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• W2894031997 abstract "Planning a science career was always a rocky road, and it seems particularly tough at the moment. The scientific press constantly features stories detailing bias and unfairness. Social media is replete with short stories concerning the unhappiness of young researchers. Clearly, all is not well. Two main themes underpin the feeling of dissatisfaction with the current state of careers: first, there are simply not enough jobs for the number of excellent scientists who need them, and, second, nobody is quite sure what separates the fortunate ones, who get through to the next stage and keep their careers alive, from the unfortunate. Is it high-impact papers, mentorship, connections, or presentation? Or simply luck? Corey Bradshaw’s The Effective Scientist addresses the second question. While the book doesn’t define the secret of success, it does make suggestions on every aspect of how to improve. As the title implies, the unspoken logic is that, if you are effective enough, you will be the one who succeeds and is rewarded with a career. The connection between efficiency and success is justified by the author’s (substantial) success in grants won and conferences chaired. It’s hard to fault either the logic or the justification, though as a complete prescription it’s a little limited. The book itself is a curious assembly. The secret is in the title: it’s all about ‘effectiveness’. If you are writing a paper, what should and shouldn’t you write? How can you ensure that you get enough recreation? What is the best way to respond when Current Biology asks you to review another researcher’s work? Bradshaw serves up a treasure trove of suggestions, nuggets of disapproval, and lists of priorities. They’re mostly excellent. Progressing scientists benefit from a wide range of sources of advice, but few channels have as much detail or prescriptions as precise. Sections include how to publish, how to manage a lab, how to keep track of data, and how to get the most out of trips and conferences — and above all how to make people listen to you. All of these sections are full of the same density of advice and caveats — and, to be sure, if you can keep track of them all, you will be a more effective scientist. One thing that the book doesn’t offer much is narrative structure. Within a few pages of opening the book, for instance, the reader is confronted with detailed examples of bad writing (such as using ‘less’ when you should say ‘fewer’; I’m pleased to report I knew that one). This would not be a writing style that I suggest: my personal advice to trainees (and anyone else who’ll listen) is that narrative is everything, and you must never talk about specifics until you’ve cascaded through the generalities and set the scene. That’s not this book’s style. It’s no unstructured pile, but one gets the opinion that this author values precision in small things ahead of global statements and generalities. Indeed, with its penchant for facts and lists, the text conveys a strong sense of the author’s personality; I imagine an avuncular but detail-obsessed professor with an almost military desire to improve his charges with a thousand small tweaks (I hope to meet him at a conference one day and see if the human matches the text; Dr Bradshaw, I’ll buy the first round…). The ‘how to be a scientist’ genre contains some heavy-hitting precedents. Perhaps the most notable are Advice to a Young Scientist by Nobel Laureate and immunologist Peter Medawar and Letters to a Young Scientist by the naturalist E.O. Wilson. There are also some reprehensible examples. During my PhD in the 1980s, I was appalled by a book that used to be left around the library, entitled Winning the Games Scientists Play. I vaguely remember its thread being purely Machiavellian — how to chair a committee so its conclusions are favourable to you, for example. I still remember feeling at the time that, if these were the rules, then I needed to play a different game; fortunately, my experience since is that plenty of scientists succeed enough by playing nicely. The Medawar and Wilson books are completely different animals: both are full of optimism, enthusiasm, and above all belief in science as an essential mixture of both truth and art. Medawar begins by addressing the question “how can I tell if I am cut out to be a scientific research worker?”, and then he goes on to “what shall I do research on?” before broaching any details of experiments or writing. This is to say, his view of science begins with the human in the lab coat, followed by the interest and creativity of the problem, before details enter the scene. Similarly, Wilson demands first passion and then an aptitude for solving problems before knuckling down (he also suggests that training in mathematics is not essential, a stance that has cost him some grief but certainly foreshadows modern biology). His take on bureaucracy — avoid it for as long as you can — is wonderful advice, if hard to follow in our committee-obsessed age. These two tomes and Bradshaw’s work seem to come from different universes. The older books fixate on the process of discovering things and the excitement of the new, while the newer one presents science in terms of some kind of commodity: it’s presumed everyone has some, and it’s important that you use it wisely and invest it, but it is a curiously non-specific and bloodless discipline. Indeed, the later book could easily be talking about a different academic field, or even a publishing business, with relatively few changes required. As far as I can see, non-scientists — historians and wordsmiths — would gain as much as scientists from reading it because the advice is as excellent as it is general, but it makes me wonder if the scarcity of resources is turning science from an extroverted and collaborative pursuit to a fussy and inward-looking argument. This leads to the aspect of this book that troubles me. It puts me in mind of a medical textbook on orgasms: reliable and authoritative, but missing the real reasons why people want to have them. I don’t believe very many people take up science, or relocate their lives to start PhDs, in order to be effective. To be sure, you need effectiveness to get anywhere, but passion and inquiry are essential to success at many levels. If you really believe you can discover something new, and that your findings will make some kind of a difference, then your science will be more important and more interesting. Plus, getting up in the morning to change the world is much easier than getting up for another eight-plus hours of efficient behaviour. My advice is, therefore, if you are full of ideas and obsessive about science but you don’t know how to get everything done well, then The Effective Scientist is the book for you. If you’re starting in science and you want to know what matters, read Wilson and Medawar, and get the belief and the field sorted out before the nitty-gritty. Effectiveness is important, but the science that matters needs passion." @default.
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• W2894031997 title "Science careers — improve your effectiveness but keep your passion" @default.
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