On becoming and influencial researcher

[untitled]

Julianne Dalcanton has an interesting post over at Cosmic Variance about the development of PhD students (albeit in physics) into productive faculty.

Now, the factors that lead to having scientific influence are many. Among the most important are:

• Writing lots of papers
  
• Writing interesting papers
  
• Writing papers using novel or superior data sets
  
• Writing papers on a timely topic
  
• Being recognized as leading the above papers, rather than being directed by others
  
• Communicating your ideas with clarity
  
• Being socially well-connected in your field
  
• Being really, really, really, unusually smart and/or creative
  
• Having influential mentors promoting you

To be scientifically successful, you don’t need to have all of these factors, or even most of these factors. You just need to have enough of them, or a long enough suit in one or two of them, that people can’t ignore what you’re doing.

Of this list, there are at least half that are almost entirely under a student’s own control, no matter where they go to graduate school.

…

 

Besides the import for deciding where to attend school, the above elucidates why “climate” issues can have such a large impact on your eventual career success. If you’re at an institution that places obstacles in your path that make it difficult for you to write papers, to find good mentors, and to make scientific connections in your field, then you’ve got a problem. You’re going to be struggling uphill.

 

She also links to an interesting ARVIX pre-print discussing some of the major factors in gaining influence in the scientific community (and the biases against women).

[Golden Rule]

Interesting post.

 

I'd also highlight using novel methods in addition to just novel data... namely novel methods that open up your ability to address some interesting question. And # of interesting papers I'd say are clearly more important than timely papers or quantity (well I'd say timeliness can contribute to a topic being interesting, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient)

 

I don't think recognition when co-authoring is as potentially troublesome as in pure sciences, where you more often have long lists of authors.