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Science Moneyball: The Secret to a Successful Academic Career
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "For biomedical researchers who aspire to run their own labs, the secret is to publish frequently, as first author, and in top journals. That career advice may seem obvious, but this time it's backed up by a new analysis of data scraped from PubMed, the massive public repository of biological abstracts. The study, reported today in Current Biology, uses the status of last author as a proxy for academic success. Those corresponding authors are likely to be running their own labs, the brass ring that young researchers are trying to grab. See what your chances are using Science's PI Predictor graph."
It turns out that the secret for success in the stock market is to buy low and sell high. Get to it, folks.
... low hanging scientific fruit it appears. Since any serious science problem is going to be non-trivial. No doubt this 'success' is all about chasing low hanging fruit to get money.
Really publishing quality results is what will get you that and being the guy behind the projects will more often than not get you the lead author spot.
No, the exact opposite is what these folks used. They didn't look at the status of the last author as the summary claims, they used the last author position as a proxy for identifying who the PI was -- which is not really a measure of academic success. They didn't bother looking anyone's status up directly.
Maybe bio-whatever is different, but where I work "last author" isn't always the highest status, and there may be three or four co-PIs on a project, even multiple Universities.
Regarding the "publishing quality results is what will get you that" part, I'd argue it's exactly the opposite. Maybe we have a different idea of quality, but really groundbreaking science is high-risk science and will rarely get you the prescribed frequent publications, especially early in a project. Dull "me-too" science will. So will milking out every small incremental finding in a separate publication and spending more time writing and revising papers than doing actual science. This is partially demonstrated by the fact that papers in "lesser" journals count just as much.(*) To me, this is a big part of what's wrong with the current state of science.
(*) At the same time, I feel we should do away with journal rankings and impact factors altogether. They're a relic from the pre-internet age, where it wasn't trivial to know the number of citations an individual paper or author gets. But that's a different discussion.
I see your point, but unlike your tournament analogy, where their is direct competition between players to determine who is the best, academic publishing is only pseudo-competitive--more like figure skating.
There are far more great papers that could be in top tier journals than get published there. Whether your paper ends up there is a combination of which reviewers you happen to land, how your editor at the journal feels that morning, and how many papers you had published there previously. Thus, the majority of the determining factors in the number of top tier papers are not directly related to the scientific skill of the authors.
Certainly scientists who publish many top tier papers are great, but not all great scientists publish many top tier papers. For the number to correlate so strongly with academic success is a bit sad.
Extraordinarily famous and wildly successful scientists are publicly saying they never would have been successful if they had started in today's academic publishing world: http://kingsreview.co.uk/magaz...
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
It varies a lot from field to field. In my field (mathematics), authors generally seem to be listed in alphabetical order. Anecdotally, I have been lead to understand that in anthropology and sociology, authors are generally listed in order of seniority; and that in neurology the first author is assumed to be the head of the primary lab at University A, the second author the graduate student running that lab, the last author is the head of the secondary lab at University B, and the second to last author is the grad student running the secondary lab.
Rhapsody in Numbers