Aim High

During my first week as a postdoc at FAI, we had a group meeting where everyone briefly mentioned what projects they were working on. My adviser showed some slides, and at the end had some made-up covers of Science and Nature with our work on them. It drew some chuckles in the crowd.

My office mate openly tells me that he would like a paper to be published in the top technical journal of our field.

I had never thought of that before. Or I never openly admitted that I wanted that before.

In graduate school, my dissertation adviser openly criticized Science, Nature, and the top journal of our scientific field. He’d say that the experiments published there can only be performed once (i.e., they are not replicable). He’d say that certain research topics can always easily publish there while others are almost always denied. Aside from the whole Henrik Schoen debacle, most results published in those journals are replicable. And yes, there is a bias for certain research topics to be published there even when they have not made “big” breakthroughs. My dissertation adviser tried to play it cool – as if he was too good to try to even consider publishing in Science/Nature. Later, I found out that as a grad student, he did submit a manuscript to Science and it was rejected. Regardless what he publicly says, he does push some of his (former) postdocs to submit their papers to top journal of our scientific field, and so far most have been rejected. Some of the research topics my adviser works on are “hot” but these manuscripts (or his research program) lack a big picture/sell to them… which is something he does not realize.

My new project as a postdoc could result in a publication in top technical journal of our field (which I would love!) or the experiment might not be so interesting and gets published in a lesser journal. I am not ashamed of wanting an article in fancy name journal. Here, I aim high and hope for the best.