Getting Good at Research

[polly_mer]

Clever research does not need to be expensive, complicated, or involve a team of people to complete the work.

True.  However, getting noticed in a crowded field tends to require regular interactions with other people doing similar research.

In addition, excluding oneself from the discussions of people who are doing similar things tends to result in feedback of "yes, we all know that and have for the past 3 years" when a modest-scale research effort gets published.

Depending on field, it can be really hard to do the research without the facilities (although one can have even a high school intern do the actual work when the equipment/reagents/resources are available).  I can think of many interesting investigations that were started in the late 19th/early 20th century with almost no specialized equipment.  However, because we've now had 100 years of clever people working on those investigations, finding something new to do with almost no specialized equipment is much harder than it was at the beginning of that field's existence.

I will also mention that to be fair to one's students, teamwork and coordination with multiple sites are some of the most useful transferrable skills to learn while being mentored in the actual technical field.  We do hire folks with research experience and only a recent BS all the time.  However, those folks are seldom the ones who are doing essentially kitchen-top experiments.  Those are the ones who have been somewhere working on a complicated problem where the context is no one knows what to do next and possibly the necessary equipment doesn't already exist.  We seldom hire folks whose research was really hard because they lacked modern equipment and did not return to the older methods from the early 20th century.

YMMV in the humanities or other fields where equipment is not a concern.  I know far more biologists who do great research at teaching-mostly schools than people who do physics and chemistry research under those same conditions.  I know a lot of chemists and physicists who do very creative things to support their classrooms in terms of pedagogical research with creative demos/explorations, but very few with the discovery kind of scientific research suitable for publication in technical journals.  Astronomy is a notable exception with excellent researchers located at all kinds of institutions.

[Ruralguy]

Somewhere along the line we got derailed into perhaps conflating "good research" with "getting  an elite R1 faculty position and being published in most elite journals." Not being at elite R1 and not getting published in elite journals does not mean good research isn't being done.
So, yes, I agree with AJ.

[Ruralguy]

The physicists at small schools tend to focus on more applied, small scale problems.
Many of them are pretty close to what others might call engineers. Others are probably milking sabbaticals and summers for all their worth (going to that particle accelerator or telescope, or just using a friend's spectrometer or what have you).  I haven't seen any of them get "cover of Nature" type articles, though its probably happened..though I agree, quite rarely.

So, they are not using 19th or even early 20th century methods. They are using late 20th century computation techniques (and hey, including software we write ourselves, 21st century!). They are using methodologies developed in late 20th or early 21st but specialized for small scale. Granted, not everything can be done that way, not by a long shot, but then, anyone who just couldn't do that, or get big scale work done by collaboration and sabbaticals, just wouldn't go to a school like mine. Granted, some people just darn give up!
Also---shock, shock--- there are plenty of people in the humanities and soc sciences doing great research at small schools.

Polly, I often agree with you, but you tend to generalize a bit too much from your own experience. Your own small school you started at was crud with cruddy researchers, so you think everyone at a small school is like that. You see at your new job that everyone is working on big scale stuff, therefore it must be that anyone worth a damn is working on that kind of stuff. Its just not so cut and dried. At least not from *my* experience.

[Hibush]

Somewhere along the line we got derailed into perhaps conflating "good research" with "getting  an elite R1 faculty position and being published in most elite journals." Not being at elite R1 and not getting published in elite journals does not mean good research isn't being done.
So, yes, I agree with AJ.

Sorry for the tangent in that direction; I was just responding to the issue of how the tippy top are different. Their connectedness helps make them better, it is not that they are an exclusionary in-group as was implied in some comments. 

I agree that good research requires a discipline of mind to do insightful observation and design experiments that can unabimbiguously distinguish among proposed models. Those are uncommon talents that require constant practice. But those with the talent, and the opportunity to practice, can do so anywhere.

[jerseyjay]

Somewhere along the line we got derailed into perhaps conflating "good research" with "getting  an elite R1 faculty position and being published in most elite journals." Not being at elite R1 and not getting published in elite journals does not mean good research isn't being done.
So, yes, I agree with AJ.

Well, I think this ambiguity was inherent in the original question. What does "good at research" mean? But beyond that, I think it is a conflation inherent in contemporary academia itself. And I think it is because there is "research" that is what we do for a living, and "research" which is an activity that must be judged on its own merits. The two overlap but are different. And while it is often easy to judge one's research-as-professional-obligation, it is much harder to tell if one is good at the other type of research. And it often takes a long time to make that evaluation (at least in my field, history). 

Research is part of our jobs. So we need to be "good" at it. However, for most of us, we are measured on a serious of "metrics" like number of publications, impact factor of journals, prestige of journals, number of citations, prestige of publishers, etc. It is possible (and perhaps common) for somebody to publish many articles in high-impact journals, several books with good publishers, and be cited a bunch, and still not really be particularly good or memorable. It is also possible, though less common, for somebody to publish only a handful of articles in their career, not get tenure, and yet fundamentally shift the field.

[Wahoo Redux]

Perhaps we could share our research histories and indicate our fields / disciplines since publishing protocols seem to be discipline specific.  These little bios could explain how we "got good" or are trying to get good at research. For instance:

Humanities.

I gained my first peer-reviewed R&R and eventual article publication while finishing the dissertation, primarily because people told me that I needed PR publications on my CV.  It took a long time to get readers' responses but they were extremely helpful.  I learned a great deal from rewriting that first article---and it gave me a huge boost in confidence, which had been badly flagging.  I had enough of the diss done to begin chopping out sections to turn into articles.  I wonder how many people actually do that and is it discipline specific to farm out the dissertation work?

After that I sent out several more chunks, got a number of rejections with readers' responses, learned a lot, and received several additional notable publications. 

I noticed while finishing the diss that one particular artist, while very prominent both commercially and critically, had very little written about hu.  So I turned a section of my diss chapter into a book.  I perhaps should have tried to turn the diss into a book (which a lot of humanities people do) but I was enjoying slicing it up and sending it out.

I was the lead editor on an anthology of pedagogical material, presented at two to three conferences per year (local and national), and published a number of book reviews and non-peer-reviewed articles in both humanities and journalism, as well as a good deal of creative writing including several books.  I was invited to sent a chapter to a Cambridge UP anthology, which made my year.

And I was rejected a lot along the way.

This process was sometimes demoralizing, and the old CHE Fora was actually helpful.  This is what one poster (I'm sorry, I didn't record who this was) posted to me:

"I've always heard that the most highly published people also have the most rejections -- they get published because they write a lot and send it out instead of sitting on it, and because they keep refining and resubmitting their work rather than giving up in discouragement."

And this is what another poster responded (again, sorry, I should have kept the posters' names):

"Indeed. Some years ago, after having worked on a fairly long and far too interdisciplinary article haphazardly, I sent it out to a top journal only to receive one scathingly negative review and another helpful and hopeful review. I was so determined to work on this paper, which changed the direction of my thinking and work, that I took to heart what the reviewers said, worked diligently for a few years, and eventually had the super-organism paper published as a book. I learned so much from those comments and worked so hard to address them that I now have two spin off projects from the book. Peer review works (in most cases). Good luck wahoo!"


These perspectives really gave me a boost.  And I frequently recall them.  I wish I knew who posted these so I could thank them again.

In fact, some time ago I received a rather "crushing review" after an R&R.  I was personally devastated, put the article down for almost two years, and then went back to it out of curiosity.  I remember the advice from the old CHE Fora. I did some editing, a little more research, sent the article to one of the tippy-toppy journals (a 1,000X better than the publication that rejected the same article) and, much to my amazement, received an extremely nice "publish with revision" review from the editor and two readers.  The article came out this last fall----a nice little panache in my hat.

A few months later and I received a very firm rejection from another top journal, but the readers' reports were extremely helpful.  I was, of course, crushed, but I have a much stream-lined revision almost ready to go. And I am planning on revisiting two other crushing rejects still in my documents for the next year.

I've also starting working on (fingers crossed, please oh please) a prospectus for a book project (Oh great Googly Moogly give me power, I pray thee!) after an acquisitions editor at a national publisher sent me an email.  I'd been a manuscript reader for them. 

Now, however, I am deep in migrating all my 5 classes online (and I am posting long posts on the Fora) and so any research publication has come crashing to a halt----and that last rejection stung pretty good too, knocked me down a peg----so I am fighting to get back in the game today, if I can!

Sorry, that is maybe too long.  I hope other people share their research histories too.

[polly_mer]

Summary: I write as I do because I know enough about in-between to not encourage people to think that's a great career path if research needing time/energy/specialized equipment is a significant interest.  Even humanities folks should think carefully about how much time and energy they will have to do the research they need at institutions outside the research-mostly places, even if their research is more easily accommodated by needing different types of support than lab science.

Polly, I often agree with you, but you tend to generalize a bit too much from your own experience. Your own small school you started at was crud with cruddy researchers, so you think everyone at a small school is like that. You see at your new job that everyone is working on big scale stuff, therefore it must be that anyone worth a damn is working on that kind of stuff. Its just not so cut and dried. At least not from *my* experience.

How many places have you been in the past 20 years?  How active were you in the regional groups associated with ACS, APS, AAPT, ASME, and others that draw from the cross-section of higher ed and other institutions? 

From my time on the regional groups, I know a lot of people near/at/just past retirement who admit they've had a good career as you describe with research mostly over the summers and breaks, but are unhappy because early career people can't have that same career due to changed landscape.  I've spent about two decades now with the "what can you do with that?" career seminars, workshops, and related outreach for students and early career folks in a combination of chemistry, physics, engineering, and computation.  The message has changed over the years with a lot more focus now on "yes, yes, you love research.   'Everyone' loves research.  The hard part isn't finding people who love research; the hard part is scrambling to find a sweet spot between what interests you, what resources are available, and the time/energy required to do well while balancing the bazillion other demands on your time". 

Are there people doing good research at S(elective and not all that large enrollment) LACs in areas related to mine?  Yep. 

Are there people doing good research at R2s that aren't particularly large enrollment with mostly master's programs in areas related to mine?  Yep, and how many, many conversations I've had over lunch, dinner, and breaks about how hard doing research is at a place that claims to value research, but really wants a lot of teaching and service.  I've handed over tissues many times to people who find they've done good research (from a scientific viewpoint), but that's not good enough to be tenured, nor is it good enough to get a comparable academic job elsewhere.  Their choices are then to go down to a teaching-only institution, go to an employer like mine because good science is sufficient, or play the lottery as soft money at an academic place that wants good science, but can't waste an academic position on someone who has no record of funding necessary to support a big enough research group.

Are there an absurd number of teaching-only institutions that had 2 or fewer physicists with zero majors or even related majors in which people are teaching 20+ contact hours with no lab help, no graders, and an active mindset on campus that scientific research is in fact a distraction from the true mission of teaching and service?  Oh, you betcha.

I have spent my professional life traveling up and down the research food chain. 

Research places certainly support scientific research--enrollment size is not an automatic indication of research support in terms of good students, sufficient time/energy to do the research, or even just resources.  The problem I see during these discussions is people who don't understand that the food chain is way longer than:

* Super Duper Elite
* Elite
* Lesser R1s (and remember there are only about 130 R1s total)
* S(elective) LACs
* Good R2s
* Good enough R2s (and remember there are only about 135 R2s total)
* Polytechnic Master's Institutions (New Mexico Tech is an example of this)
* Other

One of my roles on these fora is to point out that Super Dinky was in no way unique enough to be ignored as people think about the higher ed landscape.  One of my most enlightening moments at Super Dinky was discovering that more than 1000 institutions of higher learning had the same size enrollment or even smaller.  The majority of institutions span the range from about 2000 students and smaller.  The norm isn't at all the 130 R1s or even including 135 R2s along with S(elective) LACs at which research is done; the norm in size and even mission is much closer to Super Dinky than people expect. 

To address the question asked on a different thread recently regarding possible new hires, when the institution only has 25-35 full-time faculty total with another 3-5 professional fellows and possibly as many as 5 adjuncts total each teaching one section in five different departments, no, we're not going to hire another 1-2 full-time faculty in a department that doesn't have enough load most terms for the faculty who are already employed there.  The places that can afford to consolidate interchangeable part-time cog positions into full-time positions are the relative handful of institutions that somehow have armies of adjuncts teaching the same courses in multiple sections and wouldn't notice another 10 or even fifteen faculty when they already have thousands of faculty members. 

Ahem.

My current employer gets a lot of academic refugees from lesser R1s and below as the faculty realize they can't devote enough time to research, even if the facilities/resources are available or can be made available.  We had a discussion on the old fora where I was surprised that people were teaching 3/3 in the humanities at an R1 and still had R1 research expectations.  I can believe that different fields need different resources to do good research.  I'm bemused by the idea that good research can somehow be accomplished in a timely manner when someone's schedule is already full most of the year.

Something like 50% of TT/T in some STEM fields leave within 5 years of the birth of their child because doing the research without sufficient support is untenable. 

A large fraction of people in some science/engineering specialities refuse to take academic positions because they have watched their mentors and PIs.  That's not the life they want, even if they want to do research.  Those folks are also generally not stepping down a notch or three on the academic research food chain because part of what they didn't like was scrambling so hard for someone else to get to do the research.

Thus, while it's possible to do research outside elite institutions, many people are finding that doing so in fields that overlap mine is much harder than it was 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago, even as diligent people who can get the equipment they need who might still have summers free enough to do research.

[Ruralguy]

I admit I was probably partly goading you into writing what you wrote,Polly,  admitting there's a somewhat wider picture here than what you had been writing about more recently.

My personal view isn't so much that everything is rosy with research below the R1 level, just that it exists and thrives. Yeah, it has problems, and you do have to find a niche if you want to not get frustrated with it. I do admit that the institutions that expect R1 research output (and bucks) while also maintaining so-so SLAC-like teaching loads are ridiculous. It also might be unrealistic for low-rung SLACs to provide no research support or laugh research off when so many new career scholars are on the faculty. Mine *doesn't* do that (from my perspective at least---though the newest scholars almost always feel otherwise).

In addition, yes, I have heard over at least 2 decades, though it probably goes back decades more, that especially women dropping out due to childbirth or wanting to have a family, but increasingly men for similar reasons, has had an effect on the shape of many faculties of especially the physical sciences, though I have seen some women leaving Math and Bio for similar reasons.

[Wahoo Redux]

To address the question asked on a different thread recently regarding possible new hires, when the institution only has 25-35 full-time faculty total with another 3-5 professional fellows and possibly as many as 5 adjuncts total each teaching one section in five different departments, no, we're not going to hire another 1-2 full-time faculty in a department that doesn't have enough load most terms for the faculty who are already employed there.  The places that can afford to consolidate interchangeable part-time cog positions into full-time positions are the relative handful of institutions that somehow have armies of adjuncts teaching the same courses in multiple sections and wouldn't notice another 10 or even fifteen faculty when they already have thousands of faculty members. 

Ahem.

Ahem.

This is NOT the situation I am talking about on the other thread, Polly, and you damn well know that.

I am talking about departments with 60 adjuncts teaching as many as 120 sections and 15 FT faculty teaching the rest of the classes.

Interesting that you tried to hide that comment here.

The question has never been are their enough "jobs" for faculty out there----we know there are not and we know that it has to do with money.

The question is whether or not there is enough "work" to employ a great many more people in worthwhile jobs than we are now----for which the numbers are unequivocal.  (The question, Why do we need more English professors?)

Yes, this includes the tiny rural CCs as well as the giant mega-universities.

The thing about strawman arguments is that they reflect either a lack of a real point to argue or an attempt to control the debate by pretending a different premise than the one presented. 

So let's just stick to the facts, eh?

https://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts/

[Ruralguy]

How about keeping that discussion to the other thread completely?

[Wahoo Redux]

Sorry.

The more research I did the more ideas occurred to me based on incidentals that I found doing research.

[Hibush]

After that I sent out several more chunks, got a number of rejections with readers' responses, learned a lot, and received several additional notable publications. 

...

In fact, some time ago I received a rather "crushing review" after an R&R.  I was personally devastated, put the article down for almost two years, and then went back to it out of curiosity.  I remember the advice from the old CHE Fora. I did some editing, a little more research, sent the article to one of the tippy-toppy journals (a 1,000X better than the publication that rejected the same article) and, much to my amazement, received an extremely nice "publish with revision" review from the editor and two readers.  The article came out this last fall----a nice little panache in my hat.

A few months later and I received a very firm rejection from another top journal, but the readers' reports were extremely helpful.  I was, of course, crushed, but I have a much stream-lined revision almost ready to go. And I am planning on revisiting two other crushing rejects still in my documents for the next year.

This story highlights another attribute or attitude that is helpful for getting good at research: resilience. Specifically, the one where you get a crushing review back, and the reaction is (over time), "That g*d*m ignorant bastard...makes a couple of helpful points. I'll get right on it."