Posted on behalf of the Rookie Rocky
In the world of marketing, brands are arguably as valuable as anything else. The idea is that a distinguished brand promises the quality of service or goods that can meet the customers’ expectations.
In the world of scientific research, I wonder if it’s pretty much the same. Recently, I have been struggling to get a paper published, and it seems to take more effort to satisfy the reviewers and editors than ever before, even though I wrote the paper in exactly same way as I have for many years. The message I get is: now you can breeze through the process no more. The reviewers question everything and the editors seem to be a lot more cautious about their concerns.
As a result, I’ve started wondering whether I got an easy ride under the established “brands” of my PhD and Post-Doc supervisors. Would my work have been published had I worked for myself or someone just like me – a newly independent academic? To qualify this question, I think almost all reviewers and editors, of course including those excellent ones at Nature journals, are fair. They do not judge the merit of a manuscript by whether a novice or a Nobel laureate generated it. Good papers are good no matter who wrote it, which is something I really like about science. The trick comes when a paper is not that good, nor that bad – that’s when the marketing effects may factor in. An established scientist would certainly have a strong publishing record that backs his/her credibility, which is something that rookies have to earn. It is just like we founded a start-up company, and the first thing we need to do is to familiarize potential customers with our new brand. Continuing the analogy, it is quite reasonable that people would choose to buy Coke or Pepsi rather than Rocky-Cola. That is not something we should complain about. In some ways, I feel this is rather nice as it will provide a window to aspire to higher standards: Hopefully one day I will have my own brand that compares with those of scientists I admire, and Rocky-Cola will be something that people really enjoy.
At least you are trying to communicate with people who understand what evidence is and who have a taste for abstract concepts. Physicians have a much harder job, trying to communicate with everyone (as everyone eventually gets injured or sick). We have failed miserably. Consider the popularity of alternative medicine, chiropractic, ‘natural vitamins’, the success of the idea that vaccines cause autism etc. etc. Part of the reason is that medical knowledge is much less complete, the concepts less solid. Think about the shifts in dietary advice to the populace in the past 40 years. That’s why it’s so nice to be back reading chemistry and molecular biology after 38 years in the medical trenches. I don’t have to try to do this any more.
Strange to say but not everyone likes, or is interested in, chemistry, but everyone is vitally interested in their own illness, yet scientific medicine has largely failed to communicate very much, and not just with the uneducated. The Wall Street Journal has long railed against the controlled clinical trial.
enantiotopicity can be explained to non-chemists in terms they understand.
A respected physics group demands optical rotation measures mass distribution chirality. It doesn’t, not even in solution. Solid state is worse. Silver thiogallate, AgGaS_2 with non-polar achiral tetragonal space group I-42d (#122), has immense optical rotatory power: 522°/millimeter along 100 at 497.4 nm. ([alpha]_D is measured through a decimeter, 100X longer path.)
When two identical (superposable) right hands are clasped a perfectly achiral solid sphere can result – La Coupe du Roi (using an apple). Ditto left hands, of course.
If you cannot explain it with a cocktail napkin and a swizzle stick, don’t. (Put an old 360K floppy onto a cocktail napkin).
Ha! I have it easy there.
Between “I analyze groundwater!” and “I make new materials for solar cells and flat-screen displays!”…the basic explanations are simple. As an added bonus, my answers score cool points with most people who have an environmental or gadget-fiend bent.
Heh, I can just say “I’m studying chemistry”. People tend to just look at me as though I’m insane. 😉 They never ask for details unless I mention doing research, in which case there’s a higher probability that they’ll ask. However, that’s in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, meaning I first have to explain what the field even is…
It’s interesting to think about the depth of chemical knowledge out there, and ways to bring people up to speed. I’ve been trying to write about chemistry for the last few years at CultureOfChemistry, and the comments from both chemists and others are an interesting window into the knowledge base of both groups.
Try doing this as a mathematician! Even most other scientists’ math ends where “real math” begins. If you say you do “analysis” at a cocktail party – and don’t mean Jungian – does anyone have a clue? My better half is a math guy and enjoys trying to explain what he does…but it’s a long way up.
This brings to mind a story which shall forever live in infamy as long as I have Richie as a friend. We were both graduate students at a small conference, and his advisor allowed him to give the talk, since it was entirely on his work. During the question and answer session, my advisor asked him whether the enzyme he had purified was catalytic. His response? That it was “somewhat catalytic”. I never miss the opportunity to remind him of that…