Best in Show!

Scientists often discuss (or bicker) about the order of authorship on papers. “I got a first-author paper published!” or “I was only second author on the paper.”

What do such phrases mean?

The first author on a paper is supposed to be the person who worked the most on the paper. Usually, the researcher who did the research of the paper, not necessarily the person who did the most writing. (See Lead Author, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_author). Often, this is the graduate student who worked on the project.

Jury of Your Peers

If you ever read a popular science article that references papers, you’ll often see the phrase “peer-reviewed” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review) Scientists typically only trust peer-reviewed papers, but sometimes the public will accept papers that haven’t been peer-reviewed. With the internet, any yahoo can post an article online. So what does this phrase mean?

Peer Review is the process by which scientific papers get accepted and how the scientific community works in general. Basically, your work isn't accepted until your peers agree with you.

Archiving: Not just for Librarians anymore

Scenario 1: You’re 12 years old, and you’ve just discovered a juicy new piece of gossip. You want to be the first to share it with your friends. Unfortunately, you’re stuck in the 1960s so all you can do is try to be the first one at school. Alas, a classmate has beaten you to it!

Flash forward to now. Instead of running to school, you can post the news on Twitter or Facebook. It’s even time-stamped so nobody can dispute that you were the first to know the news.

Scenario 2: You’re a poor struggling graduate student doing research. You have an amazing new discovery that would allow you to graduate once published. You rush to submit your article to a journal.

Disaster strikes! You’ve been scooped! (Someone has published the same result before you.) Three years of your life wasted. If only you could have published your research first. (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=794)

Solution: The arXiv (http://arxiv.org/)

Lab Reports for Grown-Ups

Grid notebooks, hand-written graphs, switching the carbon paper every time you turned a page. Such are the memories aroused by the mere mention of lab reports.*

To this day, I still remember the strict guidelines of high school lab reports: Hypothesis, Introduction, Materials, Methods, Data/Results, Analysis, and Conclusion.

Scientists write articles instead of lab reports. Articles are reminiscent of lab reports, but the formatting is slightly different, as we explore below.