"Publishing Scientific Papers", with Prof. Roald Hoffmann

you know it is the greatest privilege and pleasure - it's a different way you know research colleague and friend that has a roll Hoffman as you will all know we are very very fortunately Cornell to have him here he shared in the 1981 ice Nobel Prize in Chemistry and if that told you nothing else to tell you that he knows a lot about this subject and he's going to be talking today about what finally is our so to speak stock-in-trade research papers and how do they get published and what is the right strategy and what is the right form of procedures and so forth and by the way he should know he's got just a shade under 600 publication was to his name so he's well practiced in this business now what if I could do today is outlined the problem before so we just want to get our fundamental research published in front of our colleagues and even hopefully gain the acceptance right of our colleagues and that means of the documents have to be exceedingly carefully and thoughtfully prepared and that's what Professor Hoffman is going to be telling us about today so the title of this book is publishing scientific papers please are join me in welcoming yes so there are many things to talk about and thank you all for coming and eating standing up and so first the good old days just for nostalgia so what you see at left is this is a paper from 1981 and once you see it left is where the word cut and paste comes from because this is though you can see the lines of it a cutting paste from a pieces of actual paper which we we actually use different colors of paper even and you this is the writing of Casta to me distinguished Japanese chemist who was a postdoc here in mind and his writing it's really interspersed with mine there are two patches of his writing at the very bottom and near the top but the rest is my writing the drawings were done here sketched by hand then they were done on on paper sketched out a little more carefully than they were given to Jane Jorgenson whose kids I put through college with these and we're done in India ink on tracing paper with Laroy lettering set these are all words that hearken to a distant past in which you can find in antique stores along with circular slide rules and other things like that and eventually they came or they were they find their place in the paper so the drawing you see here you see it upper right in there but the process actually of getting the paper published has not changed now what does it look like today so this is the way we submitted a paper utatsu G and I and of 19 in 2012 and we actually were obliged by the journal German American Chemical Society to submit it in a template that they provide so at this point it actually looks pretty much the way it looks when it will be published there isn't that much difference in it with one thing which I will however describe in a moment so now the paper prepared the drawings are done by computer no longer done by hand and then by a draft man or woman not only did I employ Jane Jorgensen but I also employed the children of my colleagues to provide gainful employment in making these drawings in that time and so the Chester children and worked for me at one time both of two of them at least and that capacity so but now let's talk about the steps in the process so there are lots of interesting questions some of these would take a whole lecture by themselves one is to do the research how the one does the research another thing is about writing the paper and they're all questions kinds of questions that come up when is it time to write the paper who writes it what is the order of the authors who are the authors of the paper how to credit previous work there are questions here of ethics that come in and which work to cite and I will not talk very much about these though I'm very open and I've written about some of them and I'm actually writing a paper now about citation ethics which is another story then there's a question of to submit it what journal to submit it to now if you are a graduate student or a postdoc that the decisions on these things will probably be made by your research advisor with some consultation with you but event in your life you will be making those decisions yourself and there are interesting questions around all of them but let's go through the process you have done the research you have written the paper you're the authors so the first thing is submission and here is a sort of a line of all the steps just do you see this is not meant to discourage you just to tell you about the steps that are involved you submit it to a journal which means online submission today and it means the submission to the editor in chief the chief office of that journal that editor-in-chief has a consulting technical editor who will do a preliminary screening whether you filled some fulfill some of the basic criteria so if there if the communication is only 2,000 words and if you insist on sending in something with 3,000 words it'll get stopped right here of course so there there are other things about the technical editor which I'll tell you technical editors are basically subhuman we'll talk about this whereas editors are human the editor in chief usually for a larger journal has several sub editors for instance journal American Chemical Society of phys Rev this would be true they would send it to a sub editor based on a subject of the paper plus the workload that the sub editor is handling and the sub editor is the one who decides to send it out to reviewers how many one two three four I'll show you in a moment in the first time around these are called also referees their reports in time trickle back to the sub editor who will make a decision an interim or full decision on the paper and who send that to the authors along with the anonymous reviewers comment there is a whole other story of people have wondered about this review process and whether there could be alternatives the author's revised the paper who sends it to the sub editor and now there is a big parenthesis because what if that revitalization what is the revision had to be so substantial that the paper had to be sent back to the reviewers again so the cycle goes on or conceivably they could be sent to other reviewers but eventually let us say that it is successful and it is accepted it could be rejected you'll see some things in a moment that I'll show you when it's accepted it gets sent to another technical editor who man handles or woman handles the manuscript in various ways with technical points in mind and then eventually proof and galleys are set this today because it is computer setting with modern layout programs is a relatively small perturbation and not many mistakes who are intervening between what you send and this is why the technical editors in the beginning are so concerned about the what is there not too many mistakes are made here there are still layout problems because layout ultimately has to be done by humans layout means how the figures are cited relative to each other where the tables and the figures occur and so on and that gives you proofing galleys in which you comment which go back to the technical editor and finally the paper is published process looks complicated but it's it just flows naturally in these things now I want to show you this through a case study I'm a strong believer in case studies and these things I want to show you this paper which a co-worker of mine who is in the audience you thought suji and I did and it is a paper which was published in in 2014 but we did the work in 2013 so that's that paper that I show you before and this is how we submitted it and we submitted it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society one of the prime chemical journals and here is the submission letters a part of it part of what you have to submit it's a it's a computer-based process it's an experience the first time you do it it becomes routine by the time you do it 400 times it takes about a half hour in an optimal situation if you have all the material prepared if you're not prepared it may take two or three hours one of the things you have to prepare is to suggest some reviewers or referees you can also suggest some people who you don't want to be reviewers if you suggest them such people a - Marc will appear next to your name in the mind of the editor if not worse so you one should use that sparingly but you need to provide the name affiliation email address of the reviewers and how you choose those is very interesting should you choose among them your friends and former students if the editor should not know about that they are friends and former students should you choose the experts obviously you should choose the person what you're trying to do is to read the editors mind the sub editors mind the sub editor is the one who knows and and there is no point not putting on there someone whom the subreddit they're from knowing the field and reading your paper would not put on so you might as well put them on there is a submission letter and you see that left it should say something positive about the work but should not overdo it overdoing it is going to cause another small - mark in the name of the editor in the mind of the editor the editor knows what going on but it doesn't hurt to say why this work might be important he was did that that was submitted in November 2013 November 20th I must be giving some resumes and the comments were received on December 17th relatively quick review time of about three and a half weeks and the paper was rejected it now I should tell you that the sub editor was Borden is a good friend of mine I was his PA when he was an undergraduate when I wasn't registered so I've known him for 40 years and we written I and the editor have written four or five papers together so we are we know each other that's what happens when you're in a trade for a long time nevertheless there is could he have done something else I suspect because he sent us out to four of yours that probably he tried what I mean by that is he probably got a bad review as the first one and then he sent it to some others hoping to get some good reviews now I don't show you the actual reviews I'll spare you those though I'll show you some others but I just show you the recommendation once as published in JCS after minor revision wants us published in Jes without charge that sounds good without change but then the third one says do not publish and the fourth one says publish elsewhere but I want you to see what an editor who is a friend does with two positive and two negative reviews and that is he cannot accept it now could he send it out to the Pfister reviewer I don't think there's any point he did the right thing here on this now what I want to show you is some of my best dress raise comments because I know that we're interesting our interest is in other people's suffering in general or in Koreans interest of other kinds so here are some of the best reviewers comments best in quotation marks sorry the speculations in this paper the sort of thing that one expects the here at research seminars or social chemical gathering certainly many of them have been made at my own seminar by bright young students no one else howevers had the conceit or effrontery to think them worth publishing Wow okay paper to that was submitted to a chemical journal but was reviewed by a physicist this paper would not be acceptable for publication and physical review the author should calculate the binding energy of the structure and compare it with graphite not just propose it as a possible structure this was a paper which we proposed the first in the literature of metallic of many since then hypothetical metallic allotropes of carbon and that's why he's saying this this extended nickel method contains errors it is absolutely useless except for publishing papers in chemistry journals you chemists should raise your standard I thought you'd like to see that the third reviewer I am NOT now I never have been an admirer of Hoffman's efforts in the or inorganic organometallic field to a bridge players of sideline kibitzers okay so those of you are non-native speakers of English qubits to kibbutz a verb or kibbe ting is a incursion of Yiddish into English and is interesting but you'll have to look it up in a dictionary to see what it means but the general idea someone who stands by someone's playing a chess game and someone standing there making comments to the players like you should have moved your rook there that's a cubit sir okay so and probably the third comments written by the same person who wrote the first comment he also wrote a something for my tenure review which Herald knows about anyway I thought you see this is fun okay so my friend rejects the paper from J ACS so what do I do as I actually I'll give you some advice on what to do but what do we do is we re resubmitted to another good journal on given to Hewitt got a review in January very quickly from three reviewers a favorable decision needing revision and then here is my letter to the sub editor at Angewandte Chemie making my revisions and what I do in this is I answer the letter briefly but then I down here paste together the three reviewers comments in an organized form they coming as a disorganized everyone has their own style and they come in all kinds of fonts and not such as fonts but they come I assemble the jump and then I answer them in a recognizable way and then I also say here they asked me to reduce the paper so we did I send to you a track changes marked up version of this paper so you can see clearly what was cut and what was not okay so now that comes to now I come to advice that's the case story the paper got published it's good paper responding to the reviews to the editor or sub editor if his or her decision is a firm one that they reject the paper as you saw that was the decision in that first comment I got from J CEA's do not fight don't tell the editor under any circumstances do not tell the editor how many of your friends liked the paper and especially don't tell them that a Nobel laureate liked the paper anything like that just curse them under your breath or out in loud in the private room in your house and then go out and have an ice cream cone with a friend or have a glass of whiskey at home and then the next day just thank the editor for the reviews and resubmit the paper elsewhere if an editor leaves you any opening and you'll learn how to recognize this then you seize on it you revise the paper but now now things change over sudden the audience for that revision is the editor and the reviewers if he should god forbid send it back to the reviewers for a second opinion that may happen the audience is there and you must do everything possible to reach that audience sensibly and to make it easy for them so that's why I pasted the referees comments in a neat document but I answered them point by point and what you must not do and the same applies to your marriage as to your relationship with the editor when someone says something you don't like don't escalate okay that is just you do instead you answer if you perceive anything to be wrong or aggressive you answer it politely and do everything it can not to escalate the idea is obvious the idea is to impress the editor with your professionalism and your willingness to take the comments in the friendly professional matter anything you do that detracts from that is going to get the paper rejected it's as simple as that and you can you it may have the reputed value to you to get angry but it doesn't serve any purpose at all in this process and this is why also you want to make clear to the editor what don't tell the editor I've cut the paper by 12% and cut it by 2% the editor is not stupid but you make it easy for them to by actually pointing out the changes that you have made and if you have made some changes on your own which were not in the criticism put those in too it gives the editors the impression that you are a thinking human being who is able to revise the paper in different ways okay so what's clear for what I say is that in writing papers you keep your audience's firmly in mind this we learn that Cornell by being teaching assistants in introductory chemistry of physics that's where we learn our students are very intolerant if you don't keep them in mind and they teach us editors reviewers readers or all audiences that we try to reach now technical editors are something else technical editors have one interest in life the same as everyone else is how to make life easy for themselves which may be also what is makes it easy for the journal so they dominate the material that's put in the instructions to the author about how the paper is to be preferred prepared so for instance one of the things that you'll see and but described by many journals is to put the text front put the figures at the end and put the figure captions on a separate page that's not a human being talking that's someone talking who wants an easy job of how to have the paper set in their format now let me give you some money turn down this just a little bit here does somebody know will get don't get the feedback let me give you an example again a hmm a case study so this is a paper I got a preprint from a friend and I have removed the first page to protect the guilty so this is someone I know who wants me to read the paper of theirs he's sending me essentially a preprint here's page two and three next two pages next two pages references figure captions on the page of right and then the figures so this person has composed the paper in the way that the technical editor has asked them to propose the paper now you are a human being but who is the first human being who read this paper the editor maybe goes over it a little bit the sub editor but the first human being who reads this paper after you submit it as the reviewer so you supposing the reviewer reads the paper here is page two and three I will laminated page one one gentle piece of advice about writing papers do not do not wait to introduce a figure to page five in the paper the natives like pictures and the quicker you have a figure in the paper especially if they're chemical structures involved the more will people read the paper so the here someone has waited till page four see can you turn that down a little bit yep to introduce a figure and it was I sir put a little square on it that's the first time I figure appears a reference to figure one so to find figure one you have to go through the paper to the end there you find figure one but it doesn't have the caption which shows you what the axes mean in Figure one to do that you have to go back to another page now this is only four figures imagine there are twenty figures in this paper this is this is not a way to make friends now in today's day a figure should appear god knows just where it's introduced where it's called out and it should have a caption so you can understand it and with today's layout features this is just in the word not in anything complicated this is not that complicated to do so now here's the point the technical edit of the journal tell you to do it in this way but the editor is human unlike the suborder the technical editor and they and in fact the option when you submit usually carries with it the ability to in addition to the manuscript file which can be submitted often in Word or latex format sometimes you can submit it also PDF in anyway you have an option to upload a version in the PDF and the editor who is human knows that the reviewers would prefer to read it in the normal way with the figures appearing where they are and they'll send it out for review that way because they are more like you than the technical editor okay editors in general you should respect their tough job you see here never never invoke Authority it in general Americans don't do that but people from other cultures sometimes think that by invoking the favorable opinion of some experts you will influence an editor this is bizarre and it will not work reviewers the reviewers are gatekeepers some when I'm a reviewer something switches on in my mind the context is criticism and this is necessarily I'll come back to it one of the differences between RT octave and reviewed papers the context of a reviewer is to criticize that leads to excess of course as you saw in some of those comments but the idea is to find things that are that will that are wrong or that will help the reader in general make the reading of the paper easy for the reviewers use large fonts do not cram in five pictures into one even though you see in fill of letters that those pictures are so crammed in of course everyone can enlarge the pictures but just like everyone can go to the back of the manuscript to find the figure captions you are making it harder for that person to read the paper that's the basic idea wherever you can make it easy and that's so figures especially make the figures large they can be combined at the end into smaller ones if need be but not in that initial stage of you there's a special problem for non-native speakers writers of English with the universal language of science which is broken English but the there interesting questions of who is responsible for improving that English for instance do the editors of journals have a responsibility for improving the English in a paper but one thing you can be sure is the paper will be sent out to the reviewers in whatever form you have it it may be improved later on so it's important to work on getting the English improved and getting friends to to think about this let's talk about journals where to publish so there is a established through time and practice by the people active in the field there is established a pecking order of journals sometimes things are indistinct it certainly feels specific subfield specific within any science so the pecking order for high energy nuclear physics will differ from that of condensed matter physics and we can all remember some here I picked inorganic chemistry I'll say something about science and nature but Journal American Chemical Society Angewandte Chemie published articles the top journals in chemistry published articles across all fields of chemistry but in particular they publish in inorganic chemistry a good number of journals after that the two American Chemical Society journals of inorganic chemistry and organometallics are probably in the next rank there is a European upstart that is getting better by the minute that's the European Journal of inorganic chemistry and down at the bottom is inorganic AHIMA cockta but there is the bottom is bottomless as we'll see in a while that because there are new journals being founded all the time for no good reason there is something to measure journals which is an impact factor which the journals are very concerned with and which they put on their mastheads or a webpage so that's a you take all the papers scientific papers but not editorial matter that are published in a journal in years 2000 let's say 6 and 2007 and you say you get say you get 365 journal articles that are published in that rather small journal the bigger journals will have in the thousands and then you look in 2008 in all the papers that are published in the world anywhere in their own journal or in other journals and you add up all the citations and then you get divided that the second number by the first and you get the impact factor so it's the number of times papers in that journal published in 2006-2007 have been cited in 2008 there are other definitions there is a problem with these one of the problems has to do with that most fundamental of human qualities and that is laziness so being lazy people cite reveal journals much more than they cite original papers we're now close to something else which Robert Merton has described as citation by obliteration citation by obliteration citation where the more something becomes familiar the less it becomes cited perhaps but basically anything that carries review articles is going to get cited more because of this basic human quality than anything that does not publish review articles on give auntie cami for instance benefits from that there are also problems of fashion and such there is a special problem with science nature self nature is now of course a machine there is a few nature journals but let's talk about the original these have acquired in their own field cell will not publish an inorganic chemistry article these acquired a certain reputation out of proportion to their value and they there are problems with these journals which we those of us who have submitted to them and countered their about any one submits to them one is that the initial there is an initial editor screening the editors are probably a very good scientific background but they haven't worked in necessarily in all fields and into their criterion for initial screening unfortunately comes something called newsworthiness and that is intangible that's perceived by them and it is a factor and they may essentially they could call it triage lady they could reject some articles without them being reviewed that and this is very annoying if you're one of those submitted one of those articles the other thing they do is heavy editing to emphasize newsworthiness and the third thing they do which is bad is they put a limit on the number of endnotes typically like 30 for a nature article this is terrible because give when you put that together with human propensity my general advice to you would be if your face to publishing into those if you're if you're at 35 if you have a choice between eliminating and EndNote to your article or to another versus article eliminated to your article but that's not an advice that many people follow some countries universities also place excessive importance on publication than these in China people are paid extra money in bonuses for publication in this and there is an interesting I still have to get hold of their ranking of the journals to get it but the rewards are in real money which is as tangible as you can get in this all I can tell you about this it's possible to get a Nobel Prize without publishing a single article in nature or science the person who introduced me is responsible entirely for the only article in nature that I have published and I never forgive myself for being forced into that because I had a good track record until that something is changing something's changing under our feet something's changing very rapidly in your scientific lifetime first there is the question of open source publishing which again we could talk about we could talk another time there are being founded hundreds of open source journals which are poor quality curiously not motivated though they pretend to be by the open source ethic of information being accessible to all but motivated by the usual thing which motivates publishers which is making money and that's because the financing model shifts as you go from normal journals to open source journals there is the question of free print servers and how is it pronounced is Paul here as I have is it archive or arc sieve I do I'm archived is the official okay we could schedule a nice little discussion between Paul Ginsberg and myself about this many chemists have problems with archive I don't have the problems because of that but I have other problems which I don't want to discuss here with archive in general it's very popular in chemists in physics mathematics astronomy but in chemistry it is not popular in fact a good number of chemical journals will not accept for publication a paper if it has been submitted to archive this is a decision by the editors of those journals but behind it is something interesting the other thing that is at work now that's beginning our blogs so the young people in the audience for better for worse are in there with blogs the interesting question is do blogs make a contribution to science okay I being of a certain age I would be skeptical but they I have now seen two blogs in chemistry specifically in theoretical chemistry by Henry Zepa and by back crack's the back rack I think which are both good blogs they actually outside of the normal process raised interesting questions and we've had something happen in chemistry which I was a little involved in of the following kind someone wrote a paper sassonique in Israel a blog comment was made on a paper by Henry Zepa that blog comment was so perceptive that zepa was a co-author on the Nathe next paper that's a son wrote about that subject and there is a third paper in which I joined them but it came out of a blog and there may be more things like this there is another whole question of access to data this is something tied up with legal questions NSF mandates that we put in data management plans and that everyone in the world should have access to even the raw data of doing the scientific research that still there will be legal tests of this it all became came upon us as a result of the litigation as' of American society and should not have happened there is another interesting thing about archival storage what should we do with those terabytes of material that we generate that our computers generate I want to talk a little bit about how to key lead and keep up with the literature so here is the good old days so you can see that this young man I'm proud that I'm not 20 pounds heavier than that and I can't do anything about the hair but this is a photograph of me upstairs and downstairs the Clarks physical sciences library at a time when I could say without any exaggeration that we had the best library in the world I can't say that today that has nothing to do with the librarians has everything to do with the money I'm pointing to somewhere where is the money over there dae-ho it has something to do with the money that goes into the libraries and this was the old day so what would happen in the old days the pay the journals were all printed of course and they came to the library and they were put on this shelf which was very important to me and to others who kept up with it this is where they were put for the week that they came in after that week they were taken off this shelf shelf at two sides it had room when it got crowded for about a hundred journals on there after this one week I'm telling you this in some detail because most of you don't remember how it was but after that week it was put on to another set of shelves for the whole year and at the end of the year the year the whole year's number of issues was sent to a binder which bound them in a book form and then they went on the shelves in the library so there were three stages in this process but this was the important stage for me when I was at the very beginning of my career I would go here every day after a while I got busy and I started traveling but I still tried to get here on a Saturday or Sunday now why on a Saturday or Sunday in part is my work ethic but in part it's because on Monday they would be taken away from this shelf and put on the other shelf and if I came on Saturday or Sunday I could be sure that I have seen everything that's been published that came into the library that week that means I could keep up with all the literature of course I didn't look at all the journals because they had at that time I wasn't as interested in physics as I am today I didn't look at many of the physics journals and I didn't look at the relatively few astronomy journals we had in there and we were spared the biology literature which was in man library elsewhere but in order I was obsessive about keeping up with the literature one of the reasons I was obsessive was this was the new this was and science as the cult of knew this was the new stuff that was coming in the second thing was it kept me ahead of my graduate students and postdocs so let me tell you something here this is psychological if it's a research director wants to make an impression of a work ethic on his or her students one thing of course is to be in their office all the time that helps but there is in terms of a single action what has probably the greatest impact is when a research director one some graduates in the postdoc has been working on some specific subject ok and the research director sees in the literature a new article not necessarily scooping the people but relevant to that field of research and if he sends a little email it wasn't an email then to the students saying hey I just saw this in the literature it's something the students should have seen but they didn't if a research director does this two or three times they've got that student because it's obvious way it's obvious to the student that the research director cares about this it's it's just ordinary human nature so this is there another reason for keeping up with the library okay now the most important thing was I even built in a redundancy that is I wasn't somehow I thought I might have missed some of these so so I looked for something which would have the interesting papers or all the papers in another form than the hard copy that came in the library some of you of a certain age will remember something called current contents that was a print publication which published the tables of contents not the abstracts of every journal in a world that came into a certain office it's been taken over it became Citation Index and is now the web of science there's a line for those things I read current contents current contents provided what I call in general is the useful princess principle for keeping up with literature which is what I call optimal redundancy so if you do things normally by the nature of things you're going to miss something it just happens so you build in redundancy something where you have another way of looking at the thing and between now some people are so uptight about not about relatively few about missing things that they they do too much of this so optimal redundancy is two or two-and-a-half or something like that that's what I found with time so now my you see my problem the print issues have disappeared the Shelf has disappeared maybe it's still there it's gone I wish I had that piece of furniture it's gone and my prop the journals are on a web that's fine I can access them and but the problem is that I don't know what I've read I'm getting older I forget what I've read so how do I build a system which given that I have to read a lot that I don't repeat myself after a while the paper the titles of the papers begin to swim before your eyes they're all the same so what I've done I managed to find it in Google Reader but what I use are something called RSS aggregators which you will know better what that means than I and I used to to use Google Reader but in the way that Google has of abolishing anything that it can't make any money from it abolished Google Reader and so now there are other places and there is something called feedly there are other aggregators I use one called the old reader which as the name implies tries to essentially emulate the environment of Google Reader so I get journals and I get a feed of the titles and abstracts of every journal that I want and I can put them in you see a list of the journals over here here Chemical Physics Letters chemical reviews chemical science and I have it so set up here I'm looking at the title and the abstract and the graphical abstract - but I could set it up that I could just see the title and as I scroll past it which may or may not mean that I've read it but as I let's be nice to me let's say as I read the title and look at the abstract graphical abstracts are a wonderful invention there is an interesting story about where they came in in science but as I read this it goes from both face to plain font so it tells me and the number goes down so what this means is in Doulton transactions there are 18 articles I haven't seen and as I open the open transactions and as I go down this then that number decreases - so this tells me what I've read it it manages the same thing but it still doesn't have the feel of a paper yet so actually a few more words about this let me tell you the scope of where I am at and and this is not meant to impress you I'll tell you in just a moment a piece of advice of 600 papers in a number of ways I've been at it recently Neil and I published four papers and journal Chemical Physics two years ago and the editor reminded me that the I had first published my first two papers in that journal 50 years before so then can beat me on this so that but it's a nice feeling when that happens anyway what I have on here is about a hundred journals they generate around 1500 new articles per week which I look at on a weekend I look at the titles of those I look at the abstract of about 50 I look inside the paper for about 10 and I print out or save about 5 so that's the process of weaning now I know that and I tell you that that process takes me the same time that going to the library did the old library and that is 2 to 3 hours a week this process of keeping up with the literature what's very nice with a computer which was not true of the library is that process can be fitted into the nooks and crannies that a modern day existence allows what I mean by that is if you're stuck in a doctor's office for an hour you can do this and so that this is very different whereas you couldn't do it before so actually it goes way now I know it's intimidating a hundred journals and 1500 articles but it took me fifty-two years to get there so give yourself that time so here is the practical advice when you're starting out this you already have if you've written one paper you have from the references in that paper even though for you it looks like the world began yesterday and there's probably not a reference more than 10 years old in that doesn't matter probably you have in there five references the J ACS or Angewandte Chemie of your chemist if you're in a biological world you would have other references if you earn physics you would have visitor have letters visitor of B and other things so put those on the list after that follow a simple practical test if you find yourself looking up a journal to get a reference for whatever reason in the world your professor has made you do it you're doing a literature search for paper if you find yourself looking up a journal ten times in the normal way which means typing in the name of the journal in Google getting to the website of the journal then putting in the reference that somebody gave you and getting the paper if you do that 10 times for Anna you notice the same journal add that journal to this list that's all just a practical test of utility to you this is a very different philosophy than the philosophy of a targeted search which is the problem for both journals and for archive if you put in if you put in that you want to look at papers and high temperature superconductors this doesn't matter whether it is archive or in journal literature you will get 2,000 references so you refine the search and turns out that you're working on cooperate superconductors which involve business so you you ask it to supply you with references of cooperate superconductor and my god it goes down to five from and you like that okay so you do you can cover the same ground by a multitude of you can gain the redundancy by using a multitude of search topics but given human nature we tend to focus on very precise areas not because that's what we should be doing or need to be doing it's simply to get the number of hits on a search down to a manageable level so getting that down to a manageable level I'm talking about how to define search terms is what is what forces you into situation where you become too specialized and you will only see articles in you in that field and that is important at a certain stage but it's not it's not a good thing overall there are many say more things to talk about how to search the literature so I find out how to devise optimum searching strategies and of our librarians Leah McEwan and Diane dietrich are here to help us with that in a number of ways sciFinder web science web of science and databases each of the utility there is the interesting question of citation practice which what is the optimum you cannot cite everything that's too much but many there are real problems in insight I'm writing an article about this which I'll have ready in in a while there are other things how do you behave I told you how to behave with a video editors don't get angry okay now how do you behave when you find that someone else has done the work that you've been slaving to do that's an interesting psychological problem oh there is plagiarism like like the sexual misdeeds of our religious ministers of much attraction to the general public but not overall a serious problem for good science I think but it is something which the journals are very concerned with then I haven't told you anything about how to behave as a viewer of a paper which is a still another subject which is worth discussion but I think we have to and I even though Neil said I would talk about how to write a better scientific paper I haven't done that there are many theories of this but the here as in many other things of virtue theory is is not a bad idea that is you write scientific papers by modeling yourself on papers which are good papers and try to figure out what it is that's good about them it's very hard in the beginning there are many things pulling at you when you're writing of scientific paper and uh I could talk about that another time but I think it's enough so we stop here thank you [Applause]

Channel: CCMR

Views: 1,520

Rating: 4.939394 out of 5

Keywords: cornell university, ccmr, cornell center for materials research, publishing scientific papers

Id: fYKBd6BDgMQ

Length: 60min 25sec (3625 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2017