Also ask if there is potential for authorship via collaborations with other lab members.
It is unlikely that your own personal research project will reach the authorship stage (depends on how long you are there...and more honestly..how lucky you are), but if the lab is open to collaborations and you do a few experiments for someone who is wrapping up their project and starting to write a paper, you might be able to jump into a middle authorship position.
some labs are like that, some are not.
This is the best advice so far. Unfortunately, unless you are a grad student/post-doc entirely in charge of your own long-term projects, publishing depends more on luck than your skills. Things to look into if you really want to publish:
-How frequently the lab publishes
-How long it takes, on average, to complete the research for each publication. Some labs, people spend years for a single paper. Other labs have many members collaborate for each paper; they often churn out papers every few months.
-Whether there are grad students/post-docs near the end of their time in the lab who are really focusing on getting papers out. See if you can contribute to their projects. This is much more likely to get you published than your own project will.
It's good to ask yourself what you want out of the project. My most meaningful research project was one that was entirely independent, but I don't think I'll be getting any papers out of it soon. The project I did get a pub out of, I didn't do any of the intellectual work - I just lucked out and got a small project for a postdoc who was publishing a lot
😀
However, if this project doesn't look like it will be meaningful AND there's no way to collaborate with frequently-publishing people, stay away! If you don't learn anything OR get published, they're just using you.
