How do they do it? :Research and Undergrad First-author Publications

Graduate School
1

<p>How do people manage to get first author publications (I mean its hard enough just to get research experience let alone your name on a paper)? </p>

<p>If you're the main author, was the research topic your idea? So I dont understand how students decide what to do because its so difficult to find a topic that's original and feasible for an undergrad. And then theres making sure whethere there is equipment available and stuff.</p>

<p>Also how do these students manage it under all the other workload on their shoulders. (I mean despite the whole team and all being there theyd be doin most of the work).</p>

<p>Do undergraduate theses count as research experience cuz from what i gather, they sound more like design reports (the engineering theses that is). And if they arent then it must be so hard for engineering students to muddle through both the thesis and the design reports or capstones!</p>

<p>Man getting into Top Grad schools needs tons of work! Dont think I'm up for it...</p>

2

<p>You normally work with a team or specific instructor on your first papers, where the senior person (or principal investigator) has experience publishing. You volunteer to contribute a portion to a larger topic/body of research. That’s how you learn the ropes. It’s also a great way to build relationships and advance learning through collaboration.</p>

<p>There is more than one way to list the contributors to the paper but normally you would expect the senior people to contribute more and get top billing. If the senior person is well known in their field, it is an advantage to have your name associated with theirs as you build your own reputation. </p>

<p>As you gain experience, seniority & reputation you will see opportunity for topics and grow to be the first author, as you mentor the rest of your team.</p>

3

<p>How do you prove to the principal investigator that you are capable of doing much more than the rest of the team, especially when you are supposed to be the most inexperienced in the team?</p>

4

<p>By displaying qualities admirable in a research assistant in their classes. If you attend a “research” college, this shouldn’t be hard; it really is up to you to seek out those opportunities with your department or elsewhere. If none are evident, ask. They’ll tell you if there is something available to take advantage of.</p>

5

<p>To be fair, I don’t have a first author publication, but I think it just takes a lot of dedication, some luck, and a really awesome PI.</p>

<p>First you have to prove yourself to be really competent, and eventually you get more independence and more responsibility. I spent over a year working on a phd student’s project and eventually was given an independent project when I was able to commit to a summer of full-time work, plus part-time during the school year. I was lucky to have a super supportive PI, willing to put in the work it took to sort of guide me through everything. I left the lab when I graduated college, but had I stayed, I may have been able to publish something after a year or so (with TONS of help).</p>

<p>I think aiming for a first-author publication as an undergrad is sort of silly. I did research for almost all of college and I feel really lucky to have a 2nd author. Even that took a ton of dedication and some weird hours in the lab (sunday 9pm… time to go put drugs on my cells!). I think it’s way more important to finding a lab where you can do substantial work that you understand and can talk about, plus finding a PI who supports you and will write you an enthusiastic letter of rec at the end.</p>

<p>

Just takes time and patience.</p>

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<p>Is it a blow to your application to have research experience (a significant amount, in fact) but no publications?</p>

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<p>^ absolutely not…</p>

<p>~~~</p>

<p>the thing I’m wondering is how much literature you would have to read before you can actually do a first author. Obviously, you need to have a ton of background knowledge. that involves reading a lot of scientific articles, journals, and textbooks. that alone takes up hours upon hours of research that not a lot of undergrads can afford.</p>

<p>I’ve always wondered if I should be doing more resesarch in the labs, or should I be reading more articles to help me beef up my background knowledge. I’m still trying to figure that out…</p>

8

<p>@spectastic</p>

<p>That’s a question I’ve been trying to solve for myself too. Especially with undegrad work, you certainly cannot handle both -studying literature and advancing research projects- Haven’t figured out either how to balance those out, but what I do is question every now and then where I stand amongst the senior lab members. Can I keep a conversation up with them? (given that I hold them in high esteem). So I alternate between focusing more on lit and focusing more on advancing projects. I think this approach saves me time as well, as I turn to lit when I feel less inspired about how to move forward.
Moreover, one thing I’ve come to realize is that after I get my degree, I would like to commit at least for two years to a research project as an assistant cause it’s not just about filling up a CV, it’s also about getting substantial original work done. So that is when you’ll (we’ll) probably have time to keep up with research and lit.
And on a final note, in my opinion, catching up with all the lit about a subject is simply unfeasible at this point, I just get some good reviews and keep an eye out for citations that could be very interesting. After I’m done with the reviews I go and catch up on the latest.</p>

<p>How do they do it? No idea. It’s probably a set of very favorable circumstances, helpful PI, good funding (for an undegrad to be given expensive “toys”), and a smart choice of a research subject i suppose</p>

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<p>I suppose you ought to have good access to journals on the matter. Its not something you can decide off the internet, thats for sure. Then there’s getting permission to work alone in a lab and stuff like that. And then about the right PI, I’m guessing thats key because once the PI takes you on as the 1st author it completely defeats the pupose of calling him a PI. I wish I could find some1 like that to work with in my school:(</p>

10

<p>i know very few undergrads in research that have their own first author research papers. A lot of them got on as second authors, but the only one I know that MAY get a first author has been in this lab for…5 years (3 undergrad, 2 afterwards), and basically has been working on her honors thesis project this whole time. Highly doubt it’ll get published before she intends to go to grad school, but it’s the right track.</p>

<p>As for me, my first authors came on a review that my PI let me write. my PI approached me and told me that it would look good to admissions committee to produce some form of publication to show what i’ve done/learned during my time in lab. Luckily, this review was just assigned to me, so it was a great experience to write a review with minimal help from PI or a co-author.</p>

<p>I would say, try to get on a paper if you are an undergrad or an RA. Doesn’t have to be first author…especially with how hard it is for fields like bio (not sure about other fields), but try to get on a paper to show the committee that you have contributed to a project enough to warrant a mention as an author</p>

11

<p>I have always questioned how an undergrad could publish a paper as a first author. You really don’t have an indepth knowledge of the subjects to plan research projects, execute the needed experiments, and quantitate/interpret results. I did undergrad research for two years of undergrad at my university, and did 3 REU programs. In all of that time, I only had one opportunity to publish, but my experiments didn’t work; therefore, any plans on getting published were dashed. Also, I really didn’t know how to “own” a research project, and meet research deadlines, and construct cogent, directed research/validation plans until my second year of working in industry. If you can truly get a 1st author on a paper as an undergrad, more power to you. However, most people who apply to graduate programs, regardless of ranking, don’t have pubs. I don’t really know too many people in industry w/ a first author pub, unless it came from grad school. It is one thing to perform tasks assigned by a manager/PI, but when you have to basically start from “scratch” on a research project, and deliver results by on a deadline that is a whole other beast. That kind of work takes hours and weekends, and late nights to finish. But after you get the hang of it, you can accomplish those tasks in a 40 hour week if you are good (but at most in a 60 hr week).</p>

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<p>Based on MY RESEARCH, a publication is your ticket to a top Grad school even with a not so stellar GPA. Yes you dont need one if you arent applying to a TOP5 grad school program, but then again as has been mentioned here repeatedly, you need to go by research interest/department not the University’s rank.</p>

<p>With a first author publication you can be even more certain of getting accepted. These people are really rare and lucky. Its like a mock-phd they have right there. It seriously is difficult to get a publication for me, I’m longer worried about being the 1st or co-author so long as my name’s on that paper.</p>

13

<p>Quite frankly, I’m not really sure how an undergrad in my field would earn a first authorship. It would have to be a combination of sheer excellence and luck.</p>

<p>The excellence would come in from being bright and ambitious enough to 1) know what publication is, and how important it is, early enough to pursue one, 2) start doing research early enough to work your way into a position in which you could petition to publish, and 3) come up with an original idea on which to work with your professor. In some fields, you’d also have to have the requisite statistical/mathematical/computational analysis skills to analyze the data. I was an ambitious undergrad myself who started doing research in my sophomore year, but I’d say I was not prepared for independent research work until my senior year of college. If you started doing scientific research in high school, you could be ready earlier.</p>

<p>The luck comes in with the data. You have to join a lab that is in the appropriate data stage for you to publish something - as in, mostly collected and ready for cleaning and analysis. in my field, the cleaning and analysis stage can take several months in and of itself - an entire semester, perhaps. The undergrad who joins a psychology lab at the beginning of data collection in the beginning of his or her junior year probably wouldn’t see enough data collected to do analyses until MAYBE the end of his or her junior year, or the beginning of senior year. If you joined earlier, or your lab was further along in the process, perhaps you’d have enough - but then you probably wouldn’t be involved enough in the project to be first author except in the former case.</p>

<p>If you do have a summer to devote full-time to working on a project, and your PI has a project in the appropriate place, if you work quickly you could probably have something ready to submit between the end of the summer and the end of the year.</p>

<p>Undergraduate theses do count as research experience, depending on the kind you did. In my field you had to design and execute a psychological study, and it certainly counted as research.</p>

<p>Most people come out of undergrad without any publications, and the vast majority of people admitted to PhD programs (even in the STEM fields) don’t have one. Think about it like sprinkles on a cupcake - definitely can enhance the taste, but not required. I think how much a publication can balance out a mediocre GPA depends 1) on how bad the GPA is and 2) how good the publication is, and what journal it was published in.</p>

<p>I think reading widely in a field is what graduate school is for. Your job as an undergrad is to grasp the basics: the basic knowledge you need to build upon in your field and the basic process of scientific research. Graduate school is 5-7 years of reading, reading, reading the literature in your field. Not that you shouldn’t read at all in your spare time if you have it, but your focus should be on providing a foundation for yourself.</p>

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<p>You don’t need undergraduate research to get into a top graduate program. It’s nice if you have it but there are other routes.</p>

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<p>I’m all ears…</p>

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<p>Nothing to be “all ears” about. If you find profiles of students admitted to top graduate programs, many have some research on their application profile, many do not. </p>

<p>Is it a major asset? Yes. Is it a death knell if you don’t have it? No.</p>

<p>Here’s a logical test: Are there research opportunities at liberal arts colleges? Few. Do students from LAC’s get into top grad programs? Yes. Ergo.</p>

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<p>

This might depend on the field. For example, in pure math very few graduate applicants (even those who end up at tippy top universities) have “real” research experience. The minimum contribution that would qualify as “research experience” in math (= a new original idea and follow-through) would get you a first-author paper in other disciplines, which seems very rare too. </p>

<p>Less substantial research experience is much easier to come by in many other fields. For example, in the lab sciences students can conduct experiments for their professors. (And LACs usually have lab facilities too…)</p>

<p>

Can you elaborate? It seems that the better LACs go out of their way to get their students research experience (e.g. a senior thesis/project requirement, summer research programs on campus, and sometimes even grant support for projects off campus) and that lower-ranked LACs rarely send students to strong graduate programs; but my impressions might be off.</p>

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<p>Depends on what you mean by “research” at LAC’s. I would call it more toe in the water or splashing around the shallow end of the pool. Profs at LAC’s are teachers first and their own research generally is on the back burner vis a vis their teaching; not the same m.o. as at research universities. </p>

<p>My D had a research assistant position for two years in Computer Science. Her major was a double in Math/Government with an 80-page thesis on one aspect of education policy. She’s in a Top 10 program for a PhD in Economics. Hard to connect the dots in a meaningful way. I’m familiar with quite a few of her classmates, none of whom received lead author credits in a relevant field. The field that probably had the most “hands on” research of significance at her Top 20 LAC was in the biology/neuroscience area. (I read all the award winning thesis titles in the graduation program. Anal retentive I guess.)</p>

19

<p>

Fair point. I suspect that exposure to the “research process” is much more important than the significance of the project being worked on. In fact, one could argue that LACs are doing even better in this respect because students get much more responsibility on a toy research problem than they would get on a real research project at a major research university. </p>

<p>Going by popular opinion, undergraduate research experience seems to be much more important in some fields (e.g. lab sciences) than others (e.g. math). Some of that might have to do with the way that academic programs and funding are set up in different fields. For example, PhD students in math are usually funded by the department, while PhD students in some sciences and engineering disciplines are typically funded on the research grants of individual faculty members and join a lab as soon as they enter the program. Research groups might want to see more of a past research record before they make a commitment to fund an applicant. </p>

<p>I am not trying to argue that undergraduate research experience is universally important. But I do have the impression that it is essential in some fields. That’s why some posters on this thread cannot imagine getting into a semi-decent graduate program without a publication while others don’t understand what all the fuss is about. </p>

<p>You have made a general claim that research experience is never necessary. Unless you have evidence suggesting that this is true in every single specialty out there, you should be careful about making broad statements like that.</p>

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<p>Maybe we should split the graduate school forum into 2 sections, LAs and engineering. The forums would each be half as lively, but at least people get the right feedback.</p>

<p>I know for sure that in engineering, you gain a lot of favor in the eyes of professors if your undergrad research matches with their research proj. That way, you can hit the ground running as soon as you get there. Also, I’ve heard of cases in which science labs accepted some good GPA students from good schools for summer REUs. They were apparently really bad at doing research.</p>