Tag Archives: tips

Productivity for researchers: 9 brilliant tips

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Are you great at procrastinating? Do you wish you could get more done in a week, or just do things ‘better?’ Here are some helpful hints and tips for your research workflow!

By Stacy Konkiel

At Altmetric, we provide actionable insights into the online engagement surrounding published research. In early 2017 we asked researchers to share their favorite productivity tips and tricks for tackling their to-do lists, in the hope picking up some ideas ourselves and sharing their wisdom with the wider community. Here are some of their top recommendations.

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Scientific presentations: A cheat sheet

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Scientific culture and insufficient training in public speaking leads to dull, text-heavy talks. Put more effort into presentations, say Andrew Gaudet and Laura Fonken

As postdocs with a combined 20 years of experience in neuroscience research, we’ve attended hundreds of talks and delivered dozens of presentations. We’ve realized it is imperative to perform your best every time you present — whether at a weekly meeting or at a job interview.

Your preparation and organization will help the audience understand your main points, and this professionalism will boost your reputation, which could lead to further opportunities. Ultimately, a presentation is one of the ways of influencing how others perceive your science and your competence. Here, we’ve put together some ideas for creating polished presentations.

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The importance of broadening science communication

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Though well-equipped with scientific training and expertise, scientists need to be aware of the resources available to help them share their work with a public audience, learns Aliyah Weinstein.

Recently, more and more emphasis has been put on scientists to communicate their research to public audiences. National scientific organizations such as the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the American Society for Cell Biology encourage their members to reach beyond the bench, and many blogs help scientists describe their research to wider audiences. At the University of Pittsburgh, where I’m working on my PhD, graduate student and postdoc organizations on campus share their excitement about science with the public through partnerships with local museums and school districts.

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Peer-review tips for young researchers

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Cross-posted from Nature Middle East’s House of Wisdom blog

During the Euroscience Open Forum 2012 (ESOF 2012) which opened in Dublin yesterday, Alaa Ibrahim, an astrophysicist from the American University in Cairo, Egypt, gave his advice to young researchers starting their research career on how to handle the peer reviewing process. Here is a summary of his tips:

  1. Understand that the peer reviewing process is an essential part of proper science. It gives credibility to your work and acts as an initial endorsement of your work by the science community.
  2. Start early. You now have an option to be involved in undergraduate research during graduate school. This is useful to give you a feel for the peer review process and to understand and appreciate how it works.
  3. Be part of the research community in your particular discipline. Go to meetings and conferences and get engaged with the latest research taking place. Read papers and see how they are written to get a feel for the quality of published, peer-reviewed work.
  4. Get to know the leading researchers in your field. These are likely to be your editors and reviewers. They are usually experts so don’t be shy to ask them for their advice and even mentorship when you are still starting your research career.
  5. Present your research results at meetings and solicit feedback from senior researchers and peers before you go for publishing. Their advice could help improve your work to make it publishable before you submit (and possibly get refused)
  6. Once you have a good network of contacts among senior researchers in your field, circulate your paper among them for feedback and input before submitting your manuscript for review.

For three more top tips and other peer-review advice for early-career scientists, continue reading on the House of Wisdom blog.