Lecturer Spotting

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Athene Donald

The Easter break, relatively short though it may be, offers me an opportunity to introduce another raft of characters from the Athenian University to join my previous lists of Dramatis Personae/ character assassinations. Here I describe variations on the theme of University lecturers, although of course that title is not meant to say anything about an individual’s seniority, merely that their job is to lecture. These now join my other characters, so far encompassing Group Leaders; Professors; University committee members and committee chairs, as well as members of external grant-giving committees.

Dr Energetic

Dr Energetic paces up and down the lecture theatre, their arms waving wildly as they try to put an important point across. Not for the sleepy student who wants to be permitted to doze quietly at the back of the lecture theatre, Dr Energetic will make a quick kip after a hard night’s drinking hard to come by. The advantage of a lecturer such as this is that even boring or turgid subjects may come alive enough to render them intelligible. The disadvantage is that strident tones and histrionic actions may merely irritate not inform.

Dr Inaudible

Dr Inaudible’s offering is very different. They may be the most intelligent person you will ever meet, with a solid grasp of every fact they are trying to convey and a neat turn of phrase to illustrate difficult concepts, but if they are not audible beyond the first two rows in the lecture theatre (and disdain being wired up with a microphone), all this is in vain. Alternatively they may be inaudible because they totally lack confidence in the material they have been assigned to teach and want to be unheard and unremarked. Dr Inaudible needs a stiff talking to by those in charge of teaching, plus subsequent follow-up to check that instructions to use a mike have been taken to heart – as well as a check that their lectures are indeed comprehensible as well as audible.

Dr Dusty

I am of an age to have once been lectured to by a gentleman in a gown. I was exposed to only one such example, I hasten to add, by someone then already close to retirement. The dust – chalk dust- was obvious. For others the dust may be less visible or more metaphorical, but, many lecturers look as if they have been curled up in a corner for many years and are only let out on license for their annual lecturing duties. What they do the rest of the year may be a mystery (in Cambridge of course they can hang out in their college rooms, and may be assiduous in teaching generations of students there). Closely related is Dr Dry-as-Dust, old in character if not in chronological years, probably pernickety and dull, these characters do tend to take their lecturing duties seriously, indeed teaching may be their lifeblood (if not in a style attractive to many) and may be all they wish to do, not least because they aren’t interested in research and possess the leadership and administrative skills of a baby mouse.

Dr Absent-minded

Dr Absent-minded has a reputation for forgetting to turn up to lectures. One such I encountered myself encouraged me to come and find him if he didn’t show up, although that was something I found too embarrassing to contemplate. They may also turn up with the wrong lecture notes (a sin I myself once committed, although the class was amazingly tolerant) or forget to keep an eye on the clock and run over the stated time, despite the audible collective rumblings of the audience’s stomachs. They may be an irritating class of lecturers, but they can also be excellent value. Their failings are in their personal organisation not their teaching ability.

Dr Ultramodern

When the world was using blackboards, Dr Ultramodern had progressed to the overhead projector. As their colleagues caught on with this they were already contemplating the joys of Powerpoint (or should that be ‘joys’?). Dr Ultramodern is never satisfied with the current teaching tools and no doubt will now be dropping in Audioboos to enliven the lecture theatre, relevant or not, and eyeing Google Glasses with interest (will the teaching budget run to them?). That is the trouble: in an ever-changing technical landscape, this particularly lecturer is more interested in showing off the latest technology than mastering the actual content and delivering it with clarity, a failing that can become tedious for the audience.

Dr Famed-as-Charismatic

Word of mouth commentary amongst generations of students is ubiquitous, and a lecturer who starts off as wonderful – enthusiastic, accurate, charming and comprehensible – can notch up a stellar reputation. This can be unfortunate if they start to rest on their laurels, no longer sweating over their lectures to make them first class, but relying on their reputation and a wing and a prayer to get them through, year on year. This is of course particularly disastrous if the teaching admin are so mean as to give them a new course to prepare. What, they have to start from scratch, mug up some new jokes and prepare new slides? Their reputation may take a rapid nosedive after such an unfortunate turn of affairs.

Dr Careless

Dr Careless may have an excellent grasp of their subject, and be hard-working at getting a good course structure with illustrative examples and clear explanations. But where they go wrong is in all those irritating little details – in physics, minus signs incorrectly placed are a particular bugbear; I hated this sort of sloppiness as a student myself, but again I’m ashamed to say it is a sin of which I have not infrequently been guilty. In handouts or in slides these little errors regularly lurk, to the students’ frustration. They do not want (although it may be good discipline for them) to have to check through every equation to ensure that all subscripts are present and correct and factors of 2  or p – as well as those minus signs – have not gone AWOL.

Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here

This person believes they are too important to have to lecture, and they are going to make this manifest. They look down their noses at the scruffy audience they have to address, to convey the fact that they are Important Personages who are conferring a favour merely by turning up. Their style of lecturing is peremptory, unenthusiastic but probably efficient enough. But they are never going to convey a love of the subject to the lecture hall because their love is for themselves first and foremost, and they would vastly prefer to be furthering their ambitions by jet-setting around the world than by being chained to the lecture theatre dais.

Dr I’m-not-here

This one is the ultimate manifestation of Dr I-don’t-want-to-be-here because they aren’t, in fact, ‘here’. The students turn up only to find that their lecturer has indeed got on that plane and vanished, without troubling to find a stand-in (let alone notifying the powers-that-be that they were heading off so that they could find a replacement themselves).  Their diary is too full of opportunities they deem more important to permit them to fulfil their lecturing responsibilities; their lack of a sense of duty is such that it never crosses their mind that their own self-importance should be subservient to their obligations to the student body. This one is a hard nut for a Head of Department to rein in, but vital that they should.

Posted in Education, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Trying to Get Away from It All

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Athene Donald

I’ve been away briefly this week, to an extremely cold and windy Suffolk coast.  Not the kind of break one comes back from tanned – other than with wind-burn – or with skiing fractures, but remembering there is a world beyond academia seems important to me, to help me put the world in a bit of perspective.  Nevertheless, it has to be said the weather was disgusting even by British seaside standards. Struggling against the wind, trying to make sure my deplorable woolly hat didn’t disappear into the far distance (the wind was off the sea, a fierce easterly, so at least the hat wasn’t going to get tossed into the sea), I was disappointed to find my mind still didn’t turn off from physics.

The sea was in a fury of white foam, layer upon layer of froth as the waves beat at the steep shingle bank we stood upon. The foam was also constantly blowing up and onto the beach and onto our clothes. Why was the foam so long-lived? Irritating to find myself trying to answer that question; I was NOT there to think about colloids! I do not believe the sea is now so jammed full of detergents (as sometimes one sees when a river gets frothy due to local pollution) that the foam is permanently stabilised by Fairy Liquid and its cousins. Whether the fury of the waves was sufficient, or whether there are saccharides or other molecules excreted by marine organisms contributing to a lowering of the surface tension, I don’t know. And to be honest, when on holiday, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

Waves is the subject I’ve been teaching to 400 eager (and not so eager) 1st years in Cambridge for the past few years; I’ve also taught it previously (in more advanced form) to second years, and I have therefore had professional occasion to consider the nature of water waves, and seek out examples of how they behave.  Shallow water waves and deep water waves have different dispersion relationships and hence behaviour, but I’m quite sure neither representation would have been adequate to describe the turbulent water that seethed at my feet.  When I first started lecturing this material some years ago now, I came across the idea (and traditional images) of a tsunami, without having any idea of what such a thing was. I thought it was some obscure Japanese folklore. Of course, since 2004 (and again in 2011), no one could possibly have any illusions about the importance of this phenomenon, even though it still doesn’t feature explicitly in my course.

There wasn’t a proper sandy beach, no shells or crabs, I saw only the remains of cuttlefish (calcium-rich aragonite, if you’re interested, and a useful and controllable buoyancy aid for the marine creature as long as it doesn’t go too deep, where apparently the gas-filled chambers of the bone implode under the pressure). The shore mainly consisted of shingle and marram grass, but there was sand a-plenty, much of it being blown into my mouth or smothering the esplanade: Lewis Carroll’s seven maids came to mind, although there was only a bulldozer which might have been attempting the same task. And where there was an accidental layer of sand covering, it had interesting ripples. Again my physicist’s mind went into annoying overdrive: what determined the periodicity of the ripples? No doubt, as with any similar instability, there is an optimum/fastest growing wavelength set by a balance of two factors, probably involving the distance the sandgrains have to migrate to build up the peaks and something to do with windspeed and how the peaks affect the local forces on the grains due to the wind. I reiterate, I was on holiday and I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS….I want to switch that part of my brain off. NB this means I’m not looking for a detailed analysis of the problem in any response.

Of course, battling the power of the wind could hardly fail to remind me of the possibility of wind as an alternative energy source, and towering over Kessingland where we were staying were two large wind turbines rotating at speed. The figure I had just read in the book (Project Sunshine) co-authored by my friend and long-term collaborator Tony Ryan flashed into my mind. This book, an impressive, sweeping overview of our energy problems past, present and of course future, claims the outermost tips of the blades whizz round at 200mph. Do they? I refused to try to check that mental calculation out; I wanted to head for the pub. There weren’t any offshore installations that I could see, despite what felt like a good opportunity to extract some energy from the ferocious wind, but I have been to this part of the coast when all is still and, as both Tony’s book and the earlier Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, by my Cavendish colleague David Mackay, now CSA at the Department of Energy and Climate Change make plain, storing energy from wind turbines and other sustainable energy sources is a major, unsolved challenge.

I had come to this part of the Suffolk coast with two aims. The first I had failed at badly; I hadn’t switched off from the day-job as well as I’d hoped, as the anecdotes above will make plain. My other aim had been to come to make my peace with this particular part of the sea. Some years ago I’d visited Southwold at a time of turbulence and upset in aspects of both my professional and personal life. Whereas, throughout my life, I have found watching agitated and tumbling water to be a powerful source of peace, grounding and wonder, on that occasion I had found it simply moved me to tears with no accrued benefit. It was almost as upsetting then to find that wave-watching no longer restored my spirits as to suffer from the underlying distress itself.

To return to the same part of the coast and feel, once more, the joy derived from the unceasing and unpredictable motion of inky, churned-up water, was the true benefit of the break. It was good too to remember just how far I have been able to recover from what had seemed to be an encounter with an unassailable brick wall. If that recovery hadn’t occurred I could never have started this blog; so this seems like a good moment to remind the reader of a truth I have discussed before, that no one, however outwardly successful, is unlikely not to have been kicked in the teeth on more than one occasion. Equally they will have found some mechanism to use that to their advantage, to find a way round the immovable object blocking the way or at least to bury the bad memories so that they no longer impede daily life.

This same stretch of coast, a bit further up near Great Yarmouth, was home to that Dickensian family of Peggotty who lived in a boat on the shore – I was reminded of this as we walked past over-wintering boats dragged high up on the shingle. As it happens, I’m just reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens. It is not irrelevant to the previous paragraph that he suffered in his youth, notably from his period in a blacking factory, and yet, as she puts it

‘What is most remarkable is the strength of the image he had of himself ,his belief in his own capacities and potential, justified by everything that came after, but quite uncertain then.’

Additionally, the vulnerability he felt in the factory found its way into many of the children he characterised in his novels and provided fertile experience for him. However, few of us are likely to have quite that degree of self-belief and robustness Tomalin attributes to Dickens, particularly as at the time under consideration he was around 13 years of age. Nevertheless, it is healthy to remember that today’s catastrophe can (although it most certainly won’t necessarily do so) blend seamlessly into much more happy circumstances, with the accompanying wisdom of experience and accrued toughness. A small nugget to try to hold onto if your world appears to be crashing down around your ears.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Learning the Foreign Language of Twitter

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Athene Donald

Any time I go to Europe, as this week, I come back ashamed of my lack of linguistic skills. This time I struggled through a brief conversation in French with a Brussels taxi driver trying to talk about the impact of the snow on Eurostar, my sentences larded with ghastly grammar, incorrect syntax and the odd English word. Goodness knows what he made of it. I then went to the European Commission where everyone from the security guards at the door to the secretariat I encountered at the top of the building seemed to speak faultless English. In the case of the former, it didn’t alter the fact that they wouldn’t let me into the building as no one had given me my correct badge, but they could at least explain fluently why I couldn’t get in until someone came to vouch for me.

I realise the ‘language’ I have been trying to learn most recently has, however, been Twitter. It is of course not just the words but the syntax, conventions and abbreviations. Some of these have come from texting I suspect, and personally I have never mastered the art of emoticon symbolisation. But my tweets can cope without a smiley (or any other kind of face), so I’m not troubled by this. But there are stylistic conventions I have quite consciously set out to learn and others where I remain  uncertain.

Dorothy Bishop has written a helpful introduction to Twitter and if you aren’t familiar with the medium at all you could go there for wise words which I won’t attempt to recapitulate. I have also written an explanation of why I think tweeting is helpful for academics and other professionals to enable them to access articles, commentaries and so on they might otherwise miss, in a very efficient way (albeit that article was written with a specific emphasis on women in science, the arguments hold equally true in other spheres).  I don’t want to cover that ground at all here. What interests me is how one ‘learns’ how to use the medium. It does seem to me the parallels with learning a language are very close.

I spent some time reading other people’s tweets before I got myself an account and started tweeting, so I had to learn how to recognize twitterhandles (@), shortened links and hashtags (#). The latter still seem slightly mysterious to me because you seem able to make up your own whenever you want. I think. Sometimes you suddenly see a whole string of tweets with some particular hashtag which takes off. #overlyhonestmethods seemed to be a particularly successful and entertaining hashtag(see here where the stream seems still to be going strong many weeks after its creation and a write-up here), with brief descriptions of what isn’t put in scientific methods.  People can be very creative given the right nudge. Twitterhandles are easy because they are essentially just like one’s email address, but knowing how to shorten links so that a web address fits into the 140 character limit is something that required 5 minutes homework on my part, noting how many of these started bit.ly and simply Googling that. (These days Twitter does the abbreviation all by itself, if you want to leave it to it).

But it is the customs and shorthand that take rather longer to get to grips with. The abbreviations such as RT (retweet), MT (modified tweet) and HT (heard through) seem simple enough, but the tricky question of when is a RT really a MT seems on a par with how long is a piece of string. If I modify someone’s tweet to fit it into 140 characters should I label it with an RT or MT – and does it matter? It seems to me that people behave differently but I’m not sure that, whatever one does, it can amount to a serious breach of etiquette. I try to indicate where I heard something from using HT, but sometimes that gets squeezed out by the character limit (particularly if a twitterhandle is long). I regret sometimes being sloppy in this way but I won’t lose sleep over it. The trouble is, I have reached my conclusions on these points simply by trying to read between the lines, as it were, of what other people tweet. Maybe my tweetguistic skills are as good as my French and I’m actually quite out of line – but I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

There are other kinds of courtesy that I’m unsure about. Suppose someone’s #ff’d me (which turns out to stand for Follow Friday and its message is ‘I like this person so why don’t you follow them too’ and is tweeted by some people on – you guessed – a Friday, usually at least) do you thank them for the thought or take it in your stride and ignore it? I tend to thank them, although when someone did this about me for a significant number of Fridays in a row I stopped. Once was enough (by them and hence by me) in my book.

If someone retweets me (sorry, RTs me), I feel pleased that I’ve said something significant enough for someone else to want to pass it on, but I’m hardly going to send them a vote of thanks. But if they’ve retweeted my tweet linking to a recent post of mine – or even more if they’ve actually said some nice words about a particular blog I’ve written – then I try to say thank you because it means a lot to me. Sometimes, though, this becomes impossible simply because I can’t keep an eye on the twitter feed closely enough to spot the RTs – and once or twice just because the numbers of RTs were so numerous it was simply unfeasible to thank everyone, chuffed though I was (which was the case with the impostor syndrome  post of mine). I am conscious of the fact that several tweets in quick succession thanking a number of people for their RTs make for very boring reading for other readers, so apologies to you!

There is one aspect of Twitter which a lot of people seem to have failed to decode, demonstrating a real linguistic failure to pick up a basic rule of operation. This concerns in essence a confusion between replies and retweets. If you want to reply to someone the tweet will begin @joannabloggs,  followed by the message you want to send them. However if you want to reinforce a message that @joannabloggs has already tweeted, you may want to stress that this is something she has said. In speech you might well say ‘Joanna Bloggs makes a good point…’, on Twitter if you begin with @joannabloggs then only she will receive the message (plus those who follow you both). I frequently see this syntax going astray; the correct thing to do is to begin with some other character rather than the @ sign. People use a  . or sometimes “ (as in . @joannabloggs or “ @joannabloggs ), although I think any character would do. Again that is only ‘ I think’; I may be wrong. I find myself feeling slightly disappointed when I spot people who obviously wanted to pass on that they’d liked something I’d written but who only manage to say so to me!

This is clearly exactly the sort of thing when concentrating on your ‘language’ and looking at what other people are doing, should enable you to pick up the correct syntax just as with learning a foreign language as a child. The difference is that there is no parent to correct your mistakes and I don’t think total immersion in Twitter – as in being sent on an Erasmus year abroad or, the old-fashioned female way, of becoming an au pair – would be a desirable way to spend one’s time. So syntactical errors continue and we each develop our own modus twittendi , to coin a (bad foreign) phrase.

Posted in Communicating Science | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Fixing the Numbers (well maybe)

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Athene Donald

This week I read that the Labour party was attempting to redress the lack of women candidates by using all-women shortlists, as women aren’t faring well in open competition to get selected as Parliamentary candidates. In Europe, meanwhile, we see the European Commission (EC) pushing for 40% of women on its advisory committees for Horizon 2020 (presumably once that problematical budget is agreed), so far only as a target not a formal quota. Is this sort of ‘social engineering’ the only way we are finally going to make significant progress in a reasonable time period? And if so, will there be unintended consequences? I am afraid I believe that the answer to the second question is yes, even if it isn’t obvious what the answer is to the first question; this isn’t necessarily very good news for men or women.

I wrote before about my mixed views about quotas and the like; that post was actually provoked by a conversation with an EC official. Now I find myself writing this in Brussels, as a new member of the European Resarch Council’s (ERC) Scientific Council. Gender matters greatly to the ERC, which has been gathering statistics on relative success rates of men and women to its various schemes since its inception in 2007. But, as my fellow Council member Isabelle Vernos said in her Comment piece in Nature recently (£),

‘quotas might even make matters worse by overworking already-stretched female scientists.’ 

I agree wholeheartedly and one has to look carefully at what using more women on their committees might actually be expected to achieve, beyond sounding impressive.

The recent and much-cited PNAS paper by Moss-Racusin et al demonstrates that populating a committee with more women is not necessarily going to lead to more favourable outcomes for women applicants. The evidence from the ERC’s own statistics support that: there appears to be no correlation between the number of women on a committee (or whether the chair is male or female) and the success rate by women. That finding is healthy and as it should be. Women academics are thin on the ground, representing less than 20% of the professoriat globally across Europe, although that figure obviously varies significantly both between nations and disciplines. These women are likely to be already overworked (or at least worked disproportionately) locally on committees, distracted from pursuing their research in ways that might facilitate winning ERC funding themselves. So asking them to devote yet more time to sit on grant-giving committees, isn’t necessarily the best way to achieve better gender balance in success rates, however important, rewarding and stimulating such a task may be and however much there may be concomitant indirect benefits in experience gained and networking opportunities. Superficially seeking out women to sit on such committees looks attractive; in practice it may be a completely misguided and wasted effort.

That last paragraph encapsulates a depressing truth: statistically women are somewhat less successful in obtaining ERC grants than men, as Isabelle Vernos’ article pointed out. The ERC is not unusual in that respect: I wonder if there is any grant competition across Europe where that isn’t true. If it can’t be solved by a simple manipulation of committee make-up, what can be done (I refuse to accept the naïve argument that women are less good at science!)? I suspect the answer may lie in tackling deep-seated cultural issues. Just as men have traditionally been able to rely on (male) support systems to help them navigate their way through job opportunities, career progression and promotions, so I suspect this sort of networking may also have provided them with access to mentors and peers who can comment on early drafts of grant applications and share insight and tips from their own experiences. Do women automatically get this sort of support without asking? And if not how many of them feel comfortable asking for such advice? Possibly if this mentoring were provided as a norm throughout their careers, women would imbibe the tricks of the trade that help to transform a decent proposal into a stellar one.

One strategy my own department has recently introduced is to offer mock interviews for applicants for ERC Starter Grants who reach that stage. Automatically this is being offered to men and women, with senior staff making up the mock panel. It’s too early to say if this will make a difference but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. However, that is already fairly late in the process, when many individuals will already have failed to make the cut – I am suggesting that perhaps women are being disadvantaged by a lack of mentoring as they actually write the proposal in the first place. There are figures to show that some states in the EU are also under-represented, and the concern about them is that lack of expertise in these countries means applicants aren’t getting the insight and advice they need from their seniors to enable them to enter the process as effectively as, say, those from my own country which has been extremely successful in obtaining funding from the ERC (even if many of the successful applicants are not UK nationals). I can’t help feeling that the same may apply to women.

If this is true, then we should not be blindly moving to some quota of women on committees in a vain attempt to redress the imbalance. We should, in our own institutions be mentoring women as they set out and at every stage along the way. If women are reluctant to ask for help as they put an application together, we should make sure the help comes their way whether they actively seek it or not (or conversely creating an atmosphere in which asking for help comes more naturally to them).  Maybe some of the women who do make the grade of winning an ERC grant will willingly join a future panel for the experience and sense of returning something to the system. But if we insist that the few women who do succeed must disproportionately give up their time to fulfil an EC ambition of 40% female membership we will be doing them (and the ERC) a disservice in preventing them from benefitting from the money invested in them.  In my earlier blog when I wrote about quotas I had mixed feelings. In this particular instance I feel quite clear in my own mind that the plans are likely to backfire on the very people that they are meant to help.

Posted in Science Funding, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

It’s Time to Resist the Pressure

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Athene Donald

As part of my university’s preparation for the transition to open access, there is a project being run out of the University Library to look at how academics approach publishing. (Fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry has written much on the topic of open access if you’ve somehow not caught up with the topic.) As part of that project I was interviewed on my publishing ‘strategy’. In so far as I have a conscious one, I realise how much the way I have been wont to approach writing papers may be at odds with the sort of pressures under which someone like the early career Sylvia McLain (another of the OT stable of bloggers) is clearly reeling. That, I suspect, is because I was introduced to paper-writing in an earlier, gentler era and I have not felt it necessary (at least to date) to reconsider my methods.

I do think there are substantial differences in approach between disciplines, possibly even between sub-disciplines. My interactions with biologists suggest they are far more likely than physicists to want to hold back any publication until they can conceive of sending it to a journal such as Cell or Science, rather than writing up a nice piece of work sooner rather than later and sending it to some decent (if not stellar) journal as soon as there is a good story to tell. Even so, it seems that biologists regularly expect the paper to come back from the editor with a request for further experiments. That was unheard of in physics in the past – or at least I’ve never personally known it to happen as an author, referee or editor. Referees, in my experience, are keen to ensure there is clarity, that the conclusions follow from the results and to check there are no gaping holes or flaws. But if there are the paper is rejected, not sent back for further experiments to be done. If that were done in my field I believe it would be regarded as a new submission.

Another relatively new tendency, or at least it has got much more common, is to argue with the editor. Editors seem increasingly prone to take one negative report as dominant over, say, two other positive ones and recommend rejection outright rather than give the author a chance to respond. That also seems a change, but one that simply encourages argument.  I suspect that this is simply a manifestation of editors being busy people and taking the easy way out; then they wait to see how angry this makes the authors.  Those that argue may well win, but if you are junior/insecure/less assertive maybe you’ll just go away with your tail between your legs. I suspect editors used to be more willing, or possibly have more time, to carry out their own personal arbitration between referees’ responses and this situation was less likely to occur.

Which takes me on to impact factors. I started this post before Stephen Curry’s most recent post. Impact factors have featured largely on his blog last summer and again today (do read this latest post of his and join his push-back).  They are clearly pernicious and again, I have been able to indulge in the luxury of not caring. Initially, because such a number did not exist; more recently because I am not seeking tenure, promotion or anything similar. I would like to continue to indulge in that luxury, but I now realise I may be doing my students a disservice by taking that attitude. Or, on the other hand, I may be teaching them the value of caring for the science itself, and not some spurious metric that seems to have been originally dreamed up in order to amplify a journal’s prestige (and hence the number of library subscriptions). A past editorial  from PNAS (which recently resurfaced through Twitter) pointed out

‘too many of our postdocs believe that getting a paper into a prestigious journal is more important to their career than doing the science itself’

– clearly an unhealthy state of affairs. So it is up to us, particularly the more senior, not only to push RCUK to state categorically that impact factors will not be used in the assessment of researchers in the future, as Stephen urges and as is the stated case in the current REF guidelines,but also to reinforce that position any time we find ourselves in a position of ‘judging’ others: appointments, promotions and so on. We should not use impact factors as a spurious proxy for judging the science itself.

The consequences of actions around publishing are full of such spurious metrics, spurious because they imply a precision that is sadly lacking. Impact factors are just one such; h factors are another. Even the order in which authors’ names appear on papers can be a minefield. These are all of dubious value because, in so many evaluation committees – wherever they may appear but certainly including the REF, appointments and promotions committees – the evaluators are too often lumping together individuals from different areas whose culture may be significantly different. So, one field (say synthetic chemistry) may publish a huge number of short letters describing innovative methodologies to produce 0.1mg of a new substance which one day might turn out to be the new next best thing. Another may expect lengthy papers which could only be produced by a huge team working for several years (perhaps because a new transgenic organism needs to be produced for their experiments and several generations of this are required). Comparing sheer number of publications is meaningless and I would contend so would be the use of the h factor in a simplistic way. Yet I sit in committees and hear people solemnly say that X has an h factor of only 4 but Y has an h factor of 27; for a serious pure mathematician I am told an h factor of 4 is not necessarily unusual, whereas it would be extraordinary in synthetic chemistry. Too often the conversation ignores these significant differences, which can be appreciable even within different domains within a single subject.

I have frequently argued against the slavish use of these crude measures at those committees I attend, although of course a quick look may sometimes be in order to confirm an otherwise subjective evaluation. I urge all of you who likewise participate in committees within or beyond your institutions to take a similar robust view. I get fed up with my physicist colleagues who have, for many years and long before impact factors raised their ugly heads, stated so-and-so cannot be a serious applicant for a job/promotion or whatever if they’ve never published a PRL (Physics Review Letters for the uninitiated). I have frequently told them this is silly. I don’t believe this is just sour grapes because I don’t have any papers in the journal to my name; it is because PRL follows fashions and requires a certain style of physics which doesn’t fit everyone’s research. I can say in all honesty I read many submissions to the last RAE where people obviously believed a PRL would, simply by virtue of it appearing in that journal, score highly and who didn’t stop to think how boring or incremental their papers were. I was duly bored not infrequently and the papers did not necessarily get the score their authors probably naively anticipated.

As I say, I was initiated into publishing in a very different world, where metrics weren’t visible, where everything existed only in hard copy and transmission of information occurred through the old-fashioned post or by sitting long hours in the library pouring over a dusty tome; a Xerox machine was about as hi-tech as it got. Sounding like an old fogey I have to say that this lack of instantaneous information, whilst it certainly didn’t facilitate research, collaboration or the gleaning of new knowledge rapidly, did mean (I suspect) that one judged a paper by its content, not the number of citations or the impact factor of the journal in which it appeared.

On the very same day I was interviewed about my publishing strategies, I also attended a dinner discussion, led by Philip Campbell, Nature’s Editor-in-Chief, about scientific misconduct. As with open access, much has been written (and recommended) about this subject, but there is no doubt in my mind – or in Philip Campbell’s – that the high stakes involved in publishing in the ‘right’ journal (of which his own is likely to be seen as one) can lead to sloppiness and far worse in the behaviour of authors. Once again, the metrics that have insinuated their way into the competitive academic environment encourage sharp practice in the over-anxious. Of course, the possibility of dodgy goings-on have always been there and are perhaps most obvious on a regular basis in the plagiarism that besets essays and other types of submitted student coursework. But, high profile cases like Hendrik Schön are in a different league because the fabrication of data can be so extensive. Was that due to pressure within Bell Labs? The commentators seemed to imply as much.

Senior academics should be doing all they can to resist the tendencies they encounter, wherever that may be, to use dubious quantitative data as a simplistic measuring tool. If we don’t, we are guilty of facilitating a culture which will be detrimental to the future of research and the individuals sucked into the whirlpool of impact factors, citations and claims of ‘my h factor is bigger than yours’.  We haven’t yet quite reached the position where we are solely judged on such dodgy numbers. Let’s make sure we never do.

 

 

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