• Question: why do you not always publish all your research?

    Asked by kimanddil to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Not all work is publishable. Sometimes that has to do with the sponsor not wanting it published. Other times it has to do with the work itself. Last excuse is time. I am guilty of this more than any of the other reasons/excuses. I have a backlog of at least four papers that I want to get out this summer. I find writing to be very challenging. It takes time to write a good paper.

      If something doesn’t work, it is much more difficult to publish than if it does work. My academic dream is to launch the International Journal of Useful Failures because we have so much to learn from the things that don’t work and there are not very many outlets for these things.

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi Kimanddil,

      I haven’t published anything yet but I would really like to!
      At the end of a PhD, we will have a hard copy of all our work and that is available to everyone 🙂

      I think scientists do like publishing their work and often do- if they got really good data and something new that they have discovered to write about. But sometimes the science magazines you want to publish your paper in will have a set of rules and guidelines to follow so it slows down the process- might mean you have to repeat some experiments because the results you have does not look good to them.

    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I haven’t published anything yet either, and Christine is right. It takes up a lot of time, during which I’d rather do actual research. And I support Christine’s idea of a Journal of Useful Failures. So much publishing in science is about making oneself look good, and therefore nobody ever even tries to publish anything that has gone wrong. Personally I am not so keen on publishing in science journals, because there only scientists read it. But science should be made available to everyone, and I think it’s much more important to publish in a way everyone can read it, to make exhibits, to make documentaries on the BBC and to run events like ‘I’m a Scientist Get me out of here’ 🙂

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      All of us here are under some pressure to publish our work – Christine and I are lecturers and have to do this (or we get told off by our bosses), while Jess, Nicolas and Zara are PhD students and have to produce ‘publishable quality’ work to get their PhD degree.

      I think most scientists would like to publish all the work they do. However, to get a scientific paper published it usually has to go through a process known as ‘peer review’ where your work gets sent to other scientists for them to look at and comment on (it is a bit like you marking your classmates homework!). Often the scientists reviewing our work will then ask us to change things or rerun experiments – and this all takes time.

      Sometimes the scientists doing the reviewing will reject our work outright – either they don’t think it is interesting enough, they don’t think it is novel enough, or they might find a mistake. If this happens then we have to go back and redo our work until we can get it up to the required standard! I guess this is a bit like you writing an essay and having to keep redoing it until you get an A* mark for it – it can be very frustrating!

      All this seems quite hard to get through (and it is!) but the reason for doing this review process is to make sure only the best and most novel scientific research gets published. Unfortunately this can mean that useful work that we do just can’t get published in any of the science journals (this has only happened to me a couple of times thankfully) 🙁

      It works both ways though – I have acted as a reviewer for other scientists’ work and have sometimes
      had to reject it if I spot a mistake (I try to avoid doing this if I can though as I know how frustrating it is!)

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi kimanddil!

      Good question! It’s important to publish your work – otherwise, there’s a good chance that other scientists will never read it!

      Publishing can be difficult though….

      1. First of all, your results have to be interesting… and not all of the work that you do will provide interesting results!

      2. Secondly, your work should be unique and find out something totally new… if I was to ask a journal if they’d publish my paper which shows that ‘dogs have brains’, the people at the journal would say ‘umm, we knew that ages ago! why would we publish that?!’ If, for the sake of argument though, I was to prove that dogs have brains made of marshmallow… then THAT’S publishable! because nobody has discovered that until now.

      3. Thirdly.. your results need to be comprehensive enough to write up a whole paper. Unless it’s something amazing, usually it’s quite difficult to publish a paper based on one, tiny result. Some papers though, called ‘Short Communications’ will let you publish small results.

      4. Before your paper can be published, it has to be examined by other scientists to check that it’s not a load of rubbish! This is called ‘peer review’. There are usually two reviewers, who will look at your work and make comments. They will then decide if it’s good enough to publish. Some journals (e.g. Nature) are very picky about which papers they accept!

      5. Finally, publishing papers takes time…. and most scientists are very busy. It can take a long time to write up your results into a paper-form. Journals are very fussy about how the paper is written – the font has to be a certain size, the pages have to be numbered a certain way, the references have to be accurate… it can take a long while before your final paper is ready to submit!

      I’ve only published one paper so far… I actually had one back recently, and the reviewers have given me lots of corrections to do. Hopefully once I’ve done the corrections, they’ll let me send the paper back and it will be published! 🙂

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