Publication During Summer Research

[Hope2008]

Say, if you did a summer undergrad research program, and you published something. Wouldn't you feel bad about it if you have done research for only a short amount of time? Is it possible to get something published during a summer research program? How efficient can I contribute to the meaningful research each professor is doing?

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[NickNaylor]

This actually happened to me. I did research in an immunology lab. My only working knowledge at that point was intro bio. I ended up performing my own experiments (to a certain extent) and analyzing the data on my own. One of the experiments was used in a paper the grad student was working on, so he and the PI gave me authorship. I felt guilty - especially considering the experiment I did took maybe a week - but he argued (and I ultimately agreed) that anything I should get credit for anything I did independently or semi-independently. I think that's how you have to look at it.

I wish I could give you the secret, but it's 99% luck with 1% ability.

 

[Naijaba]

I'm currently writing a paper about some programming I did this past summer. 40 hrs/week of coding for 2 months is actually quite a bit of work.

 

[Narmerguy]

I'm currently writing a paper about some programming I did this past summer. 40 hrs/week of coding for 2 months is actually quite a bit of work.

It certainly is and I did something close to that (all my research is computational) for 3 months but the thought of publishing after one summer seemed wrong to me (luckily for me, that moral dilemma never came up ). I remember one day while I was sitting in the lab that the lady next to me worked the same hours that I did that one summer only every day all year long and for crappier wages than I could probably earn tutoring despite being extremely intelligent and friendly. Yet still she only publishes once every few years.

Undergraduate publishing, despite the level of involvement, is largely a game of luck.

 

[NickNaylor]

It certainly is and I did something close to that (all my research is computational) for 3 months but the thought of publishing after one summer seemed wrong to me (luckily for me, that moral dilemma never came up ). I remember one day while I was sitting in the lab that the lady next to me worked the same hours that I did that one summer only every day all year long and for crappier wages than I could probably earn tutoring despite being extremely intelligent and friendly. Yet still she only publishes once every few years.

Undergraduate publishing, despite the level of involvement, is largely a game of luck.

 

[Beta Cell]

Double agreed

 

[TheFlashMD]

It's definitely luck-based. But my suggestion for picking a lab (from ones that you're already interested in) is to look how many papers the PI puts out in a given year and the size of the lab. I chose my lab bc the PI was consistently putting out 8-10 papers a year. I figured my chances were slightly better at getting published. Got a publication out of 2 months worth of work.

 

[randombetch]

Double agreed

Triple agree

 

[d1ony5u5]

It depends on what you said: how much can you contribute to the project in the time you are there.

Hypothetically, if you made a breakthrough and the project changed direction because of what you did (unlikely for a couple of months of work, I know), then you'd totally deserve authorship, and possibly 1st authorship. As I said, that case would be highly unlikely, specially in basic science research, but I suppose it is not impossible.

However, if you happen to contribute something that is key, even if the whole paper is not based on it, but it helps make the main argument, I'd say you do deserve authorship. Even if they use some of your data in the paper, for whatever purpose, you should get some authorship.

This is very relative, and in the world of research, highly variable among PI's. By luck, your PI might be incredibly nice and help you by putting you in the paper even if you did next to nothing tangible that was used, but showed interest and helped in less tangible ways (say setting up gels, finding references, etc...). This could happen. The opposite situation in which you did some experiments that suddenly became important for the project but got taken over and repeated by some other lab member (i.e., a postdoc), and it was that data that was finally included in the paper, is not unkown. In this case you could end up with nothing...

So, to summarize, it does depend on how nice your PI is to a small extent. Mostly, though, it will depend on how important is the data you generate, and whether or not it is used in the paper.

 

[tiedyeddog]

So, to summarize, it does depend on how nice your PI is to a small extent. Mostly, though, it will depend on how important is the data you generate, and whether or not it is used in the paper.

This is the sole determiner in 99.9% of cases. I've seen profs. give out authorships (albeit low positions, like 7th or 8th) for people who only did a couple generic PCRs....