Tomorrow Dr. Isis heads back to MRU. Today she traveled into Major Metropolitan City to see Brother Isis and is chilling in his bachelor pad waiting for an acceptable hour to head out on the town. As an aside, Brother Isis has validated Dr. Isis's total hotness. Brother Isis works in a pretty high-profile, high-fashion joint. When Dr. Isis arrived in his part of MMC, she traveled to his place of employment to meet up and wait for him until he finished work. When he saw Dr. Isis he remarked, "Oh, thank God. If you had gotten all MRU-looking since the move I would have made you go sit in the cafe downstairs until I finished work. But, you're hot enough to come upstairs and meet the ladies in the office." I chuckled to myself as he told me this, thinking about our recent discussions of fashion and appearance in academia and thought of what many of you would say about his comment (trust me, I know how many of you would have reacted).
Figure 1: Had Dr. Isis shown up to Brother Isis's MMC corporate environment in mom jeans she would have apparently been sent to the coffee shop down the block and would have been made to walk home with him on opposing sides of the street.
So, Brother Isis took the totally MMC-level-hot Dr. Isis upstairs to his place of employment and set her into a cubicle where she could spend a few hours working while he finished up his day. And from hence comes the topic of today's post.
Settling into my borrowed cubicle, I tried to take advantage of the quiet and lack of internet (Dr. Isis could spend hours reading the letters from her loyal worshipers) and interruption to work on an article I am trying to finish. You see, Dr. Isis has been trying to finish this article she's working on for months. Like, seriously, months. Months. I am actually mortified by the amount of time I have spent working on this article and the very little publishable material I have to show for it. This article comes from a human research project Dr. Isis was involved with where Dr. Isis and her collaborators collected data on a large number of participants over a 3 year period. We had multiple endpoints, an obscene amount of data, and applied some very nice mathematical modeling to the data set. Dr. Isis is now challenged with taking this massive project and cleaving it into publishable units. What makes this task especially difficult is designing each paper so that it does not depend on unpublished data I intend to include in the next publication. I think this is a problem common in large research studies where many investigators add their own measurements and endpoints, especially when findings are shared and this reveals interesting but previously unanticipated results. The process of writing these papers (especially the current and largest) has been one of the most painful academic experiences ever. Although we generally outlined how papers would be published and discussed authorship prior to beginning the study, the fact that our findings were completely unexpected, and that we allowed other measurements to be made on some of our subpopulations that ended up supporting our bat-shit crazy findings, has made our initial outline pretty meaningless and has made telling the story more challenging. Attempts at keeping these publications from becoming terrible convoluted have been largely futile.
Figure 2: The results of Dr. Isis's 3 year study are the second craziest thing she's ever seen and it's all making here a little irrational.
Sitting and staring at the world's most painful publication made me itch to blog instead. Dr. Isis really loves to write (writing feeds the most creative parts of me in an incredibly gratifying way), she just doesn't want to write this particular publication and blogging sometimes offers a quick fix. You see, for Dr. Isis, blogging is like the quickie you have secretly with your partner while riding the train (or plane, if you're flying). It's quick, it's easy, it doesn't require a tremendous effort, but there is potentially a very large audience and immediate scandal to be had. On the other hand, writing this manuscript is requiring Dr. Isis to light some candles, pour the wine, put on a sexy little something, and seduce her data slowly in order for the result to be at all mutually satisfying. And the truth is, Dr. Isis has a bit of a headache and just wants to knock this bitch out and move on.
So, share with me below in the comments, little chickens. How do you decide what is a publishable unit as you look at data from an experiment you've conducted? Have you ever looked at your data and wanted to exclaim, "WTF?!?" And, if so, how did the way you structured the resultant publication differ from the way you structured your introductory rationale?
Comments
I could tell you exactly how to publish your data for maximum effect, but I'm too depressed by those photos of mom jeans, which look exactly like what I was wearing yesterday.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 21, 2008 3:09 PM
...
...continuing the 'anon' theme:
. . .and what a wonderful job you did photoshopping out the number plates under their chins.
...tom...
.
Posted by: ...tom... | November 21, 2008 3:49 PM
Dear Isis,
First, sometime ago I sent you an email asking you to provide me with an address so a can ship my book to you, but received no response yet.
Second, regarding the publication. If there is a way to publish the whole story in one paper, I discourage you from breaking it into the smallest publishable units. As to the unexpected results. My suggestion for you is to be truthful about your intial intent and expectations and to tell the story as it happened, including the unexpected. In reality, that is exactly what happens to many of us, but too frequently, we are tempted to appear smarter than we really are, pretending that the unexpected outcome was actually very expected and that we knew exactly what will happened long before we did the experiments. Most scientists tend to lie in this way, we know they lie because we have done it ourselves and yet, we continue doing it. You can put an end to this practice, especially considering your status as the hottest domestic and laboratory goddess.
Posted by: S. Rivlin | November 21, 2008 4:47 PM
Dearest Sol,
I have not forgotten you. I have been away this week taking care of something terribly important and my internet access is precarious. I shall respond to you upon my return.
Secondly, I fear your advice to be honest in the publication is admirable, but it won't get your shit in print. Dr. Isis has received reviews back from the editor telling her to rewrite a manuscript because the major finding was unintended but it was discovered without an initial clear hypothesis...it was a bit of a fluke. Journals don't care about flukes.
And now Dr. Isis needs to get on a plane.
Posted by: Isis the Scientist | November 21, 2008 4:51 PM
Absolutely key to determine the MPU, or minimum publishable unit- but that depends on how you choose specific pieces together for the story.
As for Sol- they want a story. Sometimes the way or the order in which the data happened doesn't make for a followable paper- leading to the important finding. Presenting a cohesive picture doesn't have to involve lying.
Posted by: drdrA | November 21, 2008 5:07 PM
That ranks among the absolute stupidest gibbering dumbfuck advice concerning manuscript preparation I have ever seen or heard. No one reading scientific literature qua scientific literature gives a flying fuck about the internal mental state of a scientist when she performs an experiment. All anyone cares about in this context is the conceptual relationship between the novel information revealed by the experiment and the existing conceptual landscape. Period.
The mental state of scientists when they perform experiments may be of great interest in other contexts, for example to sociologists or philosophers or to their mothers or something like that. But for scientists operating in a particular scientific arena reading the scientific literature in that arena, the internal state of the scientists performing experiments is nothing but a distraction from what they really want and need to know.
And the idea that it is "lying" to say, "In order to test the hypothesis that blah induces bleh, we generated a transgenic whoozis expressing fuckdribble in the bleezer", when what really happened was you thought, "I wonder what the fuck would happen if we expressed fuckdribble in the bleezer", represents as pathetically deficient an understanding of how scientific discourse works as it is possible to have.
Every single fucking scientist ever born knows that most experiments are performed to see what the fuck would happen if you performed some particular manipulation on some particular thing. And every scientist knows that "In order to..., we did..." is a *fiction*. But it is an exceedingly convenient and useful fiction, because it makes it much easier for the reader of a scientific paper to embed everything she is reading into the appropriate conceptual framework as she reads along.
Building suspense is for shitty novels and hackfuck horror movies. No scientist wants to read, "We decided to see what the fuck would happen if we expressed fuckdribble in the bleezer, and MUCH TO OUR SURPRISE WE FOUND (DRUM ROLL, PLEASE)...HOLY FUCKNOLY!! WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT? THE BLEH WENT KABLOOIE! So, then we scratched our asses and drank some Jameson down at the motherfucking bar, and realized that, HOLY FUCKNOLY!! THIS RESULT TESTS THE HYPOTHESIS THAT BLAH INDUCES BLEH!"
It's a waste of the intended readers' time and mental effort to write scientific papers that way. And a convenient and useful fiction that everyone understands to be a fiction, but that everyone agrees to be both convenient and useful is not a "lie".
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | November 21, 2008 8:20 PM
Comrade PhysioProf,
Your impassioned defense/elucidation of the convenient fiction that we all engage in is fucking brilliant.
Posted by: bean-mom | November 21, 2008 9:44 PM
Sol, you are PhysioProf's muse!!!
Posted by: DrugMonkey | November 21, 2008 10:47 PM
The next time I submit my little sumthin' sumthin' to an editor, I'm going to include a drum roll, please... cover letter, intro, summary, Methods, RESULTS!!, and AHHH AHHHH AHHHH **DISCUSSION**!!!!! proclaiming just how HOLY FUCKNOLY!!11!!!11!!11 MY SCIENCY FABULOUSNESS REALLY IS!!!ELEVENTYZILLION!!11!! .....AND.....put to music because that's how I throw it down in my lab...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpcUxwpOQ_A
Isis, just git 'er done. If it gets rejected by the tippy top, then start hacking it up into mini-bitches.
Posted by: JC | November 22, 2008 2:20 AM
DM,
I'm not sure about that. I think CPP simply had suffered blogging withdrawal after bulshitting his way for a whole week at the Neuroscience Annual Meeting in DC.
Posted by: S. Rivlin | November 22, 2008 10:28 AM
Huh! The least publishable unit debate combined with the let me sit on my data because I don't know WTF I should be doing with it at this moment - very familiar territory. Sometimes a dive back into some critical literature helps me reformulate ideas and go for a restructure. However, I'd kind of like advice on this one too. . .
Posted by: kiwi | November 22, 2008 12:09 PM
My advice is to present it, present it, present it. I usually find that in the process of having to tell the story out loud, and get feedback that way, I figure out what the written story will have to be. You can tell the long version first (50 minute seminar, warts and all), and then work your way down (30 minutes, 20 minutes).
When you can whittle it down to the 10-minute, mostly-punchline version, you're ready to write it up. Before that, you haven't thought about it enough.
I always say the hardest part of writing is making the decisions. After that, it's not *too* much harder than blogging (although I loved your analogy, it really is one of my secret pleasures).
I think if you're really stuck, you need to add constraints. Say for example that you can see how some parts could work in X journal, but other parts, not so much. If you're really stuck, you're better off carving out the easy pieces and publishing those, than sitting on the whole pile indefinitely.
In general, I agree with Sol that if you can find a way to keep it all together in one big paper, that's generally best. But sometimes I know it doesn't really work that way. Then you have to employ the CPP method of living in the rea(ly corrupt) world.
I personally dislike the "fictional hypothesis" method of writing, and try to keep it to a bare minimum. Personally, I think my original hypotheses are usually way smarter than anything I can come up with after the fact, but the "little white lies" are sometimes necessary. Like broccoli. Just to keep the writing going.
But there's nothing clumsier than something obviously held together after the fact with chewing gum and paper clips. Don't try to smash things together with a bunch of lies. It's always obvious when people do this, and nobody falls for it.
And while we don't really write it for them, it really confuses new students (though we really should, they're the scientists of tomorrow after all). Particularly ones capable of logical thinking. They can see through your bullshit, but then they think they must be stupid for not knowing why it's written in this totally incomprehensible way that makes no sense.
Just for the record, I'll say it again the punchline way so CPP really gets it:
"Because it's okay to lie in science" is NOT the slogan we should be toting.
Posted by: msphd | November 22, 2008 11:21 PM
Just for the record, I'll say it the punchline way so bitter angry dumbfucks really get it:
It's not "lying" to employ a rhetorical fiction that *everyone* knows is being used.
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | November 23, 2008 12:04 AM
Corollary: just because something is fictional doesn't mean it's lying.
Lying denotes trying to pull one over someone. But fiction is a mechanism by which people tell a story. The whole thing about communicating ideas relies, in part, in telling a good story. And everyone knows this. You don't collect data just to tell a good story. You tell a good story to fit your data with those that others have collected. If it truly doesn't fit and flies in the face of the existing dogma, then you have a REALLY good story. That would be probably the only time Sol's method of explaining the history and thought process *might* be useful. However, explaining one's thought processes is not as useful to science as explaining previous findings and coming up with better interpretations based on new data.
Posted by: gerund | November 23, 2008 12:15 PM
ping!
Posted by: DrugMonkey | November 23, 2008 3:15 PM
Wow PhysioProf, you have just called {insert all the derogatory terms in your post} my postdoc supervisor who advised I do just as Sol suggested about unexpected findings. For context, this person is the director of {insert prestigious neuroscience institute}, extremely well-funded and most important, a great scientist.
All I will say about the outcome was that it was positive and it was the best thing we could have done with this data.
I have also received e-mail about that paper and others from students, who thanked me for providing some picture of the mental state of the scientist...
And no, I don't write 40 page long anecdotal manuscripts. It is still possible within the pages of a normal length neuroscience article to explain the initial reasoning and how it changed in the light of data, it *can* be a good way to present results.
I really learn from and appreciate this blog but please no need for such black/white and angry views on things when clearly things are more grey...
Sometimes new shit just comes to light man...
Posted by: Ace | November 26, 2008 6:50 PM