This is my annual no-promises request for you, my Readers, to turn the tables.
I am interested in what you all have to say, scientifically.
So, if inclined drop your presentation details here in the comments or send me an email. Drugmnky at the google mail.
I might stop by.
As those of us in the neurosciences prepare for our largest annual scientific gathering, we should attend to a certain little task to assist with the odds of obtaining NIH grant funding. Part of that process is a long game of developing interpersonal relationships with the Program Officers that staff the NIH ICs of interest to our individual research areas. Many scientists find the schmoozing process to be uncomfortable and perhaps even distasteful.
To this I can only reply "Well, do you want to get funded or not?".
This post originally went up Nov 12, 2008. I've edited a few things for links and content.
One of the most important things you are going to do during the upcoming SfN Annual Meeting in Washington DC is to stroll around NIH row. Right?
I have a few thoughts for the trainees after the jump. I did mention that this is a long game, did I not? Continue Reading »
What with the 2012 edition of the Society for Neuroscience meeting rapidly approaching, I thought I'd return to this critical issue in meeting etiquette.
This was originally posted Sept 11, 2008 on the old Scienceblogs version of DrugMonkey.
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Annual scientific meetings have many purposes. One of the most essential purposes that cannot be readily accomplished by other means is the initiation and development of inter-personal relationships. Call it networking, schmoozing or whatever you like. As with any other human enterprise, there are many aspects that are improved by meeting other people face to face and becoming acquainted with them.
There is an aspect of scientific meetings, however, that always presents a very difficult problem for YHN (see Figure 1).
Neuropolarbear has a post up suggesting that people presenting posters at scientific meetings should know how to give the short version of their poster.
My favorite time to see posters is 11:55 and 4:55, since then people are forced to keep it short.
If you are writing your poster talk right now, remember to use a stopwatch and make your 5 minute version 5 minutes.
Don't even practice a longer version.
I have a suggestion.
Ask the person to tell you why they are there! Really, this is a several second exchange that can save a lot of time. For noobs, sure, maybe this is slightly embarrassing because it underlines that even if you have managed to scope out the name successfully you do not remember that this is some luminary in your subfield. Whatever. Suck it up and ask. It saves tremendous time.
If you are presenting rodent behavioral data and the person indicates that they know their way around an intravenous self-administration procedure, skip the methods! or just highlight where you've deviated critically from the expected paradigms. If they are some molecular douche who just stopped by because "THC" caught their eye then you may need to go into some detail about what sort of paradigms you are presenting.
Similarly if it is someone from the lab that just published a paper close to your findings, just jump straight to the data-chase. "This part of figure 2 totally explains what you just published"
Trust me, they will thank you.
As Neuropolarbear observes, if you've skipped something key, then this person will ask. Poster sessions are great that way.
case in point, michael b eisen, who we know as @mbeisen. He's HHMI, UCB prof, of a certain age and publishing stature....basically your science 1%er.
He has no fucking clue about normal people.
still think people mostly use it as excuse; page charges for most nonOA society Js are higher
What is under discussion is the publication fee of some $1,350 required at PLoS ONE.
This came about because I have been idly speculating of late about the Impact Factor of PLoS ONE..it's about 4.4. This compares favorably with many run of the mill journals (tied to a society or otherwise) that publish huge amounts of general neuroscience stuff. Take initial modifier [American, European, Canuckian, International....etc], add "Journal of", insert [Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Toxicology, Drug, Alcohol, Neurophysiology, Behavior, Cognition....blahdeblah] and you'll get the corpus. Some variants such as "Neuroscience" or "Psychopharmacology" or "Neuropharmacology" or .... You get the point. Published by the usual suspects: Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier.
Most of these come in with IFs under 4.4...or at least as close as make no practical difference.
They also publish a LOT of the papers in the fields that I follow and participate in.
I happen to think this is where the real science exists. If you've ever cited a paper in one of these journals.....yeah.
I also protest, when people are talking about the level of peer review at the Glamour Mags and attempting to sidestep the outsized retraction rate at those journals (hi PP!), that oftentimes the review is harshest at these journals. The reviews are by more directly focused experts and the scope of the paper is lesser. So the review comments can be brutal.
They can also, at times, be pretty demanding. I, myself, have in recent memory been asked for essentially an Aims worth of data be added to an already not-insubstantial manuscript at one of these sub-PONE-IF journals. AYFK? If I added that, I'd be submitting UPWARD you dumbasses!!!
As you know, PLoS ONE promises to accept manuscripts that are SOUND. Not on the basis of all the extra stuff some reviewer "would like to see". Not satisfying the nutty subjective "disappointment" of the reviewer that you didn't do the study he would (in theory) have conducted. Most emphatically not on the prediction of "impact" and "influence". Supposedly, not on the basis of even having a positive finding!
So with a higher IF and this promise....I'm all of a sudden having a hard time figuring out why people aren't just putting all their stuff in PLoS ONE? What is keeping them back?
It appears to me from doing some harder thinking about what is IN this journal that subfields are either in or out. There are some cultural forces going on here which I touched on previously. People want to make assumptions that they are going to get "their" editors and "their" reviewers....not just whatever random fringe OpenAccess Wackaloon who signed on to the PLoS ONE train sort-of/kinda overlaps with their work.
The other huge problem is the cost. $1,350 to be exact. There's a waiver....but it isn't really clear how likely one is to GET that fee waived. They don't make any promises before you submit the paper. And that's where it counts! Why go through the hassle of review just to find out several weeks later that you have to pull it for the $$? Might as well not even try.
Part of the problem here is the 1%ers like mbeisen and @namnezia think "society journal" means: PNAS is $70/page, JNsci is about $950 total.
yeah, SOME journals that technically qualify as "society" journals have page charges or publication fees. But the ones I'm talking about, for the most part, do not. Not. ONE. dime. Not a $75 "submission fee". Not a page charge.
They are FREE from start to finish.
JNeuro and PNAS are not normal, run of the mill society journals. This is not what we are discussing. It strikes me that this frame of reference is why mbeisen can't grasp the problem I'm trying to explore. It makes me fear that PLoS ONE is falling short of what it could be because it was founded by Science 1%ers who are clueless and out of touch.
It's like I'm blogging in the wind here.
Approximately how much should the PI and postdoc or grad student attend meetings together versus separately?
I think the together part is obvious and should be the majority of the time. The PI is supposed to be introducing the trainee around.
But flying solo can be great for independence.
The big shottes *have* to talk to you if the PI isn't at the meeting. So I'd definitely be okay with a handful of meetings where the trainee is there without the PI.
Making it habitual, however, is MentorMalpractice.
Which kind of poster do you prefer to see?
Which kind do you present?
Me, I don't want to see a finished story. If it is that wrapped up, meh, I can wait for the peer reviewed version to come out. I want to grapple with something new...and preferably *puzzling*.
The best possible outcome of a meeting presentation would be if three interested labs went home, took on an aspect of the puzzle (even if only a replication) and by year's end there were four new papers in print.
That's how meeting presentations should work.
The new SfN award, named for the legendary Particia Goldman-Rakic, honors dead people.
That's right, the site emphasizes that it is a posthumous award for scientists who were fabulous, supported women in science, were active in SfN or other academic organizations....all that good stuff.
Plus, dead. Not living. A sort of ex-scientist.
This is nuts.
Honor people while they are still alive. If someone dies tragically early, sure make the award posthumously. But let's put our focus on recognizing people while they can still receive the accolades.
Interesting post up at the haydenlab blog:
In the post-SFN hangover phase, many neuroscientists are in a slightly more anxious state about the possibility that they are about to be scooped. Surely with all those posters, you must have seen someone who has the same brilliant idea in their head as you, right?
With a few exceptions, these fears turn out to be silly. Why?
The author then goes on to list a number of reasons why getting scooped* is not as bad as is usually imagined. I tend to agree** with the points being made. One that is obscured is that in most areas of real science, the paper that does the best job is going to rack up the the respect and citations. Even if it appeared after the very first report of the general phenomenon.
So I tend to think scientists should remember they are playing the long game. And not get too concerned about the possibility that they are about to get scooped.
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*someone else manages to publish an experimental finding that you are working on before you get your paper published.
**the pursuit of GlamourMag science prioritizes the first publication of something over many other factors, including scientific quality and genuine impact, for example.
The Backyard Brains folks are at it again.
Presentation 22.17SU/YY91 will be on display Saturday 1:00 p.m. – Sunday 5:00 p.m. with their presentation time scheduled for Sunday. It is entitled:
The blue light special: a portable, low-cost optogenetics kit for the classroom
The abstract reads:
Optogenetics is an innovative technology for studying brain circuits, but to date the lay public has had little exposure to its potential and limited access to low-cost tools to do experiments. What if you have an interest in cutting-edge neuroscience but you aren’t near a university? What if you prefer to do science in your garage, in a truck-bed, or on a plane on a boat? What if you are a high school biology teacher who wants to keep your students abreast of the most current neurotechnology but the latest millage did not pass? We can help you! We have designed a low-cost, easy-to-build, and portable electrophysiology rig for simple optogenetics demonstrations. The rig consists of a extracellular amplifier (our SpikerBox), a 3D-printed 3-axis micromanipulator, an off-the-shelf monocular 30X microscope, a high intensity blue LED (light-emitting diode), and an LED control circuit that can be precisely controlled with a tailor-made iPhone application or simple tone generator. We have successfully used our first clunky prototype to record blue light-evoked electromyograms from channelrhodopsin-2 expressing Drosophila larvae. We plan to spend the summer refining our prototype (making it more stable, improving control of light emission) and genetic tools. We plan to begin demonstrations in high school classrooms by Fall 2011. We also have other low-cost neurotechnology inventions to show you, so come by our poster to participate in real-time peer review!
Right? RIGHT? You know you think this is cool. Go see their presentation folks, they always amuse, entertain and educate.
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Update for additional reading on Backyard Brains and Marzullo and Gage
The $100 Spike
The $100 SpikerBox v1.0
Backyard Brains
