/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5881148]

I'm writing my first research paper (ideally) for publication soon. I'm sure some of /sci/ has been published, any obvious pitfalls to avoid or advice to give?

It's an applied health research piece by the way.

Anyone with experience in poster presentations, I haven't a clue how to go about this.

pic unrelated but an example of the kind of graph I'm trying to avoid producing.

[Anonymous No.5881150]

>>5881148
those are two separate queries by the way, about publishing and about poster presentation. I'm not especially experienced in technical writing nor graphic design really.

[Anonymous No.5881151]

>>5881148
You are publishing a paper and giving a poster presentation, on the same research?

What journal do you plan to publish in?

[Anonymous No.5881156]

>>5881151
That's a dilemma in itself - the reason I'm doing the poster presentation is that it's one of the requirements of the grant I got to do the work.

The paper would ideally go to one of a few geriatric medicine journals but they set the standard pretty high and I am not sure what level to ask for my supervisor to get involved in the writing (it's my work but obviously he'd have to get credit if he did the writing), given that authorship would potentially have to change if he did all the legwork. He has the experience to get it in a better journal but I don't know if I'd rather be lead in a small time journal or second in a bigger one.

[Anonymous No.5881180]

>>5881156

Your professor (or postdocs) will guide you through be the technical aspects of paper submission when the time comes. Until then don't worry about that shit.

No way in fucking hell a pleb like you is publishing anything without having your professor as an author. No matter how much work you do, your professor will still be an author.

[Anonymous No.5881183]

>>5881156
>thiking your professor won't get authoriship credit

Are you fucking retarded? New to acedemia?

[Anonymous No.5881189]

>>5881183
>Be an undergrad
>Spend upwards of fifty hours in the lab helping grad student with her paper
>Don't get authorship.
>Professor only makes technical corrections to paper, which I had to correct because he's Russian.
>mfw he's the third name.

[Anonymous No.5881194]

>>5881189
Sounds about right

[Anonymous No.5881202]

>>5881189
>helping grad student out with her paper
>her paper
>her

Did you at least get to suck on dem huge tits? TITS are the best payment!

[Anonymous No.5881220]

>>5881202
She flirts with me all the time, but I don't want to get involved with a group member, or someone who isn't a native English speaker, because it never ends well. I also know she doesn't do casual sex, and I don't do things that aren't casual sex. The intersection is the empty set.
She's a solid 7/10, but it gets bumped up because of the Russian accent and the fact that she can into quantum chemistry.

[Anonymous No.5881226]

>>5881180
>>5881183
I wasn't clear there, I knew he'd always get a credit but whether he was to be the first name or later name was the question.

Being first in a lesser journal or second in a better one seems to be the choice.

[Anonymous No.5881238]

>>5881226
Stop being a fucking faggot. Worry about the quality of your paper and stop sweating the small stuff. You don't sound like a fucking scienists at all, just a dumb bureaucrat.

>Being first in a lesser journal or second in a better one seems to be the choice

I doubt you will even be afforded this "choice" by the time actual submission comes around. More likely your professor (or postdocs) will chose for you. Ultimately everything will all be up to them.

[Anonymous No.5881245]

>Anyone with experience in poster presentations, I haven't a clue how to go about this.
Your first poster is going to be bad, but go around and look at other posters and take notes on what looks bad.

Some things I'd avoid off the top of my head: overly dense text, complex background graphics (like gradients and such, they're really hard to pull off well), graphs that you pulled RIGHT out of excel with no fiddling.

For the presentation itself - you're going to be standing around your poster for an hour and every couple minutes someone new will come by and you'll go through a five minute overview of your project. It's like a really abbreviated seminar presentation.

Three types of people will be coming by:
A) Floaters - they just want you to explain it all as soon as they step up. The polite ones will greet you once they step up.
B) Lookers - they want to get a chance to read over your paper first to see if they're interested before they make you go through your spiel.
C) Assholes - the jerks who will start asking you really specific questions and trying to pick apart your methods and conclusions.

Mostly, just assume everyone's a Floater, greet them, then do your thing. You can sometimes tell if someone's a Looker if they're pretty obviously looking carefully at specific portions of your poster. In that case, just let them know you can answer any questions they have, and when they switch attention to you, start into your talk.

[Anonymous No.5881255]

>>5881245
This is really helpful, thank you.

I'll definitely go through a couple of iterations of it and check out other similar work.

[Anonymous No.5881259]

My experience with authorship is that the PI usually takes last author as a courtesy to their student, and anything past second or third author up to last author (which is usually the PI) is basically equivalent to "he walked in the lab once and we can't remember which graph he made".

Although that does fly out the window if you're getting published in Science or something. OFC they're going to grab a good spot for a Science paper.

>>5881245
For the poster itself - don't put too much space to the background information (the kind of stuff you'd put in an introduction). That's the kind of information that they'll either already be acquainted with or you'll know well enough to be able to clearly explain off the top of your head.

Make sure your graphs are each displaying one point that's critical to the overall conclusion of your poster. Don't include some minor graph that you needed to prove a supplementary point. You want the graphs to be like a really simple, five-piece puzzle that you can put together right then and there.

Give a brief overview of your most important methods, but don't get too deep into details (if you did HPLC, you don't need to say the specific product number for the column you used).

Your poster is basically a graphical, abbreviated version of a paper, so have a copy of the paper handy to pull out if someone needs that in-depth information. If you don't have a paper yet for this data, make one, it's good practice.