Wednesday, October 17, 2007

10 simple rules of SciVee

We have posted before about scivee, a sort of youtube for science. I haven't run into anything directly in my field, however it looks pretty decent now that they have much more content.
Some of their popular stuff is a few pubcasts on 10 simple rules. There is the ten rules of publishing, the 10 rules of getting grants and 10 rules of good oral presentations. I have only checked out the ten simple rules of publishing. Its not too bad and has some good tips. Certainly the host has more experience that I do.
One that I found strange though.
Rule 7: Start writing the paper the day you have the idea of what questions to pursue.
I should have about 30 papers started, sitting around as the experiments/ideas did not pan out. Also this rule might lead to making conclusions before doing the experiments.


3 comments:

Bayman said...

I also tend to disagree with writing a paper when you decide on a question...papers are usually for answers not for questions. So writing the paper at this point would mean making up the answers before you've done any experiments.

I would say, "Start writing a paper as soon you have figured something out, have experimental evidence to back it up, and think that other people will be interesting in reading about it."

Anonymous said...

if the answers dont provide more questions than they answer they're either:

1. wrong
2. representing the end of science

Kamel said...

Maybe it's more like Mezl's "start writing your thesis the day you start your degree" in the sense that, what I think he means is, try to come up with a framework for how you'll attempt to answer your question. Think in terms of publishable units. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I don't think they're suggesting jumping to conclusions (it does say 'start writing your paper', not 'write your paper')