Why scientists should communicate hope whilst avoiding hype
“Exciting new line of attack for aggressive breast cancer” … Read more
The million-dollar question every scientist should be asking
I recently had a phone call with a frustrated colleague looking for some advice. She had two key pressure points, both common in the field of science communication. Read more
How to mentor undergraduates as a postgraduate, and why it’s important
There’s a difference between mentoring and doling out to-do lists. This is something I’ve learned over the past year, my first as a mentor. Mentoring undergrads became part of my job only recently – in the past, research came first. Most advisors value research outcomes over mentoring, and departments certainly place more value on publications. Before this past year, I was used to just a single undergrad working in my lab, and I thought of them as worker bees, not as future colleagues. Read more
Last-author spot tough to nail for scientists who are not white or male
The analysis—which covered 486,644 biomedical articles with two to nine authors published between 1946 and 2009—found that female, black and Hispanic authors were less likely than were white men to hold prestigious last-author spots. And while all scientists tended to land more last-author spots as their careers went on, that trend was slower for women and minorities. “There’s a lack of progression for those groups,” says Bruce Weinberg, a co-author of the study and an economist at Ohio State University in Columbus. Read more
More to science: working as a Communities Manager
This piece was originally published on the BioMed Central blog network, part of Springer Nature. Read more
Put your email inbox on a low-spam diet
Mark Clemons has published over 250 papers over the past two-plus decades, nearly all of them involving breast cancer. So imagine his surprise when Clemons, a medical oncologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, received a flattering email inviting him to submit his work to, of all places, a journal focusing on yoga research. Read more
Communicating your research: get it right, do it often. It really matters.
The typical scientist, and particularly the typical early-career scientist, is so busy focusing on their research and their outputs (and grant applications and publishing and more grant applications and more publishing) that they don’t give priority to communicating their research, or even their successes, outside of that framework. Read more
Taking the stage: #ScientistAtWork photo competition 2018
This picture of Garry Cooper was taken at as he spoke to a crowd of almost 60,000 scientists and supporters, during the March for Science on April 22 2017. It was submitted to Naturejobs as part of the #ScientistAtWork 2018 photo competition. Cooper tells Rebecca Wild about the story behind the picture. Read more
How useful are your publications?
A recent Universities UK report found that 37% of UK-authored articles are freely available immediately, compared with 25% globally, and most UK articles can be accessed 12 months after publication through open access green and gold schemes. Around half of research articles searched for online are open access, and many funders now require research to be published in an open access journal. Read more