On Recognition and Discouragement

(by Sara Johansson)

Last week I nearly broke into tears in the lab, and the reason was neither a failed experiment nor a reactor malfunctioning. No, the reason was that a colleague mentioned that he had read a paper that I contributed to some years ago. This unexpected strike of recognition worked its way through the rather thick skin I have grown during years of lab work and touched a tenderer spot inside me. Doing research is pretty rough, at least if you are working in a lab, most of us are quite content if not too many things go wrong and that in the end of the day you are still able to maintain the hope that you will get results enough to get a paper together. As encouragement we remind ourselves that we are part of a web of science and that great discoveries are the result of accumulated knowledge. Science recently presented statistics from Sci-Hub, the world’s largest pirate website for scholarly literature. Out of the nearly 30 million downloads from September 2015 to February 2016 the top one had little less than 8000 downloads and the number 10 had 1800 download. This illustrates the fact that scientists generally work in highly specialized fields but also gives an order of magnitude on how many (or few) people will read your publications. Therefore, that someone actually acnowledges to having read your paper and found it useful is quite amazing, at least for an early stage researcher.

The second part of this experience was that it threw me back to the time when I was a student and preparing the results that later resulted in that paper. The idea I was testing was a bit out there; my professor and I were trying out something that was quite opposite of how things had been done before. I struggled a lot with the experimental work; there were the bottles of manure exploding in the incubator, gas leaks from the reactor so tricky to detect plus the regular worrying about the microorganisms during weekends. But apart from this I also remember how people kept telling me my experiments would not work out, that the project was a waste of time and that it would all fail because we were not running the reactors the regular way. This was not very encouraging to say the least and honestly I suffered a great deal. However, the results were promising and after I finished my project the work was continued by a PhD student and it crystalized into a paper, a patent and eventually a full-scale installation. Now with more experience I would say that their negative attitudes do not fit into a research environment, because the obvious key point with research is to try out things that have not been done before. However, doing something novel goes hand in hand with having to face scepticism, so as an encouragement to anyone doing something innovative, grow a thick skin and try out your idea!

Bohannon, J., Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone, Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=scihub-3916 retrieved 2016–05–05