How to get first authorships?

norcalguy
Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:41:12 +0000

The strategy is to look up previous publications of the PI and see how often he publishes. I’ve been in labs that publish once every 2-3 years. I’ve also been in labs that publish a couple of times a year. Some labs like to publish even when they don’t have anything substantial.

If your first concern is how to get published with the least amount of work, then just do what I said above. Personally, I find publication hollow and empty when you haven’t earned it. I’ve been told by multiple interviewers how disappointed they are when they find an applicant can’t even speak intelligibly about research they had published. Most likely this is because they came into a lab, spent 2 months cleaning up a project, put their name as 4th author or something, and got a publication.

Notice that very little of this actually depends on the student. Most research fellowsI know work hard (they’re willing to work nights/weekends). But they don’t design the experiments or anything (the PI does that) so publication is really not an indicator of effort or knowledge or intelligence. It is pretty much dependent on the lab and on your luck in obtaining results. In my lab, I’m in charge of knocking out amino acids one by one and then seeing the change in the protein. The protein is approx. 2500 amino acids big. I could conceivably knock out amino acid after amino acid after amino acid without it affecting the protein. Or on my second try, I could find the critical amino acid that controls the regulatory site of the protein and voila! a publication.