Andres Tips for “How to Publish more Papers” Publications are the currency of a productive scientist. As good researchers, we strive to find the balance between submitting the “least publishable unit” and a complete highprofile story that will have a major impact in the field. In a small laboratory in a department with a limited number of colleagues who are using similar scientific tools, this can be quite a challenge because basic infrastructure needs are not the same as those from a much larger institution. It is easy to publish. All you need is the time to conduct the research and write the papers. As a talented postdoc from a high-quality lab, you most likely already possess these basic skills. The key is keeping your schedule open through creative time management. Below is a list of tips to consider for a scientist in such a challenging environment: 1. Use the resources you have. If you are just starting your lab, it is often easy to identify talented undergraduates who are anxious to work in your lab. Try to harness this energy to publish short reports that do not require personnel who are extensively trained. For example, undergraduates often excel at genetic analyses that require carefully crossing animals and recording phenotypes. The same talented students may struggle for months to make a simple recombinant clone. 2. Quality graduate students in a molecular field will take a long time (maybe 2 years) to adequately train. It may be easy to recruit these students to a new lab with an ambitious young investigator, but it is unrealistic to expect them to generate high quality data that is publishable within months. This is especially true when you consider that many incoming grad students must take a heavy course load, spend a year rotating through different labs, and perhaps instruct laboratory sessions for their graduate assistantships. Try to use startup resources to hire a highly qualified technician or postdoc to fill the initial voids. If possible, delay using valuable start-up funds on research assistantships for new students who have not yet proven themselves to be dedicated scientists. 3. Delay teaching responsibilities as much as possible. Most tier 1 institutions require you to teach one undergraduate course and one part of a team-taught graduate course per year. If you are asked by your chair or dean to teach more, remind them of this fact in today’s competitive world. Also, avoid those courses where you will have to do extensive revisions to modernize the class. Junior faculty are often given the thankless tasks of revising outdated curricular materials. In a research-oriented world there is no immediate payoff for you. Also, consider teaching lower-level classes at the 100-level. These “service” classes often have good resources (laboratory demonstrators, abundant TA help, etc), and require less prep time on your part. In addition, you will be able to identify talented undergraduates in their 1st or 2nd year. These are good students to recruit into your lab because they will be around long enough for your long hours of training to pay off in high-quality publishable data. 4. Learn the delicate art of being incompetent in service. It is very difficult to say no to a chair or dean. However, if you do an excellent job on every service committee that you are assigned, you will find yourself on many committees that will suck you dry. Identify
those that are important (grad student services) and those that are less so (space assessment). Spend little or no time on those committees that are unimportant to you. Learn to do a bad job so that you will not be asked to join more committees. 5. Find a schedule that works for you and learn the system to plan your time. If you like to work at night and are most productive then, realize that it will not be easy to convert to a morning person. Try to avoid scheduling important meeting in the morning if this is the case, but be careful because many administrators who have no clue about the pressures you face will try to schedule a 9:00 meeting to discuss the urgent need to clip the ivy on campus. Identify these pitfalls and try to avoid them. If you are constantly being asked to attend meaningless meetings and perform time-consuming tasks that break up your valuable research time and remind you of grade school, plead your case to your chair, dean, or program director. Try to protect large blocks of uninterrupted time in a day to do experiments and write papers and grants. 6. Write something every day. Force yourself to write or revise some part of a paper or grant each day. Even if it is only a paragraph, after one week you will have 7 paragraphs and a good rough draft of something.