The week on Nature Network: Friday 30 January
This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
It’s not exactly easy to get funded in science, writes Steffi Suhr at her blog Science Behind the Scenes. "Those who do are, to a large extent, lucky (on top of being hopefully very good). In this time of financial crisis, there will be even more scientists who have to consider ‘alternative careers’, and not all of them will do this by choice." Further discussion follows.
Jennifer Rohn "dallies with both sides" in a typically engaging post on her blog Mind the Gap about her experiences dealing with the journal office over a review article she is writing. Being a scientist, then an editor, and now a scientist again provides a particular perspective on the process that can be used to good advantage when asked to meet a publication deadline. Again characteristically for this blog, a large number of comments follow - many about the experience of submitting to, writing for, and being edited by, journals.
How useful is online networking to scientists, asks Richard Grant on The Scientist blog - no substitute for meeting in person? There is a stimulating discussion of these points, but here I highlight a comment by David Crotty on the question of time management." How much of your time as a scientist should be spent networking? It seems to me that it’s a minor part of the job, at least compared with doing the actual research and raising funding. Which is more important to you, doing the experiments, writing up the paper for Nature, getting a grant to pay your postdocs or chatting up other scientists? Networking is important, to be sure, but it’s meaningless without the actual work being done in the lab behind it.....Social networks for scientists and meet-ups like Science Online do a lovely job of putting together people who are really interested in science networking, people for whom this is a priority. ... For the average working scientist though, are they really going to spend that much time blogging when they could be running more experiments? Are they going to spend the time and money to come to a meeting on networking when they could instead go to a meeting in their field and do some actual networking? I’ll ask you and your commenters, what percentage of one’s working day/week should be spent on networking and doing things like blogging as compared to things like doing actual research, reading the literature, securing funding, faculty duties like committees, meeting with one’s students/postdocs/PI, teaching,etc.?"
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network's many blogs and forums
Science Online FriendFeed room.
