5. Hard truths

General guidelines to how academia works

If you've gone through the four rules, you are now hopefully well prepared to face the hard truths about academia. It's time to get to those rules and bosses in the world of academia that we briefly mentioned in the first part. 

Conferences (and journal papers) are important because academia (and some parts of industry, especially machine learning/AI) measures your success in what you have published and where.

Important to note is that the less well known you are, the less you are allowed to say freely. If you are an important professor you can have more opinions in your submitted papers than a lowly PhD student with no previous publications. This means you need to either have a very important professor as a co-author to be more “free” or back up every single thing you say with much rigour. Sometimes, however, this can be “avoided” due to double-blind review, where you don’t know who reviewed you and reviewers don’t know who they’re reviewing. In many fields this doesn't really work though, as they're small enough for reviewers to guess who they're reviewing based solely on the content and even style of writing.

Academia is not always driven by the merit of your ideas and statements, it is often driven by personal brand and previous publications. We would all like to believe that academia is a meritocracy, and although that's not untrue, it's definitely not the whole story. 

If you are the kind of person who hates everything about networking and personal branding, maybe this blog post will help: http://www.fast.ai/2017/12/18/personal-brand/

Practical tips

Make sure you have something to demo at the iggi conference or just in your office. This gets asked for all the time, especially if you are at York. 

Impact factor

Impact factor is a fuzzy way of measuring how important a journal or conference is. It’s generally an average of some sort on how many times articles from that journal are cited. Generally, the journals with the most impact factor are Nature and Science, both of which you’ve probably heard about. Important to remember is that the impact factor doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of research. Actually, it may be the reverse: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full

Open science and feedback loops

Research often takes a long time to get proper feedback on. You do your work, get some feedback from your supervisor and then try to publish. The publishing process can take many months and then finally you get your peer review. That’s not a well functioning feedback loop. There are, however, some initiatives that aim to improve this.

For example, with preregistration of your studies, you not only get feedback earlier you also get it more often. This has the additional benefit of making science more reproducible, which is a good thing. This image very nicely shows how we can introduce additional feedback loops to improve our research:

Other ways of improving feedback loops are to publish pre-prints of your papers on pre-print archives like arxiv and others.

Additional guides and references

For more rules and guidelines, you may find this top 10 list useful (fair warning: it is very pragmatic, especially about moving fast and destroying things): http://www.nextscientist.com/graduate-school-advice-series-starting-phd/

Go directly to Part 6 or use the top menu.