It is susceptible to disagreement if others disagree with your methods, your analyses, or your interpretations. Part of that disagreement should not be because you had access to something secret, or your critic had access to something secret.

This is why you need to resist the temptation to refer to data you are not sharing at this time, or to communications that are not public. Science does not work by deferring to authority. It advances with data, analysis, and interpretation. These three things reveal theories that are supported. These three things are the way in which we reject theories, no matter how eminent the person advancing them is.  This is a wonderful thing about science. It is the source of all its power.

But life is complicated and you may have a piece of a puzzle that impacts a publishable study that itself is not quite ready for publication, or that belongs to a different set of co-authors. You may want to say personal communication to acknowledge an idea that was not yours. But you should not do either of these things. Restrict your story to the facts that are revealed. Save the rest for later.

I really like it that the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, explicitly disallows these practices: “Data not shown and personal communications cannot be used to support claims in the work,” from PNAS editorial policies.

When you write a review, you can put your work where it belongs in the scientific narrative. But be careful! The best reviews are the most fair ones. They cite as widely as is appropriate. They have a new and clear perspective, or they extend an old perspective. Many journals these days put reference limits on reviews, so work hard to cite the most relevant ones, mixing between the very newest and the historical papers that once defined the field. Don’t look for revenge by ignoring those who once ignored you. These are the scientists you want to win over to your perspective.

When you write your review, you should have something new to say. This takes work. But it is work that is rewarded, for it not only helps put your work in a worthy place, but it can also lead you in new and creative directions. Graduate students should be involved in reviews, writing or collaborating on them as they become familiar with the literature, provided they can write a fresh, new review.

Olaya Rendueles, a postdoc in the Velicer lab in Zurich told me that a number of her fellow grad students in Paris wrote review papers very early in their graduate careers because the short 3 year program required at least one publication. That would be hard to do with a data paper in such a short time.  I did a quick search and found an interesting review that she wrote entitled: Multispecies biofilms: how to avoid unfriendly neighbors. It looks interesting, but I couldn’t download it from here.

Steve Frank

It will still be true that the reviews written by newcomers will take longer to have an impact than the reviews written by leaders in the field. Just remember, those leaders got to their positions by having interesting things to say. I can hardly wait to read Steve Frank‘s latest piece on kin selection, for example. I also love the way he makes everything so accessible, retaining the rights to his books so people can download the PDFs freely. This didn’t stop me from actually buying the books for the convenience of the format.

There are other things you can do to get your work noticed. Attend various meetings. Give talks and posters. Approach scientists you admire and engage them in conversation about their work. Then work it around to yours. We scientists are social animals and remember best the work of those we know.

To become a leader in your field, you need to do the important new studies, casting pretty shells on the beach of science. But you also need to gather the shells of everyone together and put them into a pattern. Then you will get the attention you deserve.

We learned about a lot of them from an excellent presentation Eleanor Pardini gave to our lab group last Tuesday. I hope to work through presenting them here. I’ll start with a really cool one about grouping students.

If you have your students work in groups, you have to have a way of grouping them. If the groups are informal and short-lived, you can just have them form according to where they sit on a given day. But sometimes having students in groups that last the whole semester is a good idea. I worry when I do this, because I want students to get a lot out of their group. I don’t want the groups to sort in some ways, and do want them to sort in other ways. When I was at Rice, I generally had the groups form according to residential college, to make meeting outside of class easier. Last semester I went through a complex interview process involving written questionnaires and private meetings with me to form the semester-long groups.

But from now on, I’ll form groups according to a tool Eleanor told us about called catme.org. This site allows you to use the answers to questions to form groups and to get feedback on the groups. She said that it was particularly effective to sort students according to how much time they planned to put into the course. This sounded like a great idea to me. One thing I always want to avoid is the kind of thing that goes on when gym class teams are chosen and someone has to be last. Since a group can last all semester, it is really important to get this right. Eleanor said that when she used this tool to form the groups, she had happy groups that worked very well together.  I can’t wait to try it.

These events work best with a carefully selected blend of people representing diverse interests, ages, and universities. The multicellularity meeting would have suffered greatly had even one of the fossil people cancelled. The organizers knew this, but they are vulnerable to an increasingly common occurrence: the no show or last minute cancellation.

There will always be some cancellations, because we are human. We get sick. People we love and care for get sick. We may occasionally simply mess up and double schedule. So I don’t hold a hard line on legitimate cancellations. But some people seem to have decided that it is simply all right to cancel at the last minute, or to back out of one commitment if a more enticing one comes along. This is frustrating for all concerned, so don’t do it! For organizers, I recommend moving on down your list when you are inviting if you come on a name of a frequent last minute canceller.

It is fine to say no at the beginning.  It would be even better to say no and recommend a couple of more junior people who would be great to invite. Standing by your commitment is something you should have learned a long time ago, maybe not in kindergarten, but not long after. So say no often, but when you say yes, stand by it. We are counting on you!

For me, a meeting is a success if I sleep and wake with new ideas buzzing in my brain. A meeting is a success if I get really excited by novel information, making neurons fire as I try to fit the new into my old frameworks. A meeting is a success if I am suddenly burning with the desire to answer questions I have not thought of before, or had thought of but didn’t feel they were important.

From the beginning of the multicellularity meeting I heard talks that entranced. The fossil talks in particular were amazing to me. It isn’t that this isn’t well known in certain circles, but that they weren’t my circles. I loved the early stuff on the first fossil evidence for multicellularity. I loved the fossilized developmental series. I puzzled over the idea that animals changed the earth. I know plants changed the very make up of our atmosphere and I want to think more about that. What is the role of animal ability to move water? Why was the speaker so excited by sponges? One of the truths about effective meetings is that the talks are just the beginning. I then go home and read papers I never would have thought of looking for.

At a successful meeting one thing leads to another. For me, the fossil stuff led to wondering about how important multicellularity really is in ways we may pursue.  I found a little factoid that there is more biomass in Antarctic krill than in humans, all concentrated in an area two times that of the US. No wonder there are all those whales and squid that eat them. But humans and krill are both multicellular organisms, making them essentially the same. Where is life surface-bound and where is it floating or moving actively? Is surface-bound life generally multicellular, like aspens or bryozoans or a gooey mess like a biofilm? I bought a book on bryozoans. Do they have the answer? Or should I work harder to understand adhesion genes? Well, this is just a sampling of the things I started thinking about. I bet others found other arenas of excitement.

You are less likely to learn totally new things from scientists you already know, or those from your same intellectual ghetto. It is therefore up to the organizers to put together a good mix. In this case they were Mike Travisano, Matt Herron, and Will Ratcliff. They put together a good mix in specialty, age, and gender. About a third of the participants were women, a mixture approximating that in the field. Fossils, microbes, protists, social insects, colonial animals, fungi, and algae made their intellectual appearance. The group was light on mechanisms, I suppose, but you can’t do everything.

We were tasked with planning out the paper that would define and explain multicellularity and point to future research directions. To do this we had alternating sessions of talks, small groups, and large groups. The small groups self-organized from lists of questions gathered into five groups, four of which attracted participants. Some people joined groups where they knew a lot, while others joined groups that were novel for them. We had a Wiki for posting articles of interest and Google Docs to simultaneously write our pieces.

There was a certain amount of stress for the organizers, because we did not always follow instructions. We were asked to join different groups if we from the same lab group, but Dave and I stayed together.  Some groups changed their topics. Some seemed to get stuck on things that made their presentations rather inscrutable. Is trying to put together thinking on a topic in a small group is an effective way of spending several days, whether or not a paper comes out of it.

I think it worked. For me, discussing with Letitia Avilés, Mike Travisano, David Queller, and briefly Daniel McShea, was more effective in letting me see things differently than just listening to a few days of talks would have been. What is important when we think about multicellularity? What is not? How are social insects alike and how are they different? Why have levels of coloniality progressed comparatively little?

I also liked the informal get-togethers a lot. I loved seeing my former grad student, Chandra Jack. We nearly finished another draft of a paper. I liked the energy and diversity of the young post-docs.

What would I have changed? I would have liked to have a 10-minute talk from everyone at the meeting. These could be dispersed throughout the first three days, perhaps first thing in the morning and right after lunch. I would have liked less time for the overall presentations because they were often unclear to people outside their group. Well, they were unclear to me.

Did we come up with something new? Will there be a group paper? I think there were enough new ideas and old ideas brought together in new ways from the corners of the field that there easily could be. But it will take a lot more work.

The next meeting I go to is the symposium for Alan Templeton at Washington University in St. Louis on 3 June 2013. It will have a mix of talks, posters, and socializing. I hope people discover new directions while celebrating Alan’s phenomenal career, one that won’t end just because he is retiring.

You don’t need me to tell you that this is not fair. But it is a challenging problem when groups dine together. There are basically four solutions: have the organizer pay for everyone, divide the bill evenly, convince the servers to issue separate bills to each person, or have a set menu so everyone gets the same food (though they still won’t eat the same amount). A fifth alternative, attempting to divide up a group bill will be challenging, and is seldom attempted. NSF panel dinners often have set meals in my experience, at least for the one main panel dinner. The very nice dinner we had last night here at NESCent had individual food bills, with only bottles of wine with shared bills. At our table our gracious host snatched up the wine bill. As far as food went, we each paid for our own. So there are solutions that do not make students subsidize their professors. It is worth taking the effort to make it fair. Then everyone can concentrate on getting to know new scientists and talking about ideas.

Instead of Facebook or email, go to the speaker’s web page. See if you can download the papers he is basing his talk on. Look at them at the same time as you are listening. This will satisfy your need for multichannel stimulation without taking you off topic. You might even discover something else cool this speaker has done. Put those downloaded talks into a folder for the meeting. This can be better than taking notes.

For example, on the first day we heard such a cool talk on micro-fossils of the first multicellular organisms. I didn’t have any hooks on which to hang the information, so I am likely to forget it. I was madly copying down the names so that I could find the work again. But then I went to Nick Butterfield‘s web page.  I found the papers the talk was based on. I felt better. I could pursue this stuff at my leisure. I turned and listened harder to the talk, not worrying about taking notes any more.

Perhaps the only thing better to keep focus is to tweet the talk.

Susanne DiSalvo

One way is to have as much information as possible flow up from the student or postdoc to the professor, rather than the other way around. We professors can make our grant proposals and ideas available to students, but let the students choose what they want to do within that sphere. We should be available for conversation as much as possible to guide students. For it is true that no step is more crucial to get right than the original design of experiments. But let’s make sure what we have decided by receiving information after discussion from the student, rather than handing it down to them.

Yesterday a fairly new postdoc in our group, Susanne DiSalvo, sent me a summary of a recent meeting on her research. She had called the meeting, showed us her data, brought up some of the issues. We discussed the project and came to some conclusions. Her summary made it clear how she saw the meeting. This is so important, because miscommunication is so easy. I think I’ve asked for such summaries unsuccessfully in the past, so it was really great to get this volunteered.

What is the bottom line? That we need to talk often. That students should lead, calling the meeting, presenting the data and the issues, then following up with a summary. But if the student is too shy or new, then it is up to us to hold regular meetings, and to request summaries. We just can’t be too careful when it comes to designing and conducting research. Frequent communication is essential.

But should we all get together and write a paper on multicellularity? Can we figure out something to say that everyone will actually contribute to substantively enough to be authors? I’ve been involved in some other things like this and have found it to be true all too often that a small minority of the group actually does the heavy lifting involved in carving out a paper, let alone an important paper.

There are also big groups that end up writing papers based on journal clubs, or seminars. Everyone wants a paper and somehow one comes out. I think this can work if there is a topic for something like a meta analysis and each student or small group of students contributes the research on some specific taxon. But it is still challenging.

I’m not against studies that involve a lot of authors. Some projects I’ve been on have many authors, but they tend to be divided among different areas, with a small group of chemists contributing chemistry, another group contributing phylogenetics, another something else. Genomic papers are especially likely to be like this as different groups look at their favorite gene families in the context of a new genome.

Can a big group that just met really write a good paper? I’m guessing we would be much better at writing a set of papers in smaller groups, or that some groups would write papers and others not. After all, we don’t always write papers even after really good and influential meetings. So even if we learn a lot about what we think about multicellularity, it has to be new and important before we publish on it. And every author needs to contribute substantively in more ways than just being in the room.

Lisbon

Did you drift from one project to another during your first year in graduate school? Did your program have you do rotations? Did you continue something you began as an undergrad? Or did you simply join one lab, get on a project and never look back?

Karina Xavier

I think there are a lot of good ways to be introduced to research in graduate school, but it worries me that we lose people or have people on projects that they don’t love because we don’t take enough time at the beginning to explore. The importance of extending to unfamiliar areas fits well with what I learned about creativity and brainstorming from KnowInnovation. I suppose that with any learning, I have forgotten most of what they taught me, but one thing that really stuck is that you should separate judging from initial exploration. How can we apply this to the first year of graduate school?

Thiago Carvalho

At the innovative and exciting Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (referred to as IGC) they do things differently, at least in the program I taught in for a couple of days last week. It is called the Program in Integrative Biomedical Sciences, PIBS. It is much broader than that name might seem, since it has plant research, behavior, evolution, bacterial signaling and other basic research topics that might surprise you in a biomedical program. They take in one highly selected, international class of about 14 students a year.

This year they come from 9 countries. Then these students spend the first semester together in an integrated program that takes all their time with labs, discussions, presentations, and speakers from all over the world. The schedule has weeks on the history of biology, cell biology, statistics, development, evolution, ecology, immunology, major transitions, hypothesis-driven research, and more. It has nearly 50 outside speakers that spend a day or two with these bright students, presenting their own research and perspective. At the end of the 16 weeks, the students begin to choose a lab.

There are many strengths to this program. One in particular interested me. In groups of three or four the students presented research papers in a formal journal club. Normally I favor a free for all with open discussion for journal club, but I could see the strength of this approach here, for it allowed the students focused on a paper to really work hard to understand it and defend their presentation to others. Then,  at the end of the week each team of students had to pretend they had joined the laboratory of the group that wrote their journal club paper, and present a new project that extended the work in some way.

Student presentations

These presentations were really impressive. The students had to defend their approach, the importance of their question, and the feasibility of their methods. They gave a little powerpoint on their new virtual project. They worked in teams to do this and were clearly intensely involved. They also got a lot of hard questions from the audience. I imagine that after 15 weeks of this, the students must be really good at thinking about and defending new research projects. I bet when the time comes to choose a lab in this department-free interactive environment, they do a great job. I know I had a wonderful time telling them about the wonders of social amoebae and learning one more thing about teaching and research. Oh, and did I mention this place is right on the beach?