goals for a holiday might be explicit or implicit, and they can range from short term to intermediate and somewhat long. A career in science, starting from your period in graduate school and continuing into a life of research, is a journey, a long one. Much more so than for a holiday journey, the thoughtful setting of explicit goals is of crucial importance for a successful career in research and for success in the research itself. By success, we mean here the achievement of valuable contributions in your field, accomplished with a good deal of pleasure and a minimum of needless pain and time wasted.

Goals give direction to our actions. By clearly choosing and defining goals, we provide a focus for action needed to arrive at a hoped-for destination or outcome. Defining goals not only helps in creating a mental commitment to take certain action, it also enables us to formulate a plan of attack toward reaching the desired ends.

The material presented in this book lends itself well for a course for beginning graduate students. Such students are under time pressure when starting their research and taking courses in their chosen discipline. For this reason our best experience has been in teaching the course as a single-semester, 1-credit course, which amounts to approximately 15 classroom sessions. This appendix gives a sample curriculum aimed at offering instructors ideas for elements that could be included in such a course. The curriculum includes homework assignments that roughly follow the chapters in this book, but doing all assignments is unnecessary and might make the workload unacceptably high. The suggested homework is intended to inspire instructors' ideas for helpful exercises.

Our experience is that it is best to teach the course to classes no larger than about 20 students. The material is conveyed most effectively in a discussion format rather than as a lecture that offers relatively little opportunity for student participation. Some topics covered are likely to touch on personal issues; many students find it easier to pose questions and share personal views and dilemmas in a small group.

Class 1. What the course and science are about. Since the course is most effective when there is ample discussion, it is important that students feel comfortable in the group. It is helpful for students to have the opportunity to introduce themselves in class and mention, for example, what they hope to learn in this course and any personal issues or questions they would like to share.

Throughout their careers, scientists work with others. This is particularly so for students during their time in graduate school. As a graduate student, among those with whom you can expect to interact variously throughout your graduate-school career – your academic adviser, faculty members on your thesis committee, other faculty members from both within and outside your home department, fellow students, and scientists elsewhere whose work and ideas can be of value to you – it is your academic adviser (thesis adviser) who can be expected to influence most directly the course, for good or ill, of your graduate experience. In Chapter 3 we discussed the many choices that researchers, in particular, beginning graduate students, must make in order to focus their research and, for graduate students, to complete their educational and research program in a reasonable amount of time. The choice of the adviser and the related choice of a research topic are essential not only for the successful completion of graduate studies, they can also influence the way in which the academic career develops, and even the course of one's subsequent scientific career. In order to make informed choices, it is necessary to understand the roles – both academic and personal – of the scientific adviser, with whom you can expect to spend many hours. We describe those roles in this chapter, along with the related role of the thesis committee.

Publications are the primary means for distributing, establishing, and archiving scientific results. The decision to hire or promote somebody is often based to a large extent on the number and quality of publications that the individual has written. Because, typically, the number of copies of a journal article that are printed is orders of magnitude larger than the number of thesis copies made, papers in technical journals are of much larger value to the scientific community than are theses. Because most graduate students must prepare and defend a thesis, the best of both worlds for them exists in graduate programs that both encourage students to publish their research work during the course of their studies and allow them to use their published or submitted papers, perhaps in an adapted form, as chapters in their thesis. For all the above reasons, scientific publications are of great importance. In this chapter we suggest questions to contemplate prior to writing a paper, steps to take during the submission and review process, and actions to consider while the paper is in press and afterward.

BEFORE YOU START WRITING

Before writing a manuscript you need to decide in which journal you intend to publish your work. The choice of journal for publication can be of crucial importance. Among other reasons, this decision can influence the tone and content of the paper, its length, and the format you use.

The career in science for which graduate school prepares you could take many different possible shapes. Depending on your field, opportunities exist for stimulating and rewarding work in either industry or academia. In this chapter we outline different types of scientific careers, the sorts of choices to be made, and considerations worth keeping in mind when making these choices. Be mindful, however, that none of the choices carves the direction of your career in stone; that direction can and quite likely will change over the course of time. Even though changes are possible later in your career, greater effort is often required to make the transition later rather than earlier on. Planning ahead can help create favorable conditions, but don't expect that you can plan for every eventuality. Expect the unexpected in life if for no other reason than that you could well discover that your outlook, ambitions, and circumstances change with time.

Because the range of career possibilities available is so wide, varied, and fundamentally personal, the general topic of career choice is complex. Moreover, types of career choices change with time as society changes. Recent and up-to-date information on the scientific career can be found in the journal Science Careers, issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has a website that covers important career issues in higher education, and Appendix A lists further reading on the topic of the scientific career.

You're planning to pursue graduate education or perhaps are in an early stage of graduate study in science or engineering, or perhaps the humanities. You might therefore be thinking that the future course of your graduate studies and career thereafter are well set in place: you can now proceed with your course work and research largely on automatic pilot. The experience of most graduate students, however, is unfortunately to the contrary. While you know not to expect smooth sailing in your studies and research, you might be unaware that many roadblocks, sources of frustration and angst, and much wasted time during and after graduate study can be avoided or at least substantially minimized, perhaps making the entire experience largely satisfying, indeed joyful – one in which you thrive.

This book is a practical guide with two primary goals. The first is to help make the experience of graduate study for students early in their graduate program in science, and for senior-level undergraduates intent on entering such a program, be an efficient, effective, and generally positive one. The second goal, consistent with the first, is to help those students and other junior researchers develop effective research habits.

While some will choose to read this book from cover to cover, many will find benefit from reading selected chapters in depth at different stages of their university or professional careers, perhaps returning to specific chapters as needed.

Whether you are early in a Ph.D. program or further along in your graduate studies, an undergraduate contemplating graduate school and a career in science, a recently anointed Ph.D. embarking on a scientific career, or are somewhere beyond in mid-career, our hope is that various of the suggestions offered in this book can be of help toward your goal of a successful and satisfying professional career.

Much of the advice on doing research contained in this book involves practical skills. Regardless of the practicality of this advice, neither this nor any other book can provide a recipe that guarantees success. As argued in Chapter 2, despite its foundation in logic, science is driven by inspiration, insight, intuition, and creativity, all combined with technical expertise. No cookbook-style set of instructions based on a combination of just these skills, however, can offer a young scientist the guarantee that these ingredients, when mixed, will yield a fruitful and satisfying professional career. Our careers depend on not only our scientific talents, but also our personal ones and our attitude in life. In closing, we offer advice on the development of a mentality that helps foster success in the professional and personal aspects of a career in science, engineering, or humanities.

Traditionally the academic library has been the repository for the archiving of books and journals for scientific research, also offering a place for reading and study. It is much more than that today. By making available large and readily searchable databases of books and publications, these libraries have come to offer researchers the capability to search the scientific literature with remarkable efficiency, retrieving relevant publications electronically when possible.

Indeed, retrieval of scientific information is increasingly being driven by electronic tools and information technology. While this development opens up new possibilities for the efficient search and retrieval of information, it does so in the face of a new problem: the amount of information available is vastly larger than what the individual human mind can process. It therefore is essential to access this superabundance of information in ways that actively supports the research. The options available nowadays could be bewildering, making it important to be aware of, and use, the right tools for gaining access to the appropriate information. Most academic libraries offer valuable assistance and suggestions through their websites. Moreover, typically the staff of these libraries have the expertise as well as the desire to offer advice and share their expertise with those seeking help.

Any student contemplating graduate study, or embarking on graduate study or a career in science, is confronted by a myriad of choices. During your undergraduate career, you have the choices of major and minor subject, but you're likely past having made decisions on those. Once you have decided to pursue graduate study, near the end of your undergraduate study comes your choice of graduate university and program, founded on the choice of field – and, perhaps, subfield – of study you wish to pursue or type of career you wish to follow. Once beyond these choices, or perhaps concurrent with them, comes an all-important one, your choice of adviser – the individual who likely will have the largest influence on your approach to and outlook on science as well as on your success throughout the time of graduate study. An abundance of choices, many of which are puzzling and difficult to make, but what a wonderful position to be in to have created for yourself the opportunity to face such difficulties.

In planning research it is usually not hard to decide broadly what we want to achieve. The goal of the research might be to pursue an interest or a desire “to know”; it might be to find the path in which to establish a career; it might be to obtain a higher degree; it could be driven by the wish to contribute to making our world a better place in which to live; and it could be a mix of such considerations.

Certainly a book for prospective scientists ought to explain what science is. Still, despite numerous books that treat the philosophy, character, and practice of science, there is no agreed-upon nor clear-cut and unambiguous definition of science. This holds not only for the many fields of study that have adopted methods patterned on those of the natural science, e.g., social science, psychology, economics, managerial science, and military science, but also for the natural sciences themselves. In a broad sense one might define science as the activities aimed at understanding the world around us, but it could be well argued that the arts, humanities, and many other endeavors in modern society likewise aim at understanding of the world, albeit understanding of a different sort than that sought in the natural sciences. So let's focus on the practice of natural science, which might be defined as the activities aimed at understanding of the natural world.