Paper level of an undergraduate getting pubs?

[Shibbyboi182]

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Hello everyone!

So after about 1 2/3 years at my current research spot, I'm well under the impression that I won't be getting pubs, and I respectfully accept the wishes of my PI. Her blanket policy is not to give undergraduates any level of authorship. So I'm taking it upon myself to do my own investigation entirely independently of my current lab obligations in a different field, under the advisement of one of my former professors with a topic that's been on my mind since starting college: An Epidemiological approach to Beer Pong with regard to college campuses and tapering off herpes spreading and things like that.

What I don't know, and have had a hard time getting an idea of from previous posts, is the academic level of an undergraduate trying and possibly successfully getting published for such an indepedent thing. My experience with research papers from my classes has been the HARDCORE neuroscience ones that have more abbreviations and figures than actual words (you guys all know what I'm taking about) that are obviously 10 fold beyond the ability and resources of someone like myself. What am I to expect? What should I be aiming for? Any input is always greatly appreciated.

 

[slatermd]

what do you mean by academic level?

 

[Shibbyboi182]

I mean to say, how advanced/complicated/figure-laden? My apologies for any lack of clarity.

 

[Frazier]

Hello everyone!

So after about 1 2/3 years at my current research spot, I'm well under the impression that I won't be getting pubs, and I respectfully accept the wishes of my PI. Her blanket policy is not to give undergraduates any level of authorship. So I'm taking it upon myself to do my own investigation entirely independently of my current lab obligations in a different field, under the advisement of one of my former professors with a topic that's been on my mind since starting college: An Epidemiological approach to Beer Pong with regard to college campuses and tapering off herpes spreading and things like that.

What I don't know, and have had a hard time getting an idea of from previous posts, what is the academic level of an undergraduate trying and possibly successfully getting published for such an indepedent thing. My experience with research papers from my classes has been the HARDCORE neuroscience ones that have more abbreviations and figures than actual words (you guys all know what I'm taking about) that are obviously 10 fold beyond the ability and resources of someone like myself. What am I to expect? What should I be aiming for? Any input is always greatly appreciated.

 

[Shibbyboi182]

Sorry if you think I'm riding the troll train. Disregard, I guess

 

[vivalavie]

Sorry if you think I'm riding the troll train. Disregard, I guess

Yes, the papers you've seen represent all research papers. Peer-reviewed scientific journals do not hold different standards for undergraduates vs. PhDs, one of the reasons it's impressive to be published as an undergrad. That said, a paper in Nature is going to be held to a higher standard than Joe's Neuroscience Digest, but charts and figures are generally a good way of representing data without writing it all out, and for the amount of data you should have to publish they should offer an efficient and welcome alternative.

Look into the process of submitting articles, too, you'll need to do your research before you can do your research, so to speak.

 

[fizzgig]

you don't have to have 10 PDEs in your paper, or have developed everything totally de novo. you don't have to claim you invented flour and eggs AND made a new kind of cake. BUT, do your research forward. if you want to submit to a journal about whatever you're on about up there, first look up all the papers you can find where someone else has tried to do it to (if you think no one has attempted or studied anything similar ever you're probably not looking hard enough). read what they did. they have results, some good, some problems still are likely, there are different approaches in general, etc. you will need to justify to a journal that you've looked at the body of work out there and that either your way of doing things is altogether new, or you employ an established way of doing things and apply it to something new, etc. the journal will judge your work based on whether it contributes something that other people in your field will find useful.

i'm guessing im' not in your area bc your very weird topic seems like it wouldn't be experiment based, but the general process still holds.

 

[phltz]

Research doesn't need to involve a big lab with expensive equipment. You don't need much formal science education to get published. If you're creative and diligent, you ought to be able to come up with something.

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/168.full

 

[slatermd]

I will add to these opinions in about 6 hours. I know your breath will be bated until then. 😉

 

[CattleBruiser]

You will be judged by the quality of your work. If you do great work as an undergrad, you will get published. If you do crap work as a professor you will get published....in a 0.00001 impact factor journal (joke). You made a mistake joining a lab where the PI has an anti-undergrad publishing policy if your goal was to get published.

 

[h9i9j9]

You will be judged by the quality of your work. If you do great work as an undergrad, you will get published. If you do crap work as a professor you will get published....in a 0.00001 impact factor journal (joke). You made a mistake joining a lab where the PI has an anti-undergrad publishing policy if your goal was to get published.

I loled at your handle....stop playing sc and get back to work😛

at OP: I think the best idea would be to ask the old prof you're working with. He/She should know whether your research will deserve a publication.

 

[slatermd]

I mean to say, how advanced/complicated/figure-laden? My apologies for any lack of clarity.

Couple of things. First let me say that I encourage to work hard to make your own way. If what you're after is a noteworthy publication, I don't think this project you've mentioned is the most promising way for you to spend your time and energy.

First, any legitimate research on human subjects, even if you are just surveying them, requires approval of your experiment by a human subjects review board. It also requires informed consent from your participants. Hold this thought, we'll come back to it.

In terms of figures, for your experiment to be worth publishing, you would have to be able to say decisively, "there is a statistically significant relationship between beer pong and spread of herpes" or "the stats do not bear out any kind of significant relationship between beer pong and herpes" (or whatever hypothesis it is that you want to test). At the very least you need to be able to run correlations and/or linear regression analyses, and give corresponding p-values (or a comparable metric for statistical significance).

You also need to be able to control for/eliminate confounding variables. So if oral herpes is spreading like wildfire among people who are playing beer pong, how do you know it isn't from making out? Or oral sex?

(Lately the medical community has been discussing that men are contracting HPV in their throats from oral sex...see if you can PubMed an article or two)

Since your idea is more of a social science approach to epidemiology, the statistics become more important. Otherwise it is just you theorizing about how certain behaviors do/don't lead to certain disease outcomes. So, do you feel like you could design an experiment/survey that tests your hypothesis and also controls for confounding variables? Do you think that you could survey a large enough sample of people to get reliable data? Do you think you could write a proposal for this experiment that would be accepted by a review board? Assuming you can get this far, and you are able to successfully collect and analyze a decent chunk of data, you still might not find anything significant. In which case your only chance at a publication is saying "I did this experiment and it looks like there's no relationship between beer pong and herpes."

This could work out for you, but personally I would go back to the drawing board. It seems like kind of a long shot, and I bet you could come up with a better idea after some sustained thinking.

 

[hopefuldoc97239]

Research doesn't need to involve a big lab with expensive equipment. You don't need much formal science education to get published. If you're creative and diligent, you ought to be able to come up with something.

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/168.full

I agree. On rare occasions you can even get a light-hearted article accepted. Look up "The case of the disappearing teaspoons..." It was published in the British Medical Journal... impact factor 13.66 for those who care!

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My advice: Find a psychology or health sciences professor at your school with an interest in public health, medical psychology, or something along those lines. You could choose a biology professor too, but they might not like the social-science approach that I'm about to suggest. Anyway, find someone who's game.

Next: Do some paper-based survey/questionnaire type research about health, healthcare, or medicine. Survey type research is the easiest to get past your IRB, but if you pick your topic right then it will still look good on your med school applications.

Finally: Try to publish it. Get advice from your professor on what journals would be appropriate. If it gets rejected, then aim lower and submit to another journal.

But also (from the very beginning) try to figure out a good conference to take your research to. If your results aren't ready for publication, you can still present them at a meeting. Medical researchers (and therefore people on the admissions committee at a medical school) understand that not all research yields publishable data, and that doesn't mean it was a bad idea or that you didn't work your butt off. If you take your research to a conference it's going to look almost as cool as a publication, and it will look better than nothing!