How to be a modern scientist by Jeffrey Leek

Author:Jeffrey Leek [Jeffrey Leek]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: leanpub.com
Published: 2016-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

In light of these three things, you have a couple of options about how to react if you write an interesting paper and people are discussing it - which they will certainly do (point 1), in a way that will likely make you uncomfortable (point 2), and faster than you’d expect (point 3). The first thing to keep in mind is that the internet wants you to “fight back” and wants to declare a “winner”. Reading about amicable disagreements doesn’t build audience. That is why there is reality TV. So there will be pressure for you to score points, be clever, be fast, and refute every point or be declared the loser. I have found from my own experience that is what I feel like doing too. I think that resisting this urge is both (a) very very hard and (b) the right thing to do. I find the best solution is to be proud of your work, but be humble, because no paper is perfect and that is ok. If you do the best you can , sensible people will acknowledge that.

I think these are the three ways to respond to rapid internet criticism of your work.

Option 1: Respond on internet time. This means if you publish a big paper that you think might be controversial you should block off a day or two to spend time on the internet responding. You should be ready to do new analysis quickly, be prepared to admit mistakes quickly if they exist, and you should be prepared to make it clear when there aren’t. You will need social media accounts and you should probably have a blog so you can post longer form responses. Github/Figshare accounts make it better for quickly sharing quantitative/new analyses. Again your goal is to avoid the personal and stick to facts, so I find that Twitter/Facebook are best for disseminating your more long form responses on blogs/Github/Figshare. If you are going to go this route you should try to respond to as many of the major criticisms as possible, but usually they cluster into one or two specific comments, which you can address all in one.

Option2 : Respond in academic time. You might have spent a year writing a paper to have people respond to it essentially instantaneously. Sometimes they will have good points, but they will rarely have carefully thought out arguments given the internet-speed response (although remember point 3 that good critiques can be faster than good papers). One approach is to collect all the feedback, ignore the pressure for an immediate response, and write a careful, scientific response which you can publish in a journal or in a fast outlet like f1000Research. I think this route can be the most scientific and productive if executed well. But this will be hard because people will treat that like “you didn’t have a good answer so you didn’t respond immediately”. The internet wants a quick winner/loser and that is terrible for science. Even if you choose

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.