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A lot of scientists hate presenting posters. Because more often than not, you stand near your carefully designed, full of great results placard, all alone, while there is a crowd gathered two posters down. There are some conclusions you could come to: You might think that the popular poster author’s work is brilliant – unlike…
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…
Every once in a while you are forced to abandon your comfort zone. You have to leave behind your comfortable territory of the lab bench or your desk in the reading room and stand up in front of a group of people. Then, you will be expected to deliver – the department seminar, a progress…
I met a final year PhD student once, who told me a sad story. His supervisor had a plausible idea that exercise reduces the chances of developing bowel cancer. To test the hypothesis, the student made a transgenic mouse with an increased incidence of bowel cancer and got the mice to run (or not run)…
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…
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…
You’ve added the final touches to your scientific manuscript / presentation / thesis. You’ve even run the spellchecker and grammar checker and everything seems perfect. There are no little green or red squiggles under the text. Now it’s ready to submit or present – or is it? What could be wrong? If you read my…
You should never completely rely on your spellchecker or grammar checker when writing your scientific manuscript, thesis, or presentation. I’ll talk more about exactly why in my next article, but first let’s have a bit of fun to get you warmed up – this is Bitesize Bio after all. Over the years, I have lovingly…
Despite obvious differences between the Korean professor-biotechnologist Hwang Woo-suk and German-born postdoc Jan Hendrik Schön, who used to work in the US on semiconductors, both of these scientists have something in common. Since Hwang Woo-suk’s and Schön’s groundbreaking articles were published in Nature and Science, nobody has been able to reproduce their results and the…
Of all the words you write to prepare a manuscript, too often the most important ten or so are left as an afterthought. You’ve slaved for weeks to finish your manuscript. Through draft and re-draft, you managed to shoehorn hundreds of man-hours of careful lab work into the word limit designed to be precisely 300…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that free cheese exists only in a mousetrap, and even there it’s free only to the end user. So it’s no wonder that the traditional system of most scientific publications through publishing houses seems to be fair. A publishing house (PH) employs editors as well as technical personnel to…
Every once in a while a big case of scientific fraud reaches public attention. Does that mean these well-known cases are exceptions, a few rotten apples…or might the rest of the fruit bowl also be affected? A major part of a scientist’s work is to secure funding for future research. Obtaining funding is strongly connected…
After years of hard work in the lab, having to sit down and write everything up can be a daunting and difficult task. Here are a few tips that I picked up during my thesis write-up that might help to make the process that little bit easier. Back up This is probably the advice most…
Let’s face it: when you said you read that paper, what you really meant was that you read the abstract. And that conference you went to? You probably scanned the abstracts of the posters instead of actually attending the poster session and chatting with the presenters. It’s a dirty little secret and a time-saving tool…
Most scientists I know approach the publication process with fear and trembling: the endless discussions about what journal to submit to, the agonized consideration of impact factors, comparing the all-important “time to first decision”, etc. Now that I’ve been working for a scientific publisher for a few months, I’m surprised at how many manuscripts still…
For scientists, Photoshop is a double-edged sword with a dagger nailed to the hilt. Its power in image processing is unrivalled; its ability to gut you with ethics violations is unmatched. An earlier article outlined how to keep your conscience clean when Photoshopping, here we offer four tips that will help walk with the Photoshop balancing…
The very idea of standing up and giving an oral presentation at a conference gives even the most confident of us butterflies. Additionally, I don’t know many scientists who find the thought of spending hours working on a powerpoint presentation exactly thrilling. However, there are many benefits to presenting your work at a conference. First…
It’s pretty likely you’ll have heard of impact factors, either through colleagues talking about them in the lab, or from a journal homepage advertising its latest score. Whilst impact factor is a relatively artificial value, it is something that journal editors, scientists and some funding agencies take seriously. It’s therefore important to understand what it…
Poster sessions can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare; it all comes down to how well you’ve prepared. In this article, I’ll discuss how to present your data in poster form, what to look out for at a poster session, and how to make the most out of a poster session…in short, how…
There are six little words that can instill both excitement and trepidation in the heart of a graduate student: “No one’s ever done this before.” What those words really mean, of course, is “No one’s ever published this before,” and you are either standing at the edge of a great discovery or a chasm of…
In today’s technology-driven world, we leave so many things to our electronic gadgets. Surprisingly, many life scientists try manically to control the appearance of their documents by hand with programs like MS Word. LaTeX takes this task off your hands by providing highly efficient algorithms to properly format your texts. The results are almost always…
Against the advice of journals and printers, many scientists use Microsoft Powerpoint to assemble posters and figures. You should consider upgrading to Adobe Illustrator! For generating scientific figures, Illustrator is more powerful and flexible than Powerpoint and is designed to produce print documents at high quality resolution. This means that journals will stop sending your…
Collecting the data took several years, writing the paper took several months, assembling the figures took several weeks, and converting those figures to PDFs took a frustratingly long day. You waited a month for the paper to come back from review, then two months re-doing experiments to satisfy a sadistic reviewer. Finally, your paper is…
They say scientists are highly skilled… and rightly so! While many people would think that we’re shy, retiring types who sit at our lab benches obsessing over teeny-weeny molecules, science (and particularly the process of obtaining a PhD) sets us up as highly skilled members of the workforce. I can hear you all groaning as…
You’ve spent a few years optimising your experiments and gathering data, and with good planning “The easier way to write a PhD thesis” it’s all come together and you’re ready to start writing it up. This is the last big challenge in getting your PhD finished, but it’s the part which can feel the most…
Thanks to the power of digital imaging software, faking data is a lot easier than doing real science. Clearly the honest majority of us would never deliberately distort the scientific record, but is it possible to stumble into trouble through sheer ignorance? Quite possibly. The line between innocent enhancement and deliberate fraud can be blurry…
We scientists are all so focused on getting our work published that many of us seem to forget something very important; that publication is just the beginning. After publication is when our manuscripts really have to do their essential work of communicating our science to our peers. If no-one reads the manuscript, we might as…
Understanding how to format your manuscript is an important skill for researchers and getting it right will make your PI very happy – they’ll spend less time proofreading and editing the document for you and it might just help get your manuscript through to peer review faster. When writing up your results for a…
As scientists, we become engrossed in our own scientific world. We focus on graduating, publishing a paper, or writing that grant application. Our labs, quite literally, become our world. Which is why we all know the glazed looks in the eyes of non-scientific people who had the misfortune of asking us what we do. As…
There’s no author who can’t benefit from an editor, or two, or ten. But first, an author needs to do everything they can to make the manuscript as good as they possibly can. You want your editor(s) to concentrate on what you’ve written, without the distraction of stupid stuff that you were just too lazy…
So my PhD hasn’t been easy but whose has? And if it wasn’t for some supportive colleagues and some great advice I wouldn’t be where I am today, or where I was last year! I found out about a great conference from a colleague, and their enthusiasm got me really interested when all I wanted…
You’ve done the experiments, gathered the data, interpreted the results, and now you’ve got something important to share with the scientific community. Congratulations! You’re writing a scientific paper. Once you’ve decided on which journal to submit your paper, you can get the guidelines from that journal. All that’s left is to write the paper. Your…
This is the final installment in a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here, for the second part, click here, and for the third, click here. After what has potentially (likely?) been years of data collection and a month or two of writing, re-writing, wailing and gnashing of teeth,…
This is part three of a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here, for the second part, click here. Once you have written the first draft and handed it off to your mentor, the editing process begins. Depending on the personalities involved, this could be a…
This is part two of a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here. You have been pounding away at your project, probably for a year… or two… or three… Anyhow, you now have a collection of figures that seem to tell quite a nice story,…
Most of us learn the art of writing papers on the job, often a painful process. In this four-part series, I’ll run you through my step-by-step approach to writing papers and, hopefully, help make the process of writing your first (or next) paper, a bit easier. As always, if you have any alternative advice or…
Presenting your work is a fantastic opportunity to get feedback on your project, demonstrate the significance of your results, and make the connections that will enhance your future career. And yet, how many incomprehensible lab meetings have we all sat through? How many seminars have you attended that left you feeling more confused than inspired?…
No-one would disagree with the goals of open access publishing: free access to scientific literature for all. If you work in an institution or small company that can’t afford to pay journal subscription fees you’ll know the problems that lack of access can cause. But publishing costs money, and someone has to pay those costs….
Really great presentation skills. Some people in science seem to have them, and some don’t. I am one of the don’ts. Sure, I can get up in front of people and talk when needed, but it won’t be a polished performance by any means. I can get my message across but my delivery is not…
Powerpoint is a double-edged sword. There’s no doubt it makes putting together a presentation easier. Those who worked with slides, overhead projector films and the like in the years B.P. (Before Powerpoint) will testify to that. But Powerpoint’s ease of use also makes it easy to abuse, and bullet points are the most abused feature…
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