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FORUM Labs Look for the Write Stuff Jan Schmollinger Photo by Jeff Cleary As a minimum, applicants must have at least one first-author publication in press or published in an international peer- reviewed journal at the time of application. This rule is strictly applied as experience shows that those with weaker CVs are never successful." This paragraph, taken from the guidelines of a postdoctoral fellowship application, comes right to the point: the results of your PhD thesis project may be impressive, but if they have not appeared in a scientific journal, they simply do not count when you apply for funding to take the next step in your academic career. The Key Criteria The evaluation of a young scientist is often difficult since the short CV offers little on paper to give a selection committee a sense of the candidate. A personal presentation or an interview may be much more valuable, but this is often not possible given the dozens of scientists who file an application. (The organization whose guidelines are quoted above does rely on interviews in the second stage of its selection process.) The results of your PhD thesis project may be impressive, but if they have not appeared in a scientific journal, they simply do not count when you apply for funding to take the next step in your academic career. --Jan Schmollinger Certainly publication is a good way to measure an applicant's strength, but I wonder whether this should be the most important criterion. Graduate students--in contrast to postdocs--usually focus on one particular project. Coursework, extensive reading, and mastering technique make students advance more slowly at the bench and concentrate their efforts. More than once I have seen these projects take unexpected turns and occasionally go nowhere in terms of a publishable, closed story. In many of these cases, this "failure" did not mean that the student did not try hard enough or lacked the intellectual ability to address the existing questions. If I were a reviewer for a funding agency, I would also be interested in the originality of a project, whether the candidate tried to further the field or just went down a beaten path. Many graduate students--and I am certainly no exception--start their thesis project with relatively little bench experience and not exactly comprehensive knowledge of the field. I think it would be of great interest to learn how a recent graduate looks at his or her thesis topic in hindsight. Does the student, now armed with a deeper understanding, think the approach taken was the right way to go? Has a broader outlook developed? I also think it would be of interest to find out how much the newly minted PhD actually contributed to the listed publications. (Of the six principal investigators I have interviewed with so far for a postdoctoral stint, only one asked me straight out how much of the published manuscript I had actually written.) Another limitation of publishing or perishing from a graduate student's perspective is that the need to see one's results in print may promote a risk-averse attitude. What may look like a groundbreaking and interesting project to an adviser often looks more like a high-stakes bet to a PhD candidate. System Errors Finally, the peer review process, which is supposed to allow only works of high quality to be published, comes with its own flaws. Many manuscripts never reach this stage and are not sent out for review because the responsible editor decides they are not of interest to the majority of the readership. Furthermore, your peers are not always willing to accept that you found evidence that supports a hypothesis different from theirs. One not-so-favorable evaluation is all it takes to derail your efforts at seeing your results in print. Also, as witnessed recently, peer review is no guarantee that fraudulent results will not be published. There are many arguments against the current publication process that call into question whether scientific papers should be the foremost criterion for judging applicants. But this reasoning will not help you much when looking for your next lab. During my six interviews, all at academic institutions in Europe, each investigator clearly hinted to me that one of the prerequisites for joining the lab was securing your own funding. Since funding agencies base their decision heavily on the applicant's publication record, the importance of a good first-authorship cannot be overestimated. To ensure that they develop the necessary writing skills, principal investigators should probably give their students every opportunity to hone their abilities. Penning a first draft or submitting an abstract to a scientific meeting may not only come in handy when finishing a manuscript, but also when preparing a fellowship application. --Jan Schmollinger, an HMS research associate in medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute