Home Community Sabina Lukovac One sky high paper or few smaller ones?

One sky high paper or few smaller ones?
Thursday, 03 June 2010 08:50
posted by Sabina Lukovac

This truely has been the number one question for most of you scientists around the world… We are desperate 'to know'… 'to find out'… 'to identify the underlying mechanism'… but most of all

'we must publish or perish'.

At the moment I just started my first post doc job and again the same question arised: What is the best option in order to find a proper faculty position in a university and to get the grant proposals honoured: to publish more papers in the lower impact factor journals? Or shall we put in all the effort, everything there is to finaly get that one, sky-high Nature paper??

It would take me years to answer this question properly, but are there any rules within the scientific community?? What do the majority of us think is the best?? Sometimes I wonder if 'low science publishing' works… it is so often descriptive and leads to further questions without ever really discovering the real mechanism behind a certain observation… but maybe this is what we need as well in science in order to open up the new, undiscovered chapters… or maybe it is worth waiting to really find out how things work…

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#5 Piet 2010-06-08 02:35
High impact always.

It's true that staking everything on one high impact paper may not turn out the way you want it to. However, having Nature, Science or Cell on your CV is much much much more appreciated than several lower impact papers. It's not just the impact factor, it's the name and status of the journal.

With the competition growing and the funding decreasing, CV has become the first method of culling the numbers. Having a high impact paper should pretty much ensure that you at least go to the second round, where reviewers will actually read the proposal itself.
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#4 Zen Faulkes 2010-06-04 01:29
"(I)n order to start your own independent career as a scientist you do need the money, a grant to start with something."

The institution that hires you should be the ones starting your career as an independent scientist by giving you start-up funds. Negotiation for start-up funds is something that many people don't plane enough for. And you only have one shot to get it right.

"Unfortunately, some of the people I know have been rejected during a grant procedure not because they did not have enough publications, but because non of them was "high" enough...even though they had several one first author papers, many collaborations, experience in top labs and institutes....and all of that was not enough."

At some point, with funding rates what they are in the U.S. and elsewhere, trying to analyze out why some people get funded and others don't is like trying to analyze where the factors that go into a winning lottery ticket. There are more good proposals than money. Which means people have to find essentially arbitrary reasons to pick some over the others.
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#3 s lukovac 2010-06-03 21:13
Thanks for your comments, I totally agree with you. But, in order to start your own independent career as a scientist you do need the money, a grant to start with something. The problem often is, and I have heard this from some of my colleagues, that it is not easy to implement the project management skills in a grant application. I am not saying that it is impossible, it's just that we are judged on our CV (publications). Unfortunately, some of the people I know have been rejected during a grant procedure not because they did not have enough publications, but because non of them was "high" enough...even though they had several one first author papers, many collaborations, experience in top labs and institutes....and all of that was not enough. I guess it also depends on your competition in a certain round for a grant application. But maybe all of this is not essential for a tenure track position, as long as you know people who can help you get in, you can still do research.
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#2 via twitter 2010-06-03 20:01
@larry_parnell: @PostdocNews Postdoc shouldn't fret over impact factor, but on project management & gaining skills & contacts 4 next step in career.
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#1 Zen Faulkes 2010-06-03 17:10
If you're a musician, do you keep working on the one album that will make the cover of the Rolling Stone? No.

If you're a filmmaker, do you do turn down all deals until you get a blockbuster with a budget of $100,000 or more?

That people even contemplate staking everything on that one big paper is utterly and completely incomprehensibl e to me. There are some fields of science where you can work all your life and never, ever have something that will appear in the "glamour mags."

I think the best strategy for career advancement is to aim for a solid, consistent series of papers in the disciplinary journals of your field. That is to say, try not to publish in the Chinese Journal of Irreproducible Crap.
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