Publication?

[thehappydoctor]

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Hello everyone!

Im working at research lab this summer but don't have a "project" per se....theres small mini-projects I do (1-2 a week). SO HOW IN THE WORLD WILL I GET A PUBLICATION EVER? how do i bring this up to my mentor?

 

[RocketSurgeon]

Its unlikely that you will get a publication over the summer. You need to have significant background in your research field to do something meaningful in such a short time. You can only publish when youve done something meaningful.

In addition, take your time to learn what you are doing learn the basics before chasing that publication.

 

[carnelian]

Hello everyone!

Im working at research lab this summer but don't have a "project" per se....theres small mini-projects I do (1-2 a week). SO HOW IN THE WORLD WILL I GET A PUBLICATION EVER? how do i bring this up to my mentor?

Ask your mentor if you can get an independent project. It's typical to start out at a lab assisting others and doing small mini-projects to learn techniques, but eventually you should get your own. This is assuming you're doing the lab for more than just one summer. The publication will come naturally after you put in the work (ie. most likely not this summer).

 

[thehappydoctor]

Its unlikely that you will get a publication over the summer. You need to have significant background in your research field to do something meaningful in such a short time. You can only publish when youve done something meaningful.

In addition, take your time to learn what you are doing learn the basics before chasing that publication.

Oh, trust me I've totally committed myself to this research area and will most likely be working with it when I'm in medicine too...but to get there a publication would be helpful...

To anyone who has experience with publication and a not a particularly enterprising PI...how did you accomplish this?

 

[sector9]

How long do you plan to work in this lab?

 

[thehappydoctor]

Ask your mentor if you can get an independent project. It's typical to start out at a lab assisting others and doing small mini-projects to learn techniques, but eventually you should get your own. This is assuming you're doing the lab for more than just one summer. The publication will come naturally after you put in the work (ie. most likely not this summer).

Hmmm, I am 99 percent sure I will be here next summer too so perhaps I will ask them next year...THANKS! helpful responses are the best!

 

[thehappydoctor]

How long do you plan to work in this lab?

all the summers of my undergrad so this summer plus 2-3 more summers

 

[DietSexy5000]

It's hard to get a publication if you're only working for 3 months at a time with 9 months off in between. To be fair, there are lots of other factors involved in publishing in a peer reviewed journal beyond making a novel discovery. The politics of your lab, who gets first authorship, the willingness of the PI to publish at all, which journals PI is willing to publish into, how frequently he/she is willing to publish, etc. To give you a concrete example, I've been in the same lab for 3 years (school year and summer) and my PI only publishes once a year. He's HHMI and National Academy of Science so he will not publish anything outside of Nature, Cell, JBC, etc. I accepted I'll never have my own paper in this lab barring a miracle even though I've produced novel, useful data. Just my $.02 to keep in mind if you're dead set on being published.

 

[thehappydoctor]

It's hard to get a publication if you're only working for 3 months at a time with 9 months off in between. To be fair, there are lots of other factors involved in publishing in a peer reviewed journal beyond making a novel discovery. The politics of your lab, who gets first authorship, the willingness of the PI to publish at all, which journals PI is willing to publish into, how frequently he/she is willing to publish, etc. To give you a concrete example, I've been in the same lab for 3 years (school year and summer) and my PI only publishes once a year. He's HHMI and National Academy of Science so he will not publish anything outside of Nature, Cell, JBC, etc. I accepted I'll never have my own paper in this lab barring a miracle even though I've produced novel, useful data. Just my $.02 to keep in mind if you're dead set on being published.

hmm yes i understand what you're saying..i guess I'm a little optimistic..I do know that my lab does do conference papers regularly (publications not AS frequently), does it "count" if i can somehow get into authorship of a conference paper? (not just me, but a bunch of my mentors and me?)

 

[Galatasaray]

never bet on a publication. even if you get your own project, work on it 24/7, you still might not get published. you also need to be very lucky...

 

[thehappydoctor]

never bet on a publication. even if you get your own project, work on it 24/7, you still might not get published. you also need to be very lucky...

LOLLLLL unfortunately i can attest to the from my own persona experience...i was previously working in a lab (full time for 2 years plus 1 summer) and my mentor was the one who brought up publication. I even wrote my paper and she promised to edit it...after this i never heard from her again..naturally as the date of submission came closer (about 2 months before) I emailed and called her, even went to see her in person but she avoided me and ended up leaving the country...and therefore publication count 0 and no lab to return to...and i had to go find a new mentor

 

[samsunimomo]

To anyone who has experience with publication and a not a particularly enterprising PI...how did you accomplish this?

Enterprising PI is probably a prerequisite in getting a research during undergrad. Perhaps you should look for more prolific labs, one that will allow you a project of your own?

 

[thehappydoctor]

Enterprising PI is probably a prerequisite in getting a research during undergrad. Perhaps you should look for more prolific labs, one that will allow you a project of your own?

yeah this is definitely on my to-do list as those kind of prolific labs are hard to find and harder to get in to. but until then i consider myself lucky to be in ANY lab. plus the area we are working on in this lab is very interesting 🙂

 

[VardamanBundren]

Just keep doing what you're doing. You probably won't get an authorship from any projects you are doing this summer, but it could definitely happen in future bouts of summer research.

 

[soundnin]

just focus on learning as much as you can in the lab. if you get published, you get published. if you don't, you don't. what's most important is you can talk intelligently about what you worked on.

bringing it up with the PI seems like such a ridiculous conversation ("i've been in your lab for a month, when can i haz publication!!1!11!!"). and i don't know what you mean by mini-projects. do you mean an experiment? a single publication can contain anywhere from dozens to hundreds of experiments, and that might not even be counting the negative data that went into developing the project.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

LOLLLLL unfortunately i can attest to the from my own persona experience...i was previously working in a lab (full time for 2 years plus 1 summer) and my mentor was the one who brought up publication. I even wrote my paper and she promised to edit it...after this i never heard from her again..naturally as the date of submission came closer (about 2 months before) I emailed and called her, even went to see her in person but she avoided me and ended up leaving the country...and therefore publication count 0 and no lab to return to...and i had to go find a new mentor

I've had a similar experience in undergrad. My PI assured me my project would definitely get published for the three years I was in that lab, and he lavished praise on my manuscript. Unfortunately my lab was really OCD about quality control and as a result even though the thing was practically done by the end of my junior year it took until the end of my senior year to finally have something my PI was content with (mind you this was only because the PI kept making edits to his own edits and then re-editing things back to the way I had them originally only to edit them again). At that point I thought I was more or less done but then the PI said a few months after graduating he wanted to make "a few more small changes". Thus we spent the rest of the year slowly doing more edits (again, slow on his end, not mine). Then around January he just stopped contacting me altogether and ever since I only hear from him like once every three months.

As another example, in the two labs I'm in now both PIs are anxious to publish. Things were going pretty well (I was on track to have two journal submissions out the door by September) until we found out that there was something wrong with our animal facility that was causing the animals to be extremely stressed out. So now all the research we've done for the last half year has to be thrown out which in two cases means starting from scratch. Only one of my papers doesn't seem to have been affected, but it's got weird data and I'm scared my PI isn't going to want to publish because of that.

Moral of the story: Publishing in 1 part effort, 9 parts luck. I've known kids who got 6 publications out in a year by the time they graduated college. I've known kids who got Nature publications. On the other end of the spectrum you have the poor souls who put in 5x as much work as the people I just described only to come out with nothing to show for it because the experiments didn't work out or papers got lost in lab politics. And then you have guys like me who seem to be on a publication treadmill in purgatory.

 

[littlefurrybugs]

There's this one girl in my research program that worked on a project for less than a month and was published as a 3rd author. Sometimes it's all about timing I guess. She got to do the last few experiments needed for publication and the PI was nice enough to include her. I'm quite jealous...

Anyway, like what everyone is saying, just try and learn something from the experience. Being published is nice, but there is definitely more to working in a lab than that such as learning new skills or even getting a LOR from the PI.

 

[smarts1]

There's this one girl in my research program that worked on a project for less than a month and was published as a 3rd author. Sometimes it's all about timing I guess. She got to do the last few experiments needed for publication and the PI was nice enough to include her. I'm quite jealous...

Anyway, like what everyone is saying, just try and learn something from the experience. Being published is nice, but there is definitely more to working in a lab than that such as learning new skills or even getting a LOR from the PI.

I agree. One of my friends got a pub this way. She was working in a grad student who was pretty much at the end of her project and ended up getting published 8 months later.

But honestly, I think that although smaller labs may churn out papers less frequently, the opportunity for publication in smaller labs is better because you get to hold your own weight in smaller labs and get some interaction with the PI as opposed to larger labs where the PI will rarely come out of his/her office.

 

[thehappydoctor]

Yeah guys looks like i'll have to wait and see and until something happens ill just continue putting in more effort and more handwork. Hopefully LUCK will be on my side, too!

Thanks everyone for responses! I appreciate you guys!

 

[dmf2682]

If you can't make a discovery you should try and invent something. Patents are another form of publication and might make you stand out. Plus they don't strictly require you to work in a lab under a pi. Downside is you need a lawyer and 2-3 years of processing time to even get it looked at by the government- it won't get published for another year or two beyond that.

Something to consider. Good luck!

 

[thehappydoctor]

If you can't make a discovery you should try and invent something. Patents are another form of publication and might make you stand out. Plus they don't strictly require you to work in a lab under a pi. Downside is you need a lawyer and 2-3 years of processing time to even get it looked at by the government- it won't get published for another year or two beyond that.

Something to consider. Good luck!

LOL outta curiosity what kind of things do people invent? (no ridiculous answers please?)
i mean i work in a medically related lab and theres really nothing i can invent here....unless i invent like a new human..uhh awk

 

[dmf2682]

LOL outta curiosity what kind of things do people invent? (no ridiculous answers please?)
i mean i work in a medically related lab and theres really nothing i can invent here....unless i invent like a new human..uhh awk

I've patents for certain parts of jet engines.

If you can think of a new way of doing something, or a tool or medical device that would be a good place to start. Do research on your own, and if you can't find it online, see if you can partner with an engineering professor or students to get the ball rolling. Sometimes, newcomers to a field can have the most novel ideas. Good luck!

 

[thehappydoctor]

I've patents for certain parts of jet engines.

If you can think of a new way of doing something, or a tool or medical device that would be a good place to start. Do research on your own, and if you can't find it online, see if you can partner with an engineering professor or students to get the ball rolling. Sometimes, newcomers to a field can have the most novel ideas. Good luck!

CONGRATSSSS ON YOUR PATENTS!👍👍👍

Thanks for the idea!!!! i'll look into it

 

[samsunimomo]

LOL outta curiosity what kind of things do people invent? (no ridiculous answers please?)
i mean i work in a medically related lab and theres really nothing i can invent here....unless i invent like a new human..uhh awk

Our school has an extremely hands-on engineering department. One of our students developed a prototype of a medical device that helps keep the stomach in place during endoscopic surgery.

 

[thehappydoctor]

Our school has an extremely hands-on engineering department. One of our students developed a prototype of a medical device that helps keep the stomach in place during endoscopic surgery.

woahhhh! thats awesome! if only ideas like that popped into my head LOL

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

LOL outta curiosity what kind of things do people invent? (no ridiculous answers please?)
i mean i work in a medically related lab and theres really nothing i can invent here....unless i invent like a new human..uhh awk

If you're not in an engineering lab/internship or an engineering major then your opportunities for patents are greatly diminished. That said, opportunities do sometimes present themselves in basic science. If you synthesize a new molecule, come up with a new treatment, come up with a new procedure (that has real world relevance), etc. you can file a patent.

 

[thehappydoctor]

If you're not in an engineering lab/internship or an engineering major then your opportunities for patents are greatly diminished. That said, opportunities do sometimes present themselves in basic science. If you synthesize a new molecule, come up with a new treatment, come up with a new procedure (that has real world relevance), etc. you can file a patent.

hmm sounds true! Thanks for advice! Will look out for these opportunities!