Category Archives: Collaboration
Trust your collaborators?
How many wasps are on this nest? What are their unique identifying marks? How many eggs, larvae, and pupae are in the nest? How many times does a given wasp dominate another? These are the questions that gave the numbers … Continue reading
A tragedy in animal behavior and heroic responses
As I write this 8 papers where data were collected by Jonathan Pruitt are somewhere in the pipeline for retraction and another 5 have been identified with data problems. Many others are being checked. Yet other papers, mostly with data … Continue reading
Why is your lab group so separate from your department?
Few things in research are more exciting than watching ideas build as one person augments the thinking of another. Each can arrive at a place unanticipated and impossible from lone thinking. I feel almost euphoric when this happens. It may … Continue reading
How to creatively work the room at an NSF meeting
You’ve arrived at NSF, or NIH, or at any kind of small meeting with a job to do. You walk in the door, see the big table and find your name plate. Do you sit down and get to work, … Continue reading
How to increase research creativity: work differently!
Isn’t it too bad there isn’t a simple formula for having the best ideas? Isn’t it too bad you can’t easily find the best thing to study, something easy, fun, high impact, and easily published in PNAS? It may seem … Continue reading
What to do when a postdoc isn’t working out
Your postdoctoral years should be glorious. You’ve proven yourself with a Ph.D., showing you can master your field and find something new to solve, often in collaboration with an adviser, solve it, write it up, and publish it. You have … Continue reading
The problem with describing author contribution
Did you ever read the author contribution box on a paper you have contributed to with horror? Did you not realize you were hardly a part of the study, that someone else is claiming the idea, the analysis, or all … Continue reading
Is co-authorship a cynical strategy?
What if you found a partner you trusted and simply put your name on all of each other’s publications, asked a friend at the Evolution meeting in Snowbird. You would come close to doubling your reputation without doing any extra … Continue reading
Sociobiology 