Since I have had to clarify this on numerous occasions to multiple people who’ve passed through my lab, this is a convenient place to put all these thoughts in one place. Also acknowledgement to the legendary John Eisen (of metagenomics fame) and his blog-post on exactly this topic.

1) Please email me your request atleast 1 week before your deadline to have sent it.

2) I need to see an updated CV (or resume) so that my facts about you are accurate.

3) Mention from when to when you have worked with me, if you are no longer in my lab. If you are still in my lab, please still mention your start date. You should add a brief summary what you did in that period (or are doing).

4) Please clarify what is the name/title and nature of the position that you are applying for. Specify the potential role you will play in it, if you were hired/recruited/placed. If a statement of purpose (SOP) is associated with it, please share the gist (summary) of it.

5) Provide all information I will need. For a brief moment, put yourself in my shoes. To be able to send the letter, you need to assist me- i.e.

• If it’s by email then provide me the address.
• If it’s as a hard copy then provide me the address of the recepient and whatever title-details are required.
• Often these letters need to be in certain formats. Please send me this. In short, make my work simpler, so I can help you more effectively.
• If the agency/organization/university has an online portal, please provide my name and email address ONLY AFTER you have taken my approval.

6) Providing a letter of recommendation is part of my job. It will be a recommendation and an honest assessment.

7) Your work with me or interactions in my class, depending on whether you worked with me or took my courses, will determine the nature of what I write. Think of it as कर्म

8 ) Should you choose to ask for letters from phd-student/technicians/project assistants/postdocs in the lab, please find out from the agency that has requested them what criteria they use for determining the appropriateness of the letter. Typically for academic/research positions a supervisory role is required, but not essential for obtaining recommendations.

9) Please do not add me as a referee without asking me first.

One of the big questions facing (especially) young researchers, at the anvil of choosing a research career, is finding a problem. There are many ways to go about doing this.

• Follow the leader: One can find a big and successful lab with a famous scientist and hope good ideas from the lab come to you and inspire you
• Follow the money: Find a topic that is being funded heavily by Public or Private agencies, since that might be something that is also socially relevant. There are many pitfalls here. But it’s a sense of doing socially useful science. It might therefore be very applied too.
• Follow the market: Industry has always attracted science. And science has sometimes attracted industry, less so in this country. If you enjoy tight deadline working, and are looking for new goals, new challenges every year,  with a driver of novelty coming from the market.
• Follow your heart: Find and identify the problem that really does make you curious, for rational reasons or irrational ones. This requires a very curious mind, and might not be a good startpoint for all minds. Yoshinori Oshsumi (Nobel Prize winner 2016 for Physiology and Medicine) however is a shining example of this as highlighted in this 2012 article “Yoshinori Ohsumi: Autophagy from the beginning to the end” in J. Cell. Biol. This is also the hardest.

And adding to all of this is, once you choose a problem to continue pursuing it. C.V. Raman is reported to have said “Science can only flower out when there is an internal urge. It cannot thrive under external pressure.” (21/11/1970) [Barry Masters on C.V. Raman].

Further reading

• Peter B. Medawar (1979) Advice to a Young Scientist. Classic book, still relevant
• Alon U. (2009) How to choose a good scientific problem. Molec. Cell. 2009 Sep 24;35(6):726-8. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2009.09.013.
• C.V. Raman and the Raman Effect by Barry R. Masters on the OSA website weblink

A superficial reading of popular media on science plagiarism, doctored results, falsification, backstabbing, sabotage appear to suggest that these have spilt over only recently from other hyper-competitive professions. But appearances are deceptive. This (as with many other human traits) has been around since we began to think.

Here I will attempt to bring together scientific ethics, ideas about ethical scientific practise and the positive side of all the noise about bad-science. In the interim, a few links.

• Clearly a strategy of naming and shaming- Beall’s list makes for an interesting read. Many of those with some years in scientific research will vouch for the increase in emails claiming yet another OpenAccess journal to “submit your new research findings” to. This certainly seems to address (in a Rambo-esque manner- one man army) the question about the (sometimes more than apparent) questionable quality of the journals. Many you will find have indian-sounding names- because they are based in India. This together with Mr. Aly’s interview is a fascinating read about the rise of dubious journals and the economics of it. Naturally when ~1000 articles are published in our field every month, we often don’t have the time to check on this, so Dr. Beall does a useful job. But more such Bealls are needed to get a global perspective on this.
• The article that appeared in Nature “Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing” (Mar 2013) can be read here [pdf] (for those of who can’t get beyond the paywall). The irony being ofcourse that it appears the critique of OpenAccess is strongest amongst journals which don’t practise it. However all is not lost, there is a “Critical Analysis of Scholarly OpenAccess Publishing” blog which has a number of criteria which could be used to define predatory-publishing:  checklist if you like.
• Science in the time of predatory publishing (Gracias Senor Gabriel Garcia-Marquez): Interview with a journal editor Mr. Aly from Egypt or Belgium, a former emloyee of Hindawi Publishing, India (!) which leaves lots to one’s imagination. Predatory publishing or simply bad scientific-publishing? You make up your mind.

• UNESCO Bioethics Core Curriculum http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001636/163613e.pdf (english)- if anybody wants to translate it into other Indian languages, feel free to do so.

2013-12-30

While ringing in the new year (anno domini, i.e. current era (CE) 2014) there has been a huge storm kicked up in the science publishing and science ‘generating’ communities. For long seen as one and the same (with editors and all reviewers doing work pro-bono, i.e. for no or token fees), the professionalization and possible expansion of scientific publication has some feel led to a chasm between the two communities.

I am ofcourse referring to the ‘sting’ by a member of the editorial staff of the journal Science (John Bohannon) and the counters by Mike Eisen and a bigger followup by Randy Schenkman. A nice review of similar stings in the past (submitting fake papers to journals and seeing them accepted, to demonstrate the flaws in the review system) highlights the efforts by Bohannon aren’t new. However the internet with its reach and speed, allow data to be gathered globally and surveyed somewhat quantitatively- as seen in this info-graphic from http://scicomm.scimagdev.org/