Tips for Choosing Your Lab Notebook Pen (and Why You Need to Choose Carefully)

Tips for Choosing Your Lab Notebook Pen (and Why You Need to Choose Carefully)

Keeping a meticulous lab record of your experiments is a necessity. And it’s drilled into us to back up our computers, including backups stored in different locations to ensure vital records don’t get lost. But how do we protect the hard copy information in our lab books? You may not have given much thought previously…

Scientific Illustrations Part II: Molecular Graphics and Animation

Scientific Illustrations Part II: Molecular Graphics and Animation

How do you explain to your friends and family what you have you’ve been working on all this time? Conveying the true wonder and intricacy of your work to the layperson can be tricky. They won’t be familiar with the lingo, and they might not immediately know how to interpret scientific graphs and figures. You…

Scientific Illustrations Part I: Schematics and Cartoons

Scientific Illustrations Part I: Schematics and Cartoons

Biologists have a long tradition of drawing specimens as a form of data collection before the invention of the camera. The ability to present information in the form of illustrations is an important but often understated skill in a scientist’s toolkit. Scientific illustrations in publications run the gamut from schematics, 3D models, cartoons, and even…

Intellectual Property: How not to shoot yourself in the foot.

Intellectual Property: How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot

So you’ve discovered the Holy Grail all life scientists in your field are searching for – congratulations! The dollar signs start appearing and you realize that there is a huge scope for commercializing your research. But before you can actually collect the rewards, you need to have been thinking tactically about how to protect your…

Assertive Slide Titles to Guide Your Presentation

When I first learned how to design scientific presentations, I kept hearing the same advice from well-intentioned mentors: “Make sure your presentation tells a story!” they’d say. I understood what they meant in principle, but I had difficulty implementing this advice in my own presentations. In this article, I’m going to share a simple way…

Talk

How to Give an Incredible Scientific Talk

Committee meeting approaching? 10 minute department seminar? Lab meeting? Fear not! My adviser has insulted my presentations so regularly, that I’ve finally learned some things. Hopefully, I can head your adviser off at the pass, and give you some tips on crafting an incredible talk. What’s the Occasion? Who’s Your Audience? This is arguably the most important…

scientific cyber fraud

Scientific Cyber Fraud: Nobody Move—We’re Taking Over This Journal!

Keeping up to date with the scientific literature is a large part of the work-load of any researcher. Love it or loathe it, this means of sharing research findings with the larger scientific community is still the way in which most of us inform ourselves of the latest findings in our fields of research, or…

|

How to Make a Good Graphical Abstract

Presenting science concisely poses many challenges: How do you say enough without saying too much? Are you capturing the main points? Does this research paper abstract attract the reader’s attention and make them want to read your paper? That last question is the most important and the most overlooked one. And to address it, many…

public

The Art of Bridging the Gap between Scientists and the Public

Communicating your science to a lay audience is different than giving a talk to other scientists. An urban legend says that when Michael Faraday verified the relationship between electricity and magnetism, he was asked to present his evidence to the prime minister of England. So, he had his coils arranged and he just moved a…

corresponding author

How to be an Effective Corresponding Author

Writing manuscripts is an integral part of research. And being listed as an author on a published article is the most cherished dream of a research scholar/ graduate student. However, what about the corresponding author role? During your Ph.D tenure, you will be encouraged to compile your data and write manuscripts based on your results….

thesis writing

Top 5 Tips for Maintaining Your Sanity During Thesis Writing

For many scientists the most intimidating aspect of undertaking a PhD isn’t the long hours in the lab or the uncertain nature of the job length in academia that follows it. It’s the thought of attempting to write up 4+ years of work into a single cohesive thesis! The thesis writing process can vary greatly…

great talk

How to Give a Great Scientific Talk and Engage Your Audience

We have all been to awful talks—hours of slides crammed with data, given by presenters who assume you know as much as they do. But hopefully you’ve also seen a great scientific talk. A talk in which you’re walked through a story, eagerly anticipating each question and data point, until you finally reach a conclusion…

The Do’s and Don’ts of Making and Presenting a Scientific Poster

The Do’s and Don’ts of Making and Presenting a Scientific Poster

At a conference, a poster can be a great tool for drawing people into conversation. Not only do you have something to break the ice with, you can also get really useful feedback from a completely different perspective! To make sure you get the most out of your poster time it’s important to have a…

What You Should Know About Intellectual Property Rights

What You Should Know About Intellectual Property Rights

Innovation is the essence of research and it is the fuel that keeps the research industry going. If it were not for inventions, the field of scientific research would have dropped dead long ago. However, simply innovating something is not sufficient. It is not the end of the road, but the beginning of it. Therefore,…

Five Simple Tips to Break Your Dissertation up into Manageable Parts

Five Simple Tips to Break Your Dissertation up into Manageable Parts

You’ve got an advisor, you’re done with classes, you’ve finally passed your qualifying exams and your dissertation project is underway. Life is looking good, but it’s not too early to start thinking about how to tackle your dissertation. Chances are this is the biggest writing project you have ever undertaken, so breaking it up into…

A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words – Making Diagrams Simple

A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words – Making Diagrams Simple

Figures play a central role in science not just as a way of displaying results, although this is obviously important, but also as a way of getting across complicated theories and processes in a relatively simple and direct manner.  I’m a firm believe in the power of putting ideas into diagrams and spent a considerable…

Alternatives to presenting your science with Powerpoint

Alternatives to presenting your science with Powerpoint

I was shocked recently at a seminar called  “Writing with style” by the Manchester University writer-in-residence, Chris Simms. He opened by saying that he has never done a presentation using Powerpoint in his life. What? Surely biologists and PowerPoint presentations (PPT) go together like biologists and white lab coats. They teach you to make PPTs…

Scientific manuscripts: what constitutes authorship?

Scientific manuscripts: what constitutes authorship?

With ever increasing demands on researchers to publish, sometimes it feels like the whole world and their dog are vying for authorship on your latest manuscript. Appropriate and fair representation of those that contributed to sample collection, lab experiments and preparation of the manuscript is essential but can often be complex. So in this article…