Research Competitions

[Rupert Pumpkin]

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[b&ierstiefel]

Does anyone have experience with research competitions? Any success? How did you prepare? What sort of things did you do differently from your competitors? What worked? Thanks!

Most of my projects in grad school was a race cuz there was this French group and a few groups out on the West coast with whom we were competing. Success is never guaranteed and is dependent on hard work and serendipity. We were able to publish ahead of everyone else because we had a few key reagents that we had made (the other groups had similar reagents but by good fortune, theirs didn't yield as conclusive and clean results). At the same time, we worked our asses off in the lab to write the best paper possible. Then we submitted it to the journal.

We didn't put in ALL the data for negotiation purposes. And we predicted what some of the criticisms of the paper would be so we started working out those experiments as the paper was being reviewed. We believe that there was a competitor (reviewer #2) who reviewed the paper who was being absolutely unreasonable with regards to demands. We had to negotiate with the editor in chief with the data that we had withheld (we had told him that we had additional data that would make the paper more complete and cater to a more broad readership). We tried to respond to some of the unreasonable demands of reviewer #2. We were able to include more data to appease this guy. But eventually, we told him to STFU and the editor in chief accepted our paper for publication after 6 months of this.

Oh also, when you have this data and you go present this at meetings, be very conservative about what you tell people or put on your poster. Scientists are very perceptive and word travels very fast. I was describing the data for the above paper at a conference. I had inadvertently forgotten to remove one panel of my poster which had a sequence alignment for this novel protein we had found. We had given the protein a name that was not in the database but some guys did come by and copy the sequence alignment down on their notepad. Our manuscript was being submitted during the week of the conference. A week or so after I got back from the conference, my boss receives an email from some random group that they had similar data, asked us where we had submitted our manuscript to, and told us that they wished to try to co-publish with us.

 

[Rupert Pumpkin]

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[uproarhz]

That's interesting. I was conducting research over the summer at Harvard Med on prostate cancer and we were competing with some others as well. We're establishing an enzyme called fatty acid synthase (FAS) as a metabolic oncogene in prostate cancer for the first time so it's big. What journal did you end up publishing in? Hopefully our stuff will be in Oncogene or Nat Med. Do you know any trends of papers that make it into Nature?

That's interesting. The previous lab I was in, now heavily studies FAS in breast cancer. The guy who mainly works on it has been publishing like crazy for the past year. I guess he has got a lot of press for it too. So if your work goes anything like that, you will get some good stuff out of it. Best of luck!

 

[BDavis]

But eventually, we told him to STFU and the editor in chief accepted our paper for publication after 6 months of this.

I am not familiar with this new STFU technique. Do you get one STFU per major criticism (like a line item veto) or can you use it for all the comments from a reviewer? I have been using the old trite "this is outside the scope of the paper" which translates into "I don't want to do the experiment" or "you should read more than the manuscript abstract before reviewing the paper".

 

[b&ierstiefel]

I am not familiar with this new STFU technique. Do you get one STFU per major criticism (like a line item veto) or can you use it for all the comments from a reviewer? I have been using the old trite "this is outside the scope of the paper" which translates into "I don't want to do the experiment" or "you should read more than the manuscript abstract before reviewing the paper".

Well that is the STFU technique...stating in the rebuttal things like, "outside the scope of the paper" and stuff like that. Basically, you tell the monitoring editor that the reviewer in question is being a dick.

 

[BDavis]

Well that is the STFU technique...stating in the rebuttal things like, "outside the scope of the paper" and stuff like that. Basically, you tell the monitoring editor that the reviewer in question is being a dick.

I was being sarcastic about STFU. I am sure there are many graduate students/post-docs that would like to use that exact acryonym in the rebuttal letter in response to some reviewers comments.

 

[b&ierstiefel]

I was being sarcastic about STFU. I am sure there are many graduate students/post-docs that would like to use that exact acryonym in the rebuttal letter in response to some reviewers comments.

amen dude!

 

[Rupert Pumpkin]

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[uproarhz]

In which journals is he publishing? Does he think that it's an oncogene? That's what we're trying to prove -- that it's a metabolic oncogene in prostate cancer. I certainly hope so regarding good stuff. My PI is one of the editors of oncogene so hopefully we'll publish in Nature or one of its submagazines. So far I've gotten a co-authorship in 12th NCI SPORE Investigators' Conference, Baltimore, MD. Everyone that came were from the highest ranked cancer institutes in the country so I think it was prestigious. Yes.. no?

On pubmed do a search on "menendez ja," you'll find his publications on this.

 

[Rupert Pumpkin]

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[abeanatrice]

Our transgenic mice recently formed a tumor!!! We are now getting ready to publish in a big journal. I'm jubilant! It's amazing...I honestly went into research for med school admissions and now I'm actually considering a career in it.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

 

[old macdonald]

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Don't get used to huge results...savor the moment and appreciate how long it took to get to that point!

 

[Rupert Pumpkin]

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