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- December 16th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Five-million dollar question
The career path in the academic world is tough. After a demanding undergraduate period, you will enter graduate school and another period of at least four years of hard work lies ahead. After acquirin…
- December 8th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
How much time to spend on lecturing?
If you are an academic in a university, you almost certainly have to do a fair bit of teaching. So I thought it might be appropriate to give you a flavour of what that means in practice (just in case…
- December 6th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
How to justify text with MS Word
Depending on your discipline you write your scientific papers with either MS Word or you prepare them with a more professional text formatter like LaTeX. Besides scientific papers scientist produce al…
- December 3rd, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Critical article on the H-Index
The H-Index is ruling science these days. Recently an interesting article appeared in EuroPhysics News. I think this paper is of interest to all scientists, and not only to physicists: Europhysics New…
- November 28th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Stop color #666
I discovered something a few days ago that made me ask the question: Am I mad, or are all web designers out of their minds? The sun was shining in my office and I just could not read the information o…
- November 8th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Where are your error bars?
Experimental observations always are coming with uncertainties. Any measurement is an estimate of the real value, if indeed such an objective value exist. The uncertainty in the magnitude of a measure…
- October 10th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Social responsibility of scientists
This post is not about building the atomic bomb or chemical weapons. It is about being sensitive to a basic and yet very important ethical issue in producing and publishing science: Honesty. Publishin…
- September 19th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Social networking in science
Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the…
- September 10th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Editing Wikipedia
Nowadays Wikipedia is commonly used by scientists at every possible level to make quick and dirty check on the most various facts. It might be the exact form of a mathematical formula, the definition…
- September 8th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Can we refer to Wikipedia articles in a scientific paper?
I think Wikipedia articles should never be allowed as references in the primary scientific literature. Generation gap The young generation is on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The older generation, if…
- September 1st, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Publishing a comment on a paper
Successful scientists are driven by curiosity and by ego. Lay people find it disappointing when told that egos of individual scientists play a crucial role in the progress of science. But the same p…
- August 12th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Elsevier is going the wrong way
Summary Reed-Elsevier’s daughter Elsevier has introduced as an experiment a new way of publishing science. The “paper” is now basically a website, in which the idea of a linear text is a…
- August 4th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Niceness is inherent to being a good scientist
Even though a scientists needs to be rude, they also need to be nice. Science is a social enterprise and making friends is key to your career.
- July 19th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Sharing my slides
Abstract In this post I have tested several solutions for slide sharing. I found the free product of SlideBoom to be superior Introduction Scientific presentations are nowadays delivered in a form whe…
- June 24th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Last-minute preparations for a presentation
In an ideal world scientists prepare their conference talk way ahead of time. In a realistic world they prepare their talk one or two days before they get on the plane. Or they do it on the plane. In…
- June 16th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
The not-so-good student
Let’s take a (not so) hypothetical situation: assume you hold some kind of responsibility in your group. You might the the principal investigator, a researcher or even just an experienced post-d…
- May 26th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Who is the owner of scientific equipment?
The United States is the premier example of a country where people move, and indeed move all over the country, if by doing so they get a better job. This professional mobility also applies to scientis…
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Writing research proposals takes a lot of time
Writing a proposal takes about six weeks of full-time work. Therefore, having one rejected is very significant time waster especially considering how much other work an academic has to do.
- May 10th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Rudeness is inherent to being a scientist
Being rude is part and parcel of being a scientist: it’s the only way you can get good discussion going after talks and this is how science progresses. Sometimes, though, it is hard to stop and you…
- May 4th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Example presentation: Surviving science
My example presentation When discussing quality of presentations it helps a lot to discuss on the basis of example presentations. An example presentation is exactly what this post is about. Although I…
- May 3rd, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Papers
Papers is a program for Mac OS X that allows you to collect scientific papers in the form of PDFs and search web repositories such as Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, PubMed, arXiv, JSTOR, Google scholar…
- April 23rd, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Ideal vs. Real in your early career
In an ideal world you finish high school having a very clear idea on what you want to do in your life. Then you opt for the very best university in that field, you graduate with very high grades and t…
- April 22nd, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Which research group should a student join for his PhD?
Today I want to discuss some of the arguments that should play a role in the decision for students to send out an application to a particular principal investigator in a particular institute in, ver…
- April 17th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Who writes conference proceedings?
As a student in a traditional condensed matter physics group, I was taught for many years that for every conference you visit, you write an article for the proceedings. In my experience it was mainly…
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Hire at a normalised 1 only
The normalised h-index is often seen as a simple single-number indicator of the quality of a researcher. A normalised h-index of 1 or above is the desired target. Does this make sense? Should hires be…
- April 12th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Open discussion on science
Every scientific journal nowadays has a web-listing with a lot of useful links added to each abstract page, like citing and related articles. This features are among commodities for almost any web-pub…
- April 10th, 2009
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adlag has posted a new entry on: Survival Blog for Scientists
Will the reviewer of my grant proposal steal my ideas?
I describe the dilemma that a principal investigator is confronted with when writing a grant proposal. The most successful way is also the most dangerous: describing in great detail
