How to pick the projects you work on
I recently read a very thought-provoking article about the process of picking research projects to work on. This is a topic that's very important, yet is easily overlooked. So I thought I would post my thoughts.
What should our aim be in picking research projects?
It's important (perhaps even vital) to pick projects that are interesting to you. Not only is this sensible on a personal level (why would you want to work on things you don't find interesting?), but it's also hugely important on an academic level; if you can't enthuse, immerse yourself, even obssess about a particular project, you'll struggle to gain the very deepest levels of insight and your results will be less good because of it.
Research that addresses important questions should be our second aim. Imagine that you have a miracle year of research where everything you work on turns to metaphorical gold. Wouldn't you rather this effort went into curing cancer, producing a working theory of quantum gravity or solving climate change, rather than some minutae of an obscure branch of your subject? I've put interesting and important in this order, but I think the key point here is that you want to work on projects that are both.
These two considerations ought to be enough. Sadly, there are also practical considerations because of the realities of building a research career. It's probably prudent to work on at least some projects that will help you secure future funding and/or jobs. This is a tricky topic, especially if you're on fixed term funding (such as a postdoc) and you have a very limited amount of time before you need to find more funding from somewhere (and you might be employed to work on a specific project). Of course, if you're working on important areas of research then it should be a lot easier to sell yourself. But you need to make sure that the projects you're working on will produce some publishable results and material on which you can talk at conferences. Even one great piece of interesting work can have a huge impact here.
At the risk of a sweeping generalisation, many researchers end up working on safe-but-slightly-uninspiring projects. These types of projects can produce a steady stream of publications and to be fair they do often have some incremental scientific value, but I think it's a huge mistake to only work in this way. Our profession is one of creativity and knowledge discovery, so we should spend a proportion of our time working on ideas that are speculative, exploring new intellectual territory. Of course, many of these won't come to anything, but the occasional one that does might have a huge impact. There are scientists who have built stellar careers and created whole new disciplines with one (really, really good) idea.
And what do I think? I think that a deep fascination with your research is vital. Within that, pick the projects that are likely to be important (in both your and other people's opinions) - you might as well work on things that might have some impact. And beyond that, try to build a good CV but if you're doing the first two things well, this shouldn't be a problem.
What should our aim be in picking research projects?
It's important (perhaps even vital) to pick projects that are interesting to you. Not only is this sensible on a personal level (why would you want to work on things you don't find interesting?), but it's also hugely important on an academic level; if you can't enthuse, immerse yourself, even obssess about a particular project, you'll struggle to gain the very deepest levels of insight and your results will be less good because of it.
Research that addresses important questions should be our second aim. Imagine that you have a miracle year of research where everything you work on turns to metaphorical gold. Wouldn't you rather this effort went into curing cancer, producing a working theory of quantum gravity or solving climate change, rather than some minutae of an obscure branch of your subject? I've put interesting and important in this order, but I think the key point here is that you want to work on projects that are both.
These two considerations ought to be enough. Sadly, there are also practical considerations because of the realities of building a research career. It's probably prudent to work on at least some projects that will help you secure future funding and/or jobs. This is a tricky topic, especially if you're on fixed term funding (such as a postdoc) and you have a very limited amount of time before you need to find more funding from somewhere (and you might be employed to work on a specific project). Of course, if you're working on important areas of research then it should be a lot easier to sell yourself. But you need to make sure that the projects you're working on will produce some publishable results and material on which you can talk at conferences. Even one great piece of interesting work can have a huge impact here.
At the risk of a sweeping generalisation, many researchers end up working on safe-but-slightly-uninspiring projects. These types of projects can produce a steady stream of publications and to be fair they do often have some incremental scientific value, but I think it's a huge mistake to only work in this way. Our profession is one of creativity and knowledge discovery, so we should spend a proportion of our time working on ideas that are speculative, exploring new intellectual territory. Of course, many of these won't come to anything, but the occasional one that does might have a huge impact. There are scientists who have built stellar careers and created whole new disciplines with one (really, really good) idea.
And what do I think? I think that a deep fascination with your research is vital. Within that, pick the projects that are likely to be important (in both your and other people's opinions) - you might as well work on things that might have some impact. And beyond that, try to build a good CV but if you're doing the first two things well, this shouldn't be a problem.
The pressure to publish...
The modern academic faces a lot of pressure to be productive, especially to publish papers.
There are pros and cons to this. In the "good old days" (I'm told), academics gained a faculty position and then were left to their own research devices for the next few decades. This is great for truly creative research (so-called "blue sky" thinking), because you can focus exclusively on the problem, letting it develop and exploring its various facets without spending time/effort producing incremental publications. Or course, it may also have allowed some academics to coast.
I'm a strong believer that there's a lot of benefit to academic creativity. What we do is intrinsically creative and creativity needs a bit of scope to explore new ideas, without having to worry if they'll turn into a paper or a grant proposal. But I think there's also a pretty good case for a balance. After all, if an academic spends their whole career deep in thought and never writes a word of it down, their research hasn't been useful to anyone. So, the question becomes this: what balance should we strike between productivity and creativity? Between writing papers and trying out new ideas.
To some degree, this is a trade-off between quality and quantity. The academic that publishes all the time runs the risk of writing papers that have very little important content. There are lots of academic papers that get churned out that have some limited merit, but that exist mainly because the authors felt the pressure to publish. On the other hand, the academic who hardly ever publishes should (hopefully) write papers with lots of great content. Just not very many of them.
There is also a subtlety to this trade-off. While publishing more frequently will tend to mean less research goes into each paper, it does mean that you'll get more rapid feedback on your work (from referees and readers). This is important because it crowd-sources your research, getting a whole range of suggestions and criticisms that will help improve and inform the next stage of your work. Research is actually very incremental (think about how your projects progress on a day-to-day basis), so this can be really beneficial.
And of course it can be argued that the funder (the UK tax payer, in my case) has the right to expect some kind of return for their investment. I think this is fair enough, but I think a lot of care has to be taken in how one defines this return. Number of papers is almost certainly a terrible measure (who cares if an academic writes 50 papers if none of them have any lasting impact). Maybe there has to be a degree of trust between funder and academic?
My gut feeling is that one awesome lead-author paper per year is what we should be aiming for. If you generate enough research for more, great. But one really great paper per year where you're the lead researcher seems to me to be a good level. This should give you enough time to try ideas out and develop new projects, while also building a good publication record over time. If you're like me, you'll also spend a fair amount of time contributing to projects where someone else will be lead author on the papers; this is valuable and you should end up being a co-author on papers as a result.
So the message of this post is to strike a balance. Whatever the rights and wrongs of productivity versus creativity, you need to publish papers to build an academic career. And I really do mean it about the 'awesome' bit. Would you rather be known as the researcher who's produced half a dozen fantastic lead-author papers, or the one who has written fifteen that are deeply uninteresting?
There are pros and cons to this. In the "good old days" (I'm told), academics gained a faculty position and then were left to their own research devices for the next few decades. This is great for truly creative research (so-called "blue sky" thinking), because you can focus exclusively on the problem, letting it develop and exploring its various facets without spending time/effort producing incremental publications. Or course, it may also have allowed some academics to coast.
I'm a strong believer that there's a lot of benefit to academic creativity. What we do is intrinsically creative and creativity needs a bit of scope to explore new ideas, without having to worry if they'll turn into a paper or a grant proposal. But I think there's also a pretty good case for a balance. After all, if an academic spends their whole career deep in thought and never writes a word of it down, their research hasn't been useful to anyone. So, the question becomes this: what balance should we strike between productivity and creativity? Between writing papers and trying out new ideas.
To some degree, this is a trade-off between quality and quantity. The academic that publishes all the time runs the risk of writing papers that have very little important content. There are lots of academic papers that get churned out that have some limited merit, but that exist mainly because the authors felt the pressure to publish. On the other hand, the academic who hardly ever publishes should (hopefully) write papers with lots of great content. Just not very many of them.
There is also a subtlety to this trade-off. While publishing more frequently will tend to mean less research goes into each paper, it does mean that you'll get more rapid feedback on your work (from referees and readers). This is important because it crowd-sources your research, getting a whole range of suggestions and criticisms that will help improve and inform the next stage of your work. Research is actually very incremental (think about how your projects progress on a day-to-day basis), so this can be really beneficial.
And of course it can be argued that the funder (the UK tax payer, in my case) has the right to expect some kind of return for their investment. I think this is fair enough, but I think a lot of care has to be taken in how one defines this return. Number of papers is almost certainly a terrible measure (who cares if an academic writes 50 papers if none of them have any lasting impact). Maybe there has to be a degree of trust between funder and academic?
My gut feeling is that one awesome lead-author paper per year is what we should be aiming for. If you generate enough research for more, great. But one really great paper per year where you're the lead researcher seems to me to be a good level. This should give you enough time to try ideas out and develop new projects, while also building a good publication record over time. If you're like me, you'll also spend a fair amount of time contributing to projects where someone else will be lead author on the papers; this is valuable and you should end up being a co-author on papers as a result.
So the message of this post is to strike a balance. Whatever the rights and wrongs of productivity versus creativity, you need to publish papers to build an academic career. And I really do mean it about the 'awesome' bit. Would you rather be known as the researcher who's produced half a dozen fantastic lead-author papers, or the one who has written fifteen that are deeply uninteresting?
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