Being THAT reviewer

Last week, my supervisor popped by in the lab and told me he had been asked to review a manuscript, but didn’t have time to do it. Whether I would like to review it. Naturally, I said yes. To please him, because he’ll have to write substantial amounts of recommendation letters before I’ll reach the stage where I can do without him… Also, because I felt like it was some kind of test, to see whether I’m up to it; I still feel like I have to prove myself here somehow. Apart from that, I accepted because I think it’s a good way to learn. I give him my comments and write a draft review, he adjusts this as he sees fit and sends this also to me. Might be a good experience before trying to really review stuff signed by me and not my boss.

Which brings me to the point of this post: how do I get to the stage where I get to review things? As much as I like doing my bosses work without getting credit for it, of course I would like to advance, do the same work and be able to list it as super major (not) thing on my CV. Do I sit back and wait for the journals to find me? Do I join some kind of “I am not an overwhelmed PI yet and can do some free reviewing for you in a reasonable timeframe”-database? Or is this something only PIs are invited to, although they mostly don’t have the time for it anyway?

I really would like to review stuff, for multiple reasons. I’d get things to read that might be slightly outside of my usual scope (or so I hope..), meaning I’d have to read up on some unfamiliar topics. Which I mostly only do if I have a reason for it, like needing to have an opinion. Being forced to come out of my comfort zone every now and then would be good. Also, thinking critically about experiments someone else did, keeps one alert. After commenting on wrong controls or missing statistics, you would be particularly fluff-brained if you’d make the same mistake yourself. And finally, stupid reason… Every now and then, I simply miss the pressure I had during the last stages of my PhD work, reading, writing, reviewing my thesis and articles. I like to have a reason to spend an evening reading every now and then 🙂 Crazy huh?

So yeah, if anyone knows how one gets to be *chosen* as reviewer, let me know!!

Back to the lab!!

So finally, life is returning to normal. I have written like crazy past weeks and finished a review for a really shiny Journal. With Capitals. They actually want to publish our stuff. And besides that, I have written two proposals, one at my university to get some money for consumables, the other for a Fellowship that’ll take me abroad.

My intuitive response to this uncertainty about my future is to burry in labwork, which feels great! Doing real experiments again, pipetting things together feels like some kind of relaxing therapy. But oh man, the future. Either I don’t get a fellowship and have to start searching for alternatives, or I get one and will turn my life upside down by moving. Adventure seems inevitable at this stage…

But yeah, for now, I’ll just be happy that I finished writing and enjoy the relative peace & quiet of doing labwork… Hakuna matata!

Over interpretations

Now that I am writing a review, I am more critical than usual when reading research articles. Somehow, it seems that a lot of authors interpret their data in a way I wouldn’t. Am I being extremely picky or is this something common that I just never noticed because I did not take single figures apart as thoroughly as I am doing right now??

For those of you that live outside our ivory science tower: a review is some sort of summary of a research area. So basically, by reading abstracts and conclusions, complemented by browsing through results sections every now and then, I thought I knew what was described in a lot of research articles. But now I’d like to summarize them for a good journal, I want to be sure that I got it right. And notice all of a sudden that pretty often, experiments performed to do not suffice to justify the conclusions drawn. Interesting……