Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest. Here’s Liam’s question, lightly edited:
I’m currently a 3rd year Computer Science student, and as much as I love programming and Software Engineering as a whole, I’ve also always loved studying dinosaurs, and other specimens. I also have interest in potentially going for a PHD in paleontology one day to pursue this passion, which is why I wanted to ask for your opinion if it was possible to juggle both a full-time day job and a PHD program at the same time?
And my reply (which I did send to Liam the next day, but am only now getting around to posting here):
I never set out to do a Ph.D really. I just wanted an institutional affiliation so I could access online resources via the library, and it turns out that universities won’t (or at least 20 years ago they wouldn’t) just let you be an associate. So I signed up for a Masters, and that mutated into the Ph.D.
It actually wasn’t that hard, surprisingly — because you earn a Ph.D by doing research and I already wanted to do research and the Ph.D program was just a way to help me do that,
So my question for you is: do you really want to do research? If you do, then you probably can. You don’t get to year 3 of a CS degree without being a smart, analytical thinker, and your email tells me you’re a good communicator. The rest is all just stuff you learn: stuff about your taxon of choice, stuff about evolution, stuff about the various tools you can use for analysis and modelling.
But if you look deep inside yourself and decide that what you really want is to be the holder of a Ph.D, then forget it. If you don’t love the work for itself, you will soon grow to hate it. Then you become one of those dead-eyed zombie never-going-to-finish people. If down that path you start, destroy you it will.
So: it certainly is possible to juggle both a full-time day job and a Ph.D program at the same time. But I think you can only do it if either (A) you genuinely love both of them, or (B) you are truly exceptional.
So I have four pieces of advice.
1. Make sure you get a day-job that you love, not just tolerate. Don’t sign up for a Java factory to write enterprise beans for the enterprise just because the money is good. Find a job that lets you express all that creativity in building something of inherent value. You may have to sacrifice financially, but you’re at the perfect point in your life to make that choice, before you get hooked on the high-income lifestyle.
2. If you get onto a Ph.D program, make sure it’s one you love. For me that meant sauropods. For you, it might mean plesiosaurs or Permian synapsids or, for all I know, Miocene rodents. But don’t take an offer from a more prestigious institution just for the prestige: take on a research project that you actively want to do, and would do for the sheer fun of it even if you weren’t on the Ph.D program.
3. Consider doing a research Masters. It’s much less of an investment in time, money and effort, and will help you figure out whether you actually love doing this. It’s probably also easier to get onto a Masters, as you won’t be asking your supervisor to take such a big gamble on someone who’s doing it part time. If you can survive for an unpaid year after you graduate in CS, you could do a full-time Masters in a year; otherwise you can do it over a longer period as you work. (The University of Bristol is really good for this: you can do a one-year course that’s mostly research and which gives you a wide range of possible projects.)
4. Consider whether you need a higher degree at all. John McIntosh, the greatest of all sauropod palaeontologists, had no formal qualification in palaeontology (though he did have a doctorate in physics). That was in a time when it was hard to get access to the literature outside of formal programs, but that’s not true any more. If what you really want is to do research, then maybe just do the research? There is tons on this in the SV-POW! tutorial section. (And, again: if what you really want is not to do research then you will probably hate, and flunk out of, a Ph.D anyway.)
At that point Matt chipped in with more advice, which I’m including here:
My additions will be few.
Read Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, if you haven’t already. Pick a topic, or find an advisor (official or otherwise) who will inflict one on you, then do this: Tutorial 38: little projects as footsteps toward understanding.
Then just keep doing that. If it leads to anything presented or published, yay, you’re doing science (it’s not science until it’s communicated, until then it’s just self-improvement). If it leads to a degree — and if that’s what you want, can afford, and are willing to make space for in your life — great! But the degree should arise out of the research, and not the other way around.
At least, that’s how it was for me. I got the opportunity to do research as an undergrad, and just kept going after I graduated. I was in a Master’s program, but my planned thesis topic didn’t pan out — which was the best possible outcome — so my actual MS thesis ended up being something organically spun out of my undergrad research. Then I got into a PhD program, but none of the things I planned to do panned out — which was, again, the best possible outcome — so my actual dissertation ended up being something organically spun out of my Master’s research.
Looking back, my personal research program was the continuously existing, actually important thing, and the theses for the various degree requirements were just chunks of that continuous whole that I extracted and submitted (to degree-granting institutions, and also to journals, but chunked differently) at the dramatically appropriate moments. And that has continued to work right up until now. I don’t need to turn in the segments for degree requirements anymore, now they can just be blog posts, abstracts, and papers.
If you have a day job you’ll end up doing paleo on weekends and evenings, but hell, I spend most of my day time teaching or in meetings, and a huge chunk of my research gets done on weekends and evenings, so I don’t know that you’re much worse off than most folks trying to make progress in this field.
Whatever happens, good luck, and as Mike said, follow the things you love, because that’s the only way you’ll stick with them.
The fate (so far) of my 50 submitted papers
November 8, 2024
At the end of October, I submitted a paper that’s been hanging over me for a couple of years. I’ve been in the habit of tracking nearly all my submissions since I started out in palaeontology, it happens that this one is number 50 in the list. It feels like an interesting time to stop and take stock of them all.
NHMUK PV R5937, “The Archbishop”, cervical vertebra S (probably C7). A. Reconstruction of right lateral view with neural spine, prezygapophysis, diapophysis, parapophysus, condyle and cervical rib restored. Most anatomical features are as in the reconstruction of Cervical V: only unique elements are labelled. B. Left lateral view. C. Dorsal view with anterior to the right. D. Posterior view. E. Right lateral view. F. Anterior view. Scale bar 20 cm.
And, no, the recently submitted paper in question is not the Archbishop description. I just tossed this image in because, hey, this is Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week.
Before I get into the details of what happened to those submissions, I want to note that of the 31 papers listed in my CV, eight are not listed in my submissions database. Five of them I didn’t track because I was not the lead author and so not involved in the submission process (Sharing: public databases combat mistrust and secrecy; Running a question-and-answer website for science education: first hand experiences; Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications; The Anatomy and Phylogenetic Relationships of “Pelorosaurus” becklesii (Neosauropoda, Macronaria) from the Early Cretaceous of England; The Moral Dimensions of Open). And three more don’t appear because they were minor works that didn’t go through the full formal review process (The Open Dinosaur Project; Better ways to evaluate research and researchers; Comment (Case 3700) – Support for Diplodocus carnegii Hatcher, 1901 being designated as the type species of Diplodocus Marsh, 1878).
That means that the 50 submissions I have in my database represent only 23 published papers — a hit-rate of less than 50%. What’s going on?
Well, first, my submissions list includes three “published” papers that aren’t on my CV: a Europasaurus entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a nomenclatural correction to my Giraffatitan JVP paper, and the Barosaurus neck preprint. So that means 26 of the 50 submissions are published.
What about the rest?
Five more submissions are still open: the Barosaurus neck paper based on that preprint, still in review limbo after eight years; an accepted chapter in a long-delayed edited volume; a paper on Joni Mitchell that was given Major Revisions from a humanities journal for (I thought) spurious reasons; an anatomy paper at PeerJ whose revisions should soon be finished; and the newly submitted paper that I mentioned at the top of the page.
Four more submissions, I have just abandoned. One was the original submission of what became Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted, which I later resubmitted as new after I stalled for six years on responding to reviews. Another was a short note correcting a nomenclatural error in a Nature paper, which was basically ignored. Two more are chapters for the Phylonyms volume, which … well, that’s a long and depressing story for another day.
That leaves 15 submissions that were rejected. Some of these are dead forever: for example, the first palaeo paper I ever submitted, a dinosaur diversity analysis, which I ended up “publishing” as a sort of post-preprint ten years later. Some I gave up on after rejection, such as an attempt to reconcile phylogenetic and Linnaean taxonomy (rejected twice), a brief summary of dinosaur diversity that I optimistically sent to Science when I was young and stupid, and an RWA-era comment on what a “private-sector research work” is (three times at different journals!).
The other eight rejections, more happily, having been rejected from one or more journals eventually found homes elsewhere: my first (eventually) published paper, on phylogenetic nomenclature of diplodocoids; the Xenoposeidon description, our neck-posture paper (twice!), Why Giraffes Have Long Necks (also twice!), the Brontomerus description, and the paper on vertebral orientation (rejected from PeerJ as “out of scope”, idiotically).
So the final score comes out as follows:
- 26 published
- 5 still open (of which I am optimistic about at least three)
- 4 abandoned
- 15 rejected (representing 10 distinct manuscripts, of which six have since been published)
What to make of all this?
One thing to think about here is whether 50% is actually a decent batting average. Maybe a 50-50 chance of any given submission making it into the journal in question is not too bad?
And the reason why that may be so is that persistence tends to pay off: of my ten rejected manuscripts, more than half have gone on to be published elsewhere — garnering 400 citations so far (42, 57, 156, 95, 48 and 2, in chronological order). That is a happy thought to have in mind the next time I run into a rejection.
Another encouraging observation is that the rejections have tended to be concentrated towards the earlier part of my career: 14 of them in the eight years from 2004 to 2012, and only one in the twelve years since. I think there are three reasons for this, two of them good and one bad.
- I’ve got better at writing papers. That’s good.
- I’ve got better at judging what to submit and where. I’ve stopped aiming optimistic opinion pieces at Science and Nature and Biological Reviews. That’s good, too.
- I’m better known now, and that’s bad. Or, at least, it’s bad that being better known means I get better outcomes.
As scientists of course we strive to evaluate every work on its merits, not according to the name or status of the author, and deliberate actions are often taken to make sure that’s what’s done. For example, the reviewers don’t know who wrote the abstracts submitted to get a talk at SVP or SVPCA. And yet, and yet. The truth is that I have had a few ad-hominem reviews, and I’m sorry to say they were all concentrated in the first few years of my career.
Dear SV-POW! readers: don’t be That Guy. When you’re asked to review a manuscript by someone you’ve never heard of, put the fact that you’ve never heard of him or her aside, and review the damn manuscript, not the author. That’s not too much to ask.
Anyway, that’s my fifty submissions in 20 years. (In fact, now I come to check the dates, I see that today is exactly the 20th anniversary of getting back the Reject Without Review verdict on the first palaeo paper I even submitted!). Let’s hope I can get more efficient in the next 20.
Tutorial 42: how to get a paper written
May 1, 2022
Yes, we’ve touched on a similar subject in a previous tutorial, but today I want to make a really important point about writing anything of substance, whether it’s a scientific paper, a novel or the manual for a piece of software. It’s this: you have to actually do the work. And the way you do that is by first doing a bit of the work, then doing a bit more, and iterating until it’s all done. This is the only way to complete a project.
Yes, this is very basic advice. Yes, it’s almost tautological. But I think it needs saying because it’s a lesson that we seem to be hardwired to avoid learning. This, I assume, is why so many wise sayings have been coined on the subject. Everyone has heard that “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, attributed to Lao Tzu in maybe the 5th Century BC. More pithily, I recently discovered that Williams Wordsworth is supposed to have said:
To begin, begin.
I love that. In just three words, it makes the point that there is no secret to be learned here, no special thing that you can do to make beginning easier. You just have to do it. Fire up your favourite word processor. Create a new document. Start typing.
And to Wordsworth’s injunction, I would add this:
To continue, continue
Because, again, there is no secret. You just have to do it.
Mounted skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii holotype CM 84 in the rare dorsal view.
At the moment I am working on four separate but related papers. Honestly, sometimes it’s hard even keeping them straight in my head. Sometimes I forget which one I am editing. It would be easy to get overwhelmed and … just not finish. I don’t mean it would be easy to give up: that would be a decision, and I don’t think I would do that. But if I listened to my inner sluggard, I would just keep on not making progress until the matter become moot.
So here is what I do instead:
- I pick one of the papers, which is the one I’m going to work on that evening, and I try not to think too much about the others.
- I figure out what needs to be in that paper, in what order.
- I write the headings into a document, and I put an empty paragraph below each, which just says “XXX”. That’s the marker I use to mean “work needed here”.
- I use my word-processor’s document-structuring facilities to set the style of each of the headings accordingly — 1st, 2nd or occasionally 3rd level.
- I auto-generate a table of contents so I can see if it all makes sense. If it doesn’t, I move my headings around and regenerate the table of contents, and I keep doing that until it does make sense.
- I now have a manuscript that is 100% complete except in the tiny detail that it has no content. This is a big step! Now all I have to do is write the content, and I’ll be finished.
- I write the content, one section at a time. I search for “XXX” to find an unwritten section, and I write it.
- When all the “XXX” markers have been replaced by text, the paper is done — or, at least, ready to be submitted.
Caveats:
First, that list makes it sound like I am really good at this. I’m not. I suck. I get distracted. For example, I am writing this blog-post as a distraction from writing a section of the paper I’m currently working on. I check what’s new on Tweetdeck. I read an article or two. I go and make myself a cup of tea. I play a bit of guitar. But then I go back and write a bit more. I could be a lot more efficient. But the thing is, if you keep writing a bit more over and over again, in the end you finish.
Second, the path is rarely linear. Often I’m not able to complete the section I want to work on because I am waiting on someone else to get back to me about some technical point, or I need to find relevant literature, or I realise I’m going to need to make a big digression. That’s fine. I just leave an “XXX” at each point that I know I’m going to have to revisit. Then when the email comes in, or I find the paper, or I figure out how to handle the digression, I return to the “XXX” and fix it up.
Third, sometimes writing a section blows up into something bigger. That’s OK. Just make a decision. That’s how I ended up working on these four papers at the moment. I started with one, but a section of it kept growing and I realised it really wanted to be its own paper — so I cut it out of the first one and made it its own project. But then a section of that one grew into a third paper, and then a section of that one grew into a fourth. Not a problem. Sometimes, that’s the best way to generate new ideas for what to work on: just see what comes spiralling out of what you’re already working on.
None of these caveats changes the basic observation here, which is simply this: in order to get a piece of work completed, you first have to start, and then have to carry on until it’s done.
Case study: the conception, slooow gestation, and birth of the incomplete-necks paper
January 28, 2022
Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis. I thought it might be interesting to watch the story of a published paper through its various stages of prehistory and history. Strap in, this is a long one — but hopefully of interest, especially to people who are just coming into academia and wonder how this stuff works in practice.
It’s never easy to identify when a thing started, but I suppose the first seeds of this paper were sown back in 2004, when Matt was planning a visit to London (to meet me in person for the first time, as it happens) and we were planning out what things we might do during the museum time we had booked. The Rutland cetiosaur was on our itinerary, and I wrote to Matt:
I also wondered about trying to measure the radius of curvature of any well-preserved condyles and cotyles. Are there any established procedures for doing this? (And is the material up to it?)
The answer, of course, is “no”. But that wasn’t apparent until I saw the material. That got me started thinking about all the kinds of mechanical analyses we’d like to do with fossil necks, and about how good we would need the material to be for the results to mean anything.
Those ideas percolated for some years.
May 19, 2011: I wrote How long was the neck of Diplodocus?, in which I considered some of the ways that the neck of the Carnegie Diplodocus is not quite so well established as we tend to assume, and went on to make similar observations about the Humboldt brachiosaur Giraffatitan “S II”.
September 18, 2011: I gave a talk (co-authored with Matt) at the Lyme Regis SVPCA, entitled Sauropod necks: how much do we really know?, the first half of which had grown out of the observations in that initial blog-post. (The second half was about the problems caused by the lack of preserved intervertebral cartilage in fossilised vertebrae, and that half became our 2013 PLOS ONE paper.)
September 20, 2013: I wrote Measuring the elongation of vertebrae, in which I discussed a problem with Elongation Index (EI): that crushing of cotyles makes both their vertical height and horizontal width unreliable to use in ratio with vertebral length.
June 4, 2014: I wrote The Field Museum’s photo-archives tumblr, featuring: airbrushing dorsals. Among other photos, I noted one of presacral 6 (probably D7) of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype, showing that before it was “restored” into its present state, it was a mosaic of bone fragments.
October 6, 2015: I submitted to PeerJ a manuscript based on these observations and others. At the same time, I published a preprint of the submitted manuscript, and briefly blogged about it under the title My most depressing paper. I expected that the paper would quickly be published in essentially its submitted form.
In the following days, the preprint and blogpost both quickly attracted many comments pointing out complete or near-complete sauropod necks that I had missed in the manuscript’s catalogue of such necks.
October 27, 2015 (only three weeks later!): I got back three reviews which were the very definition of “tough but fair”. They were written by three researchers whose sauropod work I hugely respect and admire — Paul Barrett, Paul Upchurch and Jeff Wilson — and they graciously acknowledged the strengths of the submission as well as bringing numerous justified criticisms. It’s traditional in acknowledgements sections to say nice things about the reviewers, but really these were everything one could hope for.
(I disagreed with only two of the many critical points made: one by Paul Upchurch, which we will come to later; and Paul Barrett’s recommendation that the illustrations should use only specimens in credentialled museums. For fossils, of course, that’s right. But the paper also contains numerous photos of extant-animal vertebrae from my own collection, and that’s OK — common — even, in the extant-animal literature. A house-cat is a house-cat, and the cervicals of one are not going to be meaningfully different from those of another.)
Because it had taken the journals and the reviewers only three weeks to get detailed, helpful, constructive reviews back to me, I was now in a position to make this paper a big success story: to turn the revisions around quickly, and maybe even get an acceptance within a month of submission. The time was right: the material was still fresh in my mind so soon after the initial submission, so it should have been the work of a few evenings to revise according to the reviewers’ requests and get this thing on the road.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I became downhearted at the prospect of going back to this manuscript and dealing with all the criticisms. I want to emphasize again that this is not in any way a complaint about the reviews, which were not unduly negative. I just looked at them and felt … weary. So I let it slide for a while.
The problem is, “a while” quickly became multiple months. And by then, the material was no longer fresh in my mind, so that doing the work I should have done half a year earlier would now have been a much bigger job. I would have had to load lots of stuff back into mental RAM before I could even get started. And there was always something more appealing to do. So I left it for a full year.
The problem is, “a year” quickly became multiple years. I have no excuse for this.
And for six years, this unconsummated project has been hanging over me, draining my motivation, whispering to me every time I try to work on something else. It’s been a drag on everything I’ve tried to do in palaeo, all because I didn’t summon the energy to drive a stake through its heart back in 2015.
Learn from my mistake, folks: don’t do this.
When you get the reviews back from a submission, give yourself a week to mourn that the reviewers didn’t recognise the pristine perfection of your initial submission, then get back on the horse and do the work. Just like I didn’t.
Seriously: be better than me. (That’s certainly what I plan to do.)
Anyway …
Early 2021: I finally got my act together, and got started on the big revision. And by this point it was a big revision because not only did I have to handle all those long-postponed reviews, and all the comments on the preprint and the blog-posts from 2015. I also had to handle five more years of developments. The biggest effect this had was that I needed to completely rewrite the woefully inadequate catalogue of complete necks, which in the original preprint listed only six species. The new version lists specimens rather than species, and very many more of them. To make the list as comprehensive as possible this time …
January 27, 2021: I created my initial draft of the new list as a Google Doc, and posted Towards a catalogue of complete sauropods necks asking readers on this blog to offer corrections and additions. They did. That resulted in a lot more work as I chased down details of candidate necks in published sources and sought personal communications about others. As a result …
March 24, 2021: I posted the draft list as The catalogue of complete sauropods necks nears completion. A few more comments came in as a result, but the list was apparently approaching a steady state.
March 27, 2021: Matt dropped me a line breaking down the listed necks across a basic phylogeny of sauropods, and counting the occurrences. I thought this was interesting enough to make up a new illustration, which I posted on the blog as Analysing the distribution of complete sauropod necks and added to the in progress revised manuscript.
May 11, 2021: I was working on finding a way to measure the variation of cotyle aspect ratios along preserved necks, so I could show qualitatively that they vary more in sauropod fossils than in bones of extant amniotes. I came up with a way of calculating this, but wondered if it already existed. In my post Help me, stats people! I asked if anyone knew of it, but it seemed no-one did. (In the end, the resubmitted paper offered two versions of this metric: one additive, the other multiplicative. To the best of my knowledge, these are novel, if simple, contributions.)
June 6, 2021: In one of the original reviews, Paul Upchurch had commented that a further confounding factor in understanding neck lengths is identifying the cervicodorsal junction. I started to put together a new manuscript section on that issue, and posted my initial thoughts as What’s the difference between a cervical and dorsal vertebra?. This post, too, generated some useful feedback that made its way into the version of the section that landed up in the revised paper.
At this point, I had put together much of the new material I needed for the resubmission. So I went back to the revised draft, integrated all the new and modified material, and …
July 12 2021: I submitted the new manuscript. Because it was the best part of six years since the old version had been touched, I asked PeerJ to handle it as a new submission, and invited the handling editor to solicit reviews either from the same people who’d done the first round or from different people, as they saw fit. This time I did not also post a pre-print — I really didn’t need yet more comments coming in at this point, I just needed to get the wretched thing over the line.
September 3 2021: the editorial decision was in, based on three reviews: major revisions. sigh. Again, though, the reviewers’ criticisms were mostly legitimate, and I could sympathise with the editor’s decision. One of the reviewers of the new version — Paul Upchurch — had previously reviewed the 2015 version, but the other two were new.
Needless to say, more work was required in response to these new reviews, but it was much more tractable than the big revision had been. I added a brief discussion of retrodeformation. I wrote about how we can use phylogenetic bracketing to estimate cervical counts, and three reasons why this doesn’t work as well as we’d like. I discussed how explicit documentation of articulation and damage mitigates their misleading effects. I removed a sideswipe at the journal Science, which I have to admit was out of place. I added a discussion of different definitions of the elongation index. I clarified the prose to make it clearer that my goal was not to criticise how others had done things, but to lay out for new researchers what pitfalls they will have to deal with.
But the most fundamental issue that arose in this round of review was whether the paper should be published at all. I will quote from Paul Upchurch’s review (since it is freely available, along with all the other reviews and my responses):
I have [a] fundamental, and I fear fatal, [problem] with this paper. First, and most importantly, I think it attempts to address a problem that does not really exist. It sets up a strawman with regard to the need to tell researchers that sauropod necks are less complete than we previously thought. However, I would argue that we are well aware of these issues and that the current paper does not provide convincing evidence that there is a problem with the way we are doing things now. To be clear, I am not saying that the incompleteness of sauropod necks is not a problem – it definitely is. What I’m saying is that there is little value in a paper whose main message is to tell us what we already know and take into account.
(Let me emphasize again that this criticism came in the context of a review that was careful, detailed and in many ways positive. There was absolutely nothing malicious about it — it was just Paul’s honest opinion.)
The interesting thing about this criticism is that there was absolutely nothing I could do to remedy it. A paper criticised for lacking a phylogenetic analysis can be made acceptable to the reviewers by adding a phylogenetic analysis. But a paper criticised for not needing to exist can only stand or fall by the handling editor’s agreement with either the author or the reviewer. So all I could do was write a response in the letter than accompanied my revision:
We now come to Paul’s fundamental issue with this paper: he does not believe it is necessary. He writes “The scientific community working on these issues does not need to be reminded of the general importance of understanding the limitations on the data we use”. Here I suggest he is misled by his own unique perspective as the person who quite possibly knows more about sauropods than anyone else alive. Labouring under “The curse of knowledge”, he charitably assumes other palaeontologists are as well-read and experienced as he is — but almost no-one is. I know that I, for one, desperately needed a paper along these lines when I was new to the field.
Happily, the handling editor agreed with me — as did the other two reviewers, which surely helped: “in a time of ever more sophisticated methods, it is good to be made aware of the general imperfections of the fossil record […] I thus recommend the article for publication”. So:
November 11 2021: I submitted the revised revision, along with the response letter quoted in part above.
December 15 2021: The editor requested some more minor changes. I made some of them and pushed back on a few others, then:
December 20 2021: I submitted a third version of this second attempt at the paper.
December 28 2021 (a welcome belated Christmas present): the paper was finally accepted. From here on, it was just a matter of turning handles.
January 4 2022: The proof PDF arrived, looking lovely but riven with mistakes — some of them my own, having survived multiple rounds of revision; others introduced by the typesetting process, including some unwelcome “corrections” that created new errors.
January 13 2022: I sent back a list of 56 errors that needed correcting.
January 24 2022: The paper was published at PeerJ!
Being of a pedantic turn of mind, I went through the final typeset version to check that all the proofing errors had been fixed. Most had, of course. But one in being fixed had introduced another; another was partially corrected but is still missing an apostrophe in the final version. Small stuff.
And then I went through the “things to do when a paper comes out” checklist: posting an SV-POW! article that I had prepared in the days leading up to publication; updating the SV-POW! sidebar page for this paper; adding the new paper to my publications list (and removing the separate entry for the 2015 preprint); adding it to my univeristy’s IR; adding it to my ORCiD page (though if you omit this, it seems to figure it out on its own after a while — kudos!); and skipping LinkedIn, Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Facebook, none of which I do.
And with that, the quest really is at an end, barring this post and any others that might occur to me to write (I have nothing more planned at this point).
Now it’s time to get that vertebral orientation paper revised and resubmitted!
References
Tutorial 16: giving good talks (in four parts)
July 12, 2013
As the conference season heaves into view again, I thought it was worth gathering all four parts of the old Tutorial 16 (“giving good talks”) into one place, so it’s easy to link to. So here they are:
- Part 1: Planning: finding a narrative
- Make us care about your project.
- Tell us a story.
- You won’t be able to talk about everything you’ve done this year.
- Omit much that is relevant.
- Pick a single narrative.
- Ruthlessly prune.
- Find a structure that begins at the beginning, tells a single coherent story from beginning to end, and then stops.
- Part 2: The slides: presenting your information to be understood
- Make yourself understood.
- The slides for a conference talk are science, not art.
- Don’t “frame” your content.
- Whatever you’re showing us, let us see it.
- Use as little text as possible.
- Use big fonts.
- Use high contrast between the text and background.
- No vertical writing.
- Avoid elaborate fonts.
- Pick a single font.
- Stick to standard fonts.
- You might want to avoid Ariel.
- Do not use MS Comic Sans Serif.
- Use a consistent colour palette.
- Avoid putting important information at the bottom.
- Avoid hatching.
- Skip the fancy slide transitions.
- Draw highlighting marks on your slides.
- Show us specimens!
- Part 3: Rehearsal: honing the story and how it’s told
- Fit into the time.
- Become fluent in delivery.
- Maintain flow and momentum.
- Decide what to cut.
- Get feedback.
- Part 4: Delivery: telling the story
- Speak up!
- Slow down!
- Don’t panic!
Also, some addenda written later:
- Addendum 1: give a talk that holds attention!
- Love your taxon.
- Show us pictures of your taxon.
- Engage with the audience.
- Tell a story.
- Talks are not papers.
- Addendum 2: giving talks: what to leave out
- Don’t start by saying the title.
- Don’t introduce yourself.
- Don’t reiterate your conclusions at the end.
- Don’t say “thanks for listening”.
- Don’t read the acknowledgements out loud.
- Don’t say “I’ll be happy to take questions”.
- Addendum 3: giving talks: some more positive thoughts
- Offer lots of jump-back-on points.
- Anticipate possible objections and meet them in advance.
- Do the work to make it worth the audience’s while.
- Efficiently introduce a taxon and make it interesting before launching into details.
There are probably many ways of getting a “90% complete” paper finished and ready for submission, but here’s the way that works for me. (It’s working for me right now: I’m in the middle of the process, and broke off to write this just for a a break.)
You will need:
- A printed copy of your manuscript
- A red pen
- A CD of Dar Williams songs that you know inside out
- A bottle of red wine
- A bar of white chocolate (optional)
Method:
Take the printed copy of the manuscript. read it through, with the Dar Williams CD on in the background. Every time you see anything you don’t like, scribble on the printed copy with the red pen. It might a typo, a misspelling, an infelicitous phrasing, a missing reference, a taxonomic name needing italics; or it might be something bigger, like two sections that need to be swapped.
Do you really need a printed copy for this? YES YOU DO! Can’t you just do it on the screen? NO YOU CAN’T! For one thing, you’ll keep breaking off to read email, which is a complete killer. For another, you’ve been working on this manuscript on screens for months already. Your poor brain is inoculated against its on-screen appearance. You need the mental jolt that a shift of format gives you. And you need the freedom to scribble. When I do this, I often write in suggestions to myself of what alternative wording to use, but I feel free to ignore them when I come to make the edits.
Do you really need a Dar Williams CD? I am prepared to concede it doesn’t necessarily have to be Dar Williams. But it does need to be something that you know so well that it won’t surprise you, it won’t grab your attention away from the work you’re doing. Much as I love Dream Theater, their music is really not the way to go for this. What you want is music that will keep feeding you without distracting you.
Do you really need the red wine and the white chocolate? Perhaps not, but you don’t want this to be a boring, unpleasant process, do you? Treat yourself. (DISCLOSURE: I have moved on to beer.)
What next?
As soon as I’m done posting this, I’ll be going to Step 2, which is to go through the manuscript, making edits on the master copy. Most of them are trivial to do. A few are going to need real work. For these, I just leave a marker in the master copy, “###” and a note saying what needs doing. I will later search for these and do the work. But not tonight.
The goal of this process is to capture all the information that you wrote on the printed copy, so that you can throw it away and move on with your life.
That’s it — it’s all you need to do. For the record, I expect to submit in the next three or four days.
Tutorial 14: How to actually write a paper
July 6, 2011
Matt recently told us how to get ideas for papers, but if you’ve not previously published, you may be wondering how you get from idea to actual manuscript. I’ve written about twenty palaeontology papers now, not counting trivial ones like encyclopaedia entries and corrections (plus a few in computer science). So while there are plenty of people out there with much bigger CVs than mine, I’ve accumulated enough different experiences over the last six or seven years that hopefully I can shed a bit of light on the process. DISCLAIMER: this means I am going to be citing myself like crazy, and will look like a complete egomaniac. That really is not the point of this exercise.
Before I plough in, a digression: you may legitimately wonder why, if I’ve written 20 papers, my publications page lists only fourteen. A couple are in press but not yet out: my work on those is done, I just have to wait for the wheels to grind exceeding fine. A few more are in review. Others, though once completed, are now in the process of being revised, either in response to reviewers’ comments or because they were rejected outright and need retooling for submission to another journal. Maybe the most interesting category, though, is that I have two or three papers that I think are dead: they’ve been submitted and rejected, and I think I will probably never resubmit them. In two cases — dinosaur diversity surveys — the manuscripts have aged badly, because the rapid rate of new dinosaurs being named is rendering them more and more obsolete. To bring these up to publishable standard again would involve rebuilding the database and redoing the stats, and I just can’t summon up enthusiasm for that work when I have other projects going on that are so much more fun.
Anyway, we’re not here to talk about how to abandon finished manuscripts — we’re here to talk about how to get them finished in the first place.
In my projects, I have used three broad approaches. Let’s look at them in turn.
Approach 1. Gather notes first
If you take this approach, you’ll begin by gathering all your thoughts on the subject of the manuscript-to-be into one place — these days, most likely a single file or folder on your computer, but in the old days it might well have been a physical notebook. Don’t think about the structure of the manuscript, or about narrative flow, at this stage. Don’t worry about what to include and what to exclude: just gather everything you can, pour it into a pot, and stir it. You can think about the other stuff later.
The idea here is to separate “left-brain” and “right-brain” activity, so you can concentrate on one of them at a time. During the gathering phase, you’re being creative, an artist playing with ideas. When you’re done, you switch into engineer mode, and your task becomes to synthesise some or all those ideas into a coherent argument. It’s easier to think about one of these things at a time than both at once, so the theory goes.
Handy household hint: you don’t have to put all your ideas into a single paper. Find a set of thoughts that fit together into a narrative, and build the paper around that. The other ideas will find homes in subsequent papers, they’re not lost.
The right-brain-then-left-brain approach sounds good; but in practice, I’ve found this doesn’t work well for me. In fact, looking back over my submissions, it looks like I’ve only done it twice, and both times it’s resulted in a huge amount of work. Those two papers are the Taylor et al. (2009) paper on habitual sauropod neck posture and Taylor et al. (2011) on sexual selection of sauropod necks. These were three- and four-way collaborations between myself, Matt, Darren, and for the latter David Hone. And for such short papers (eight and twelve pages respectively) they took an amazingly long time to put together. They went through long sequence of revisions and rewrites before reaching their final forms, and lead authorship swapped hands many times along the way — we all held it at one time or another on both papers.
So what was the problem? Only this: that “synthesise all those ideas into a coherent argument” sounds like a straightforward mechanical process, but it’s not. It’s an art in itself — it requires taste, judgement, and most of all a lot of hard work. (And of course, this is especially true when working with a team, when everyone has different ideas.) When you start the composition process using a big ol’ bucket full of observations, it’s hard to tie them all together in a sequence that makes sense; and sure enough, we didn’t. Early “complete” drafts of the neck-posture paper contained all the same information as the published version, but they were incoherent and repetitive. One moment you’d be reading about some assertion that Stevens and Parrish had made about ONP being habitual, then next you’d be reading something about semi-circular canal orientation, then it would be be some observation on extant animal behaviour, then it would be back to DinoMorph, and so on. Reading it felt like being batted around inside a pinball machine.
We probably could have submitted it in that form, and found a venue for it. But we didn’t, because we wanted our paper not just to contain a bunch of relevant facts, but to lay out an argument, a connected sequence of observations and deductions, that would tell a story, make a compelling case. We wanted our paper to convince. And doing that is an art — hence the many, many, revisions and rewrites. We got there in the end, and all three of us are happy with how the paper came out, but it was a real hack to get there, and it left me wondering whether we’d gone about it the wrong way.
On the other hand, what other way is there to write a genuinely three- or four-cornered collaborative paper? Most of the other collaborative papers I’ve been involved with have had a very clear lead author who contributed the bulk of the prose, with the remaining authors contributing specific passages of text – and of course other input, just as important, such as the discussions that gave rise to the project in the first place. The genesis of the neck-posture project was that we each contributed a stack of notes — some about what has previously been written on the subject, some about the flaws in those assertions, some about the behaviour of extant animals — and I just don’t see a significantly better way of melding all those into a coherent narrative than the multiple-pass approach that we adopted.
So anyway, what I’ve mostly done instead is:
Approach 2. Just write a manuscript
There is something enormously empowering about firing up OpenOffice (or MS-Word, if you must), choosing File → New, looking at that brand new white page, and typing a title. Once you’ve done that, you’re up and running. You’re really doing it. It gets much harder to procrastinate. Even if you end up changing that title half a dozen times, and rejigging the order of the manuscript, and rewriting the conclusions, and retaking the photos and doing the figures again, and reworking the statistical analysis because new data has come in, none of that changes the fact that once you’ve started a manuscript, you’ve started. It doesn’t matter if it gets three new heads and five new shafts along the way, it’s still the axe the George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree.
So with this approach, the idea is that after accumulating information and internalising it, you just sit down and start writing — telling the story in an order that makes sense and draws the reader in. The liberating thing is not trying to use any of the actual wording of your notes, not feeling obliged to work them all into the manuscript, just writing.
A technique that people often recommend at this stage — and one that in theory at least I endorse — is not to bother with your citations and references at this stage, or even with boring typographical details like italicising your genus and species names. You don’t want to let yourself get sucked into any of that detailed clerical work — it will break the flow of your thoughts, and prevent you from getting them all down in a sequence that makes sense. You want to be writing in the same spirit that you would explain the ideas to an intelligent friend in a pub, after maybe the second pint, waving your hands wildly to get you through the difficult bits, but not worrying about that because the point is to get your idea across — or rather, your sequence of ideas, that gets the listener from A to B. You can go back in fill in the references later.
Like I said, in theory I endorse this technique. In practice, I don’t seem to be able to do it: when I start to write, the citations just thrust themselves into my mind and I’m not able to write a perfectly simple sentence like “the humeri of brachiosaurids are the longest known in any sauropods, exceeding 2 m in length” without shoving in a “(Janensch 1961)”, and nine times out of ten going and re-checking that paper so I can specifically cite the table on page 187. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I couldn’t say — maybe if I could discipline myself not to do this, I’d save myself the pain later in the writing process of having to shuffle the text to get it into an order that tells the right story.
A digression on story-telling
I’ve used the metaphor of story-telling a couple of times, and I think it’s absolutely central here. You want to draw your reader through the paper.
Of course, what we mean by “story” is very different from one paper to another. For example, in my short paper surveying dinosaur diversity (Taylor 2006), the story could hardly have been different from how it turns out: here’s where the data was from, here’s what I did with it, here are the results, and then end with some discussion. By contrast, there were lots of different ways I could have structured my plea to the ICZN to recognise electronic publication (Taylor 2009b), but I went for an approach where the section headings outlined the core argument even if you didn’t read the actual text: 1. Background: the availability of the name Darwinius masillae; 2. The Code is in danger of becoming an irrelevance; 3. Paper journals are going away; 4. The time to act is now; 5. Electronic documents are different from electronic media; 6. We must come to terms with the ubiquity of PDF; 7. The current rules are too hard to get right (and finally a Conclusion).
For a fairly hardcore descriptive paper like the Xenoposeidon description (Taylor and Naish 2007, natch), you’re more limited in how much of a story you can tell, and pretty much constrained by the usual Introduction, Systematic Palaeontology, Description, Systematics, Discussion structure. But even there, we laid out what I think is a fairly compelling story by splitting the “description” section into two parts: one that was purely descriptive, and a subsequent one containing all the comparisons. Only after those two sections did we progress to the phylogenetic analysis that weakly corroborated our inferences.
For my Brachiosaurus/Giraffatitan paper (Taylor 2009a), though, I subverted the usual structure by postponing the Systematic Palaeontology until after I’d done all the necessary descriptive work to support the generic separation, rather than presenting the systematic conclusion up front and then going back and justifying it. I also gave that paper a very, very short introduction (116 words incuding citations and taxonomic authorities), pushing the rest of what would normally be considered introductory material back into a separate Historical Background section. Why? Because that way I could put the end-of-introduction subsections on Anatomical Nomenclature, Anatomical Abbreviations and Institutional Abbreviations up front on the first page where they belong, rather than buried on the sixth page as they would otherwise have been.
Well, it seems that I have have drifted a bit from what I intended to talk about, and got onto the subject of how to structure a paper; but since that’s sort of relevant, I won’t let it spoil my day.
Anyway, the two approaches I’ve discussed so far really bracket the range of ways to put a manuscript together, and most projects will fall somewhere on the continuum between them. But every now and then an opportunity comes up to use a third way:
Approach 3. Convert from another medium
I already mentioned my paper on electronic publication (Taylor 2009b), but long-time SV-POW! readers will remember that much of the material in this paper was cannibalised from a sequence of SV-POW! posts (notably Non-Open Academic Publishing Is Dead) as well as a few comments that I’d left on relevant posts on other people’s blogs. On paper, you’d say this is a lot like approach 1, in that while I had much of material to hand, it needed sorting, integrating and rewriting. In fact, it went much more smoothly than the neck-posture paper’s editing process, perhaps because all the source material was my own rather than having come from several different authors; and perhaps because the posts and comments were already in a chronological order which reflected the way my thoughts had arrived at the position where they eventually landed.
But a more interesting example of this route is the survey of the history of sauropod studies (Taylor 2010). This started life as a slideshow, the accompaniment for my talk at the conference Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective. (Yes, the very same talk which Fiona fell asleep in, when I rehearsed it on her.) To put together a talk, you already have to have your story together — the sequence in which things happen, the sections that you chop it all up into, the references forward to things you’re going to say, and back to things you’ve said. So transcribing that all down into a manuscript is surprisingly straightforward — at least, it was for me, for this project. It really was, almost literally, as case of taking each slide in turn, writing a little essay about what it depicted, and moving on.
So I kind of recommend that. In fact, I’d go further: do not ever give a conference talk without immediately transcribing your slides into a manuscript. If you do, you’re throwing away a super-easy publication: you’ve already done all the hard work.
(I didn’t know I was going to say that, just as I didn’t know I was going to digress onto story-telling earlier. Turns out that this is an essay in the literal French sense of “an attempt”, something that you only figure out as you’re writing it. Now that I’ve said you should always turn your slideshows into papers, I find myself wondering whether I’ve taken my own advice … Hmm, quick check of the old publications list and I see that, hmm, I have roughly three sets of unconverted slides. So that gives me something to do in the evenings, then.)
Actual writing
I only have two things to say about this, and they have both been said better by other people (computer scientists, as it happens):
Say what you mean, simply and directly.
— Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger
and:
Present to inform, not to impress; if you inform, you will impress.
— Frederick P. Brooks
In short, do not write “the taxon under consideration exhibits a tendency towards velocitous aerial locomotion” when you could write “it flies fast”.
A final thought
All I’ve done here is list and discuss what’s worked for me (and some of the things that haven’t). If these things don’t work for you, don’t do them. If you find a way that works better, then by all means use that.
But if you’re struggling to find a way to get started, then follow Approach 2 above. Just start writing, and keep going until you’re finished.
Hope that’s helpful.
References
[Once more, I’m sorry that the reference list is so me-centric, but I had to use my own papers as examples because I don’t know the genesis of anyone else’s.]
- Taylor, Michael P. 2006. Dinosaur diversity analysed by clade, age, place and year of description. pp. 134-138 in Paul M. Barrett and Susan E. Evans (eds.), Ninth international symposium on Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems and biota, Manchester, UK. Cambridge Publications. Natural History Museum, London, UK. 187 pp.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009a. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrae Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009b. Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the Code. Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 66(3):205-214.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2010. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. pp. 361-386 in: Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill (eds.), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 343. doi: 10.1144/SP343.22
- Taylor, Michael P., and Darren Naish. 2007. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England. Palaeontology 50(6):1547-1564. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Darren Naish. 2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54(2):213-230.
Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on
February 3, 2011
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
–Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky
If you’ve been following the past few tutorials, you now know how to get copies of academic papers (learn Google fu and ask politely) and how to become a paleontologist (write and publish papers). But what are you going to write and publish papers about?
My own experience, and my impression from talking with many others, is that when you move into a new field for the first time, it often seems like all of the good projects are taken. Or you’ll have what feels like a great idea for a project and then find out that Romer already solved that problem back in the middle of the 20th century. My advice is going to seem trite, but it’s worked for me several times and it seems to be what most other people do as well. Are you ready?
Step 1: Work on something
Seems obvious, right? Of course you have to work on something. You can’t just be a generic scientist (the idea is attractive, but that occupation closed about four centuries ago), and you can’t accumulate papers on everything. You need a focus. But if you’re just starting out, how do you know what to work on while you decide what to work on? It’s a Catch-22.
There are basically two solutions: work on something that appeals to you, or let someone else pick something for you.
Don’t discount the second path. It’s a big benefit of having an advisor who can provide you with a starter project. I didn’t have any particular fascination for sauropods before Rich Cifelli put me to work on what would become Sauroposeidon; I fell in love with them along the way (Buddhists would call this my awakening). As far as I can tell, Mike took the first path, and started working on sauropods because they seemed cool, and fell more deeply in love with them along the way.
I don’t describe this as “falling in love” lightly. That’s what it feels like: a positive feedback loop wherein the more you engage with a subject, the more you enjoy engaging with it, and so on. A few rounds of that and you may find yourself in a committed relationship, also known as a “research program”, because that’s how you maximize your time with the object of your affection.
You may not fall in love with your first project. It might crash and burn. You might not even finish it. It’s really just there to be your runway, to get you up in the air and flying under your own power. One way or another, you’re going on to something else. If you get a paper or two out of it along the way, that’s gravy.
Some people may find all this talk about falling in love overwrought or goofy, and some people may not feel that way about what they work on. If that’s you, you have my full sympathy, and my advice is to keep trying new things until you find something that you really do fall in love with. It’s worth it. Also note that I am using the word “love” to mean something involving commitment, investment, and self-sacrifice, as opposed to infatuation; find something that gives you satisfaction, not merely pleasure.
The point of working on something, as opposed to taking a more general approach, is not just to cut the problem of becoming a scientist down to a manageable size. It’s also to give you some traction with real data and real arguments. If you tried to become a generic paleontologist, you’d have to fly at such a high level that you couldn’t afford to get engaged with the details of any one particular problem. If you go that route you will never “drill down” enough to make a useful contribution; you may become a very well-informed enthusiast, but you won’t be a very productive researcher.
Step 2: Learn lots of stuff
“Data! Data! Data! I cannot make bricks without clay!”
— Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Once you have a direction, even a vague and temporary one, you have to accumulate clay. The clay comes in the form of facts, hypotheses (tested and otherwise), ideas, suggestions, and so on, and you get it mostly from reading papers.
You need clay for two reasons. First, you simply have to have a foundation of knowledge before you’re going to be able to contribute anything. Furthermore–and this is the step that seems to trip up many who aspire to contribute–you really need to have a handle on where the field is right now, and how it got there.
It’s pretty common for internet cranks in general, and absolutely pandemic for dinosaur cranks in particular, to argue that Ivory Tower so-called experts are all blinkered by orthodoxy and that outsiders with no technical training are better suited to having the big ideas because they are unshackled by the weight of knowing all that has gone before. These people are almost always wrong, because they keep reinventing the wheel, and the wheels they reinvent are often square. Either they’re solutions to problems that have already been solved (behind the state of the art), or solutions to problems that don’t exist (they misunderstand the state of the art), or, more rarely, solutions no one could implement because the methods or evidence just aren’t good enough yet (too far ahead of the state of the art). A good idea for a project has to be testable, but so far untested. Which means that if you want to make a useful contribution, you have to catch up with the cutting edge, and then stay caught up.
If you trust yourself and believe in your dreams and follow your star, you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.
–Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
It’s not a trivial amount of work, and it requires some humility. Rich Cifelli put me to work on what would become Sauroposeidon in the late spring of 1996, and we had a paper ready to submit in the late spring of 1999. Thanks to Brooks Britt and Kent Sanders, I started CT scanning and really thinking seriously about sauropod pneumaticity in 1998, and the major papers that came out of that were written in 2001 and published in 2003. So both of those major steps required about three years of work from inception to submission (and an additional year or two until publication). Not all of my papers have three years of work behind them, because as you progress you learn stuff that applies to more than one project and you get better at figuring out what you need to know to complete a project; the earlier ones involve more faffing about. But if you’ve never published, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to mentally prepare to spend a few years getting up to speed.
That’s another benefit of doing a formal degree program that Mike didn’t mention in Tutorial 10: it gives you some protected time in which to get up to speed. You can do it without doing a formal degree program. It will require more effort on your part, since you won’t have an advisor to guide you or fellow students to challenge you (although you may be able to find substitutes). But there’s no reason why it can’t be done.
Step 3: Think about things
When Newton was asked years later how he had discovered his laws of celestial dyamics, he replied, “By thinking of them without ceasing.”
— Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way
This seems like the easy step, when you’re considering it at one remove, either because you haven’t plunged in or because you’ve already learned to swim. After all, what could be more fun than thinking about dinosaurs (to pick an example completely at random)? But when you first start pulling the clay together, it seems like all the good ideas have been taken, like everyone else in the world is working on something 100 times cooler than anything you could ever think of, and that you will surely be doomed to work only on the most trivial problems because you’ll never have any really good ideas.
(Aside: if you have loads of what seem like really good ideas, then either you have already grown through this stage, in which case get back to work, or you skipped Step 2, in which case I’ll be happy to talk with you–in about three years.)
Fear not, because as long as you keep at it, you are going to have good ideas. In fact, pretty soon you’ll be drowning in them, and it will happen a lot sooner than you think. And I’ll tell you exactly how that’s going to happen.
At first, you don’t know anything, and it seems like all the good ideas are taken, but that’s because you don’t know anything. But as you catch up with the cutting edge, you will start to notice holes in the fabric of science: things that no one has done before, ideas that haven’t been tested, established “facts” that seem a little wonky or that have been upset by new discoveries. Now you’re getting traction. Not all of these holes are going to be worth patching. As you learn more (Step 2 again, forever and ever, world without end), you may find that some things haven’t been tried because they’re just intractable, and that some established facts only seemed wonky because you didn’t fully understand them (beware–this happens a lot). So stay humble, and keep learning, and keep thinking.
By “thinking” here I don’t mean simply staring off into space (although that is sometimes a symptom of deep thought), or sitting down with a notebook and pencil and deciding to think, although that can be a useful exercise now and then. It’s more along the lines of living and breathing your work. You have to engage with your subject material on a deep level. It will become what you think about in the shower. It may even invade your dreams. This is what I meant up above when I described it as “falling in love”. When you fall in love with someone, it’s almost impossible to think about anything else. With any luck, you’ll find a problem that occupies your mind similarly, at least for part of the day. I wrote the GDI tutorial when I was doing a lot of mass estimation for a couple of upcoming projects, and I found that I was mentally rotating volumetric models of Plateosaurus in my head on the drive home from work. Often I went to sleep with visions of translucent 3D sauropodomorphs dancing in my head.
At some point you are going to go through what I call the Big Flip, where the exponentially rising curve of your knowledge passes the exponentially falling curve of your perception of how much science has actually been done. As you attain some level of mastery of the field, you won’t see just a few holes in the fabric of science, you’ll see that science is mostly holes, and that what we know is tiny compared to what we don’t know, about just about everything. At that point, you’ll see potential projects everywhere you look. The problem then becomes not thinking of a project to work on, but deciding what to pursue from among the almost limitless array of things that you could work on, and that’s a problem for another tutorial.
Maybe. Neither Mike nor I have been active long enough to tell if we’re any good at sorting projects, and Darren is no help because his “solution” is simply to work on everything. About the only thing I know for sure is that sometimes you have to start a project to find out that it’s not worth finishing. Don’t feel bad about hopping off a project like that onto another, more promising one (to a point; you’re going to have to settle down and work sometime). Some projects actually get to the moon, and others burn up in the atmosphere, go into dead-end orbits, or blow up on the pad. Sometimes the only way to find out which is which is to strap yourself in and light the engines.
Surely, you think, I’m exaggerating about the “almost limitless” array of things to work on. But I’m not. Just as big-S Science is dwarfed by big-I Ignorance, pretty soon your own completed science will fall far behind your own potential science, and it will never catch up. Right now I have about a dozen published papers, and 35 folders on my hard drive for projects I have taken seriously enough to start working on. A handful of those will be published in the not-too-distant future, a few more are things I might work on after that, and the vast majority are things I’ll never get around to. Everyone I know who is active in science feels exactly like this (Darren Tanke has “about 55 writing projects on the go”, by his own count). In fact, one sign that you’ve had your Big Flip is when you look around at all of the stuff you have going on and realize that you are going to die with a lot of work left to do, whether that’s tomorrow or a century from now. When that realization hits, don’t despair. It means you’ve arrived. Dive into whatever looks the most promising at the moment, and vamp till fade.
Step 4. Be open
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
–Albert Einstein
I can tell you from experience that parents with infants are hyper-alert, because they don’t want to drop their babies. For the first few hours and days, this alertness is almost exhausting. It’s like when you first learn to drive and you’re constantly twitching the steering wheel. Eventually you learn how to be hyper-alert and still do other things. The “don’t trip on that rug/avoid sharp corners/be prepared to fall on your back” program is still running, but you can have other windows open on your mental desktop. Evaluating the potential hazards in whatever space you’re in becomes reflexive.
When I say, “be open”, I’m talking about cultivating an alertness of that kind. Your research program will be running most of the time, even it it’s minimized or in the tray while you do other stuff, and it will constantly evaluate the facts and ideas you encounter and see if they fit. The other part of being open is feeding your brain a cosmopolitan diet. Inspiration comes from the most unpredictable sources. There’s no way to force inspiration to happen, but you can improve the odds by deliberately seeking out the unfamiliar.
There is a great bit in one of David Quammen’s essays in which Quammen is roaming the Montana State University library and he comes across Jack Horner sitting on the floor between two rows of shelves with journals spread out all around him. Quammen says, “Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?” Horner looks up and says, “Having ideas.” The best part is that the journals weren’t even paleo journals, they were ornithology journals. (Note to DMLers: including a positive anecdote about Jack Horner is an intelligence test. Try not to fail.)
The downside of deliberately seeking out new stuff instead of staying with the bounds of your research program (the Sofa of Science!) is that it will make you feel stupid. It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in, whether it’s paleontology or programming or construction, there is something that you are an expert on now that you weren’t when you started, whether it is taphonomy or recursive subroutines or pouring concrete. But you weren’t an expert when you started, and when you started you probably spent a lot of time feeling stupid. But you learned quickly, partly because you were anxious to get past feeling stupid, and partly because trying dumb stuff is a good way to learn what works and what doesn’t. If you’re not feeling stupid, you’re too comfortable, and it might be time to do an audit and see if you’re actually contributing to science at all. Science requires a certain kind of stupidity (Schwarz 2008).
And once you’ve got a research program, it’s all potential grist for the mill. Throw facts and ideas in the air and see where they land (the whole idea is that you can’t predict that in advance). Some will land behind the cutting edge, some too far out in front, and some entirely off the map. But one or two might land on the cutting edge, or ideally just ahead, and then you can push the whole field forward, just a little bit.
Conferences are valuable because they give your mental program a huge slug of input. You don’t get sprinkled with new facts and ideas, you get carpet-bombed, and as the volume of fire increases, so do the chances for a successful hit. I got an idea for a sauropod neck paper from a talk on the foot morphology of perching birds at ICVM last summer. Another long-delayed project was inspired by a talk on the development of snail shells by a fellow grad student back at Berkeley. That’s one reason I like smaller conferences like SVPCA, with no concurrent sessions. If everyone is in one room, you’re bound to sit through talks you wouldn’t see otherwise, and those are where you’re most likely to get fresh ideas. At SVP I always opt for the dinosaur talks over the mammal talks, and that’s good for Step 2, but bad for Step 4, because I already know what most of the dinosaur talks are about. I’m adding a little clay, but possibly losing out on a lot of inspiration. If I was really taking my own advice, I’d go see the fish talks.
So, conferences are good, but really they’re just an intense version of something you can do all the time, which is choose to feed yourself new things.
Coda: Publish
“I was on an [email] list with Tom Clancy once. Mr. Clancy’s
contribution to the list was, ‘Write the damn book’.”–Greg Gunther.
I know Mike used that quote before, but it bears repeating.
This tutorial is not aimed at everyone. It’s aimed specifically at people who were inspired by Tutorial 10 but don’t know where to start. Well, now you know. Step 1 is a choice. Steps 2, 3, and 4 are habits to be cultivated, for the rest of your life. But you can pick a project, read all the papers you want, think about your topic constantly, and drench yourself in the rainstorm of new ideas, and none of it counts until you publish. It may be a great way to pass the time, it may be tremendously rewarding, and you may develop as a person, but it won’t be science until you communicate it in a form that other people can use (i.e., papers, not mailing list posts–you dino folks know who I’m secretly addressing).
——————–
Disclosure: a couple of passages in this post are cribbed from the never-completed series, “Blundering toward productivity”, on my old blog. That series was a straight up pastiche of Paul Graham, but it includes a few more relevant ideas and might be of interest. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Finally: I can only link to things, I can’t put a gun to your head and force you to read them. But if I could, I’d make you read Schwarz (2008) first–it’s one page, and it’s important. After that, I’d make you read all the linked Paul Graham essays. If you have time to slog through my blatherations, you have time to read the better stuff that inspired me.
Update 2014-03-16: This post inspired a follow-up, and this much later post touches on some of the same issues.
Reference
Tutorial 10: how to become a palaeontologist
November 12, 2010
Last time around, I referred in passing, rather flippantly, to what I called Tutorial n: how to become a palaeontologist. Since then, I realised that actually I could write a tutorial on this, and that it could be surprisingly short and sweet — much shorter than it would have needed to be even a few years ago.
So here it is: how to be a published palaeontologist.
Step 1. Publish papers about palaeontology
… and you’re done.
Really.
If this sounds frivolous or facetious, it’s not meant to. It is the absolute, solid truth about how to be a published palaeontologist. It is a fact that the difference between published palaeontologists and other people is that only the former have published papers about palaeontology. If you want to move from the latter group into the former, then, that’s what you have to do.
I’m talking about proper publication in peer-reviewed journals, by the way: not just blogging (valuable though that is), not self-publication, not vanity publication. Making a genuine contribution to the science of palaeontology through peer-reviewed articles.
But Mike, it’s not that simple!
Yes, it is. It really is.
At times like this, I always remember Tom Clancy’s advice to would-be novelists. I used to be on a mailing list for writers, and the administrator, Greg Gunther, once posted this anecdote:
I was on an [email] list with Tom Clancy once. Mr. Clancy’s contribution to the list was, ‘Write the damn book’.
That’s the finest advice I know on the subject, and it applies to palaeontology papers as well as to novels. If that doesn’t convince you, here is a post from noted science-fiction author Frederik Pohl, 87 years old at the time of writing, on the subject of establishing yourself as a short-story writer:
How do you get to be a writer?
- You sit down and write something.
- Finish what you write. Pensées don’t count. Neither do short stories without an ending.
- If the next morning you think it’s any good send it to some editor who might buy it.
- Repeat as needed.
Terse as this advice may seem, you could condense the whole thing to point 1. Sit down and write something. Heck, you don’t even need to sit down if you prefer to write standing up. In which case the advice reduces to write something.
If you, dear reader, are not yourself a published palaeontologist, then you are probably thinking of all kinds of objections now. Dismiss them: just start doing the work. To help you out, let me smack a few common objections down for you.
Objection 1. But I’m not a professional!
What do you mean by that? Do you mean that you don’t get paid to work on palaeontology? No-one cares about that: journal editors and reviewers will neither know nor care. For whatever it’s worth, both Darren and I are amateurs in this sense.
What matters — what journal editors and reviewers do care about — is whether you conduct yourself as a professional. And that’s up to you. Be courteous. Write clearly. Don’t be excessively critical of others’ work, especially if there’s a chance that you’ve misunderstood it. Submit to peer review. Turn your manuscripts around quickly. These are the aspects of “professionalism” that actually matter, and they are just as available to amateurs as to professionals.
Objection 2. But I don’t have a Ph.D!
Doesn’t matter. Lots of published palaeontologists don’t have Ph.Ds. My own first five papers came out before I got my Ph.D. Heck, John McIntosh, the undisputed king of sauropod science, never earned a Ph.D in palaeontology (though he has one in his day-job field of physics).
Really, what does a Ph.D get you? Only the right to sign your submission letters Dr. Simeon Halibutwrangler instead of just plain Simeon Halibutwrangler. Otherwise it has no effect whatsoever on the publication process. I mean it. Look at some papers: note how the authors’ names don’t include titles or credentials? Journal editors and reviewers probably don’t even know whether you have a Ph.D or not, and they certainly don’t care. What they care about is whether your manuscript is any good.
To be clear, I’m not saying a Ph.D is worthless. For one thing, it’s a necessity if you’re looking for a job in academia. But in terms of its effect on your ability to actually, you know, do science, it’s way overrated.
Objection 3. But I don’t have an academic affiliation!
Doesn’t matter. Greg Paul isn’t affiliated with a university: his recent papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature, Paleobiology and, oh, yes, Science, give a street address rather than an institutional address.
Again, what does the affiliation really get you? I would say three things: access to papers (see below), access to specimens (see below) and the right to put the name of a university on your papers. If you can work around the first two things — and you can — the lack of the third is not truly such a great hardship.
Obejction 4. But I don’t have access to papers!
Yes you do. This is a solved problem. We’re living in the Shiny Digital Future now.
Seriously. The rankest amateur living in 2010 has better access to the literature than the most hallowed professional of twenty years ago ever had.
Here’s a strange thing: although I’ve been affiliated with UCL for eighteen months now, I’ve never got around to setting up my off-campus institutional access to paywalled publishers like Elsevier and Blackwell. Now partly this is just plain laziness, which I’m not proud of. But I do think it goes to show how very much that kind of access is, these days, a pleasant luxury rather than a necessity. Because everything is open.
Objection 5. But I don’t have access to specimens!
Finally, we come to a real objection. Fossil specimens are held by museums, and museums are rightly careful about who they allow to play with their irreplaceable stuff. In general, it’s easier to get access to specimens as you become better known — either through the shortcut of an academic affiliation, or through publishing papers. But how can you publish papers if you don’t have access to specimens? You can’t, right? It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, right?
Well, wrong actually.
Obviously you can’t write descriptive papers without seeing the material you’re describing. But that is only one kind of paper. Reviewing my own output so far, I was rather shocked to find that only two of eleven papers (the Xenoposeidon description and Brachiosaurus revision) are descriptive, specimen-based work. Of the others, three were taxonomic (Diplodocoid PN, pre-PhyloCode PN and Cetiosaurus petition); one was statistical (dinosaur diversity survey), one was palaeobiological inference (sauropod neck posture); three were about the Shiny Digital Future (electronic publication of names, sharing data, ODP report); and one is basically a literature review (history of sauropod studies).
What this means is that I could have written 81.8% of my papers without ever looking at an actual specimen. So: write 81.8% of your papers, get them published, then when museum collection managers know who you are, go and look at their fossils and write the other 18.2%.
Objection 6. But what if my paper is rejected?
Reformat for a different journal and send it straight back out. This happens to everyone. It’s just part of the process. My very first paper was rejected; we just sent it back out. The Xenoposeidon paper was rejected without even being reviewed; we just sent it back out. Our neck-posture paper was rejected without review twice; we just sent it back out. As I write this, Matt and I are busy revising two papers that we co-wrote, both of which were rejected. Any day now, we’re going to send them back out. [Update, March 2014: those two papers became Taylor and Wedel (2013a) on sauropod neck anatomy and Wedel and Taylor (2013b) on caudal pneumaticity.]
Objection 7. But I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to put in the work!
Oh. Well, there you have me. That really is a problem.
So what’s stopping you?
I know a whole bunch of people who should be published palaeontologists but aren’t. Some of them know far, far more about extinct animals than I do, and I am frankly bewildered that they have somehow never made it into print: I assume they are letting themselves be defeated by some kind of psychological barrier.
Others are just feeling their way into this field, in many cases by blogging. They have more excuse for hestitancy, but no real reason for it. As a success story, I could cite Brian Switek of the blog Laelaps, who took a while to warm up to the idea of academic publishing but recently placed his first major paper (“Thomas Henry Huxley and the reptile to bird transition“) in the dinosaur history volume.
Well. I could say more about the nuts and bolts of writing and submitting papers, and I will do so in Tutorial 14. But for now, I am leaving this here. Because the single, simple point that this article makes is such an important one. Write papers.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 