Writing Resources

Right now I am meant to be writing a grant, but this lead me to looking into writing examples, and well here I am! Here are some links to useful scientific writing tips, all of which we should know, but seem to easily forget. The last link is not so much a resource but a nice article to make you laugh. If anyone has some other resources they'd like to share we'd love to hear about them.

Write Well and Prosper – Science Writing Tips

5 Tips to Improve Your Scientific Writing

Top ten writing tips for scientists

How to Write Like a Scientist

Webcasts to advance your career

Recently I attended two workshops designed to advance your career that were held here in Dublin as part of the European Science Open Forum, 2012. There were recorded and are now online and while not all the advice might relevant to you, they are certainly worth checking out. You can find them here.

The first discusses the importance of networking and creating a career plan. The second discusses how to use the library, plagiarism and some of the innovative ways in which the library can help researchers and this was presented by Mr. Ole Evensen. Mr. Evensen and his team at the library at the University of Bergen, Norway created a wonderful video on plagiarism is definitely worth checking out, click the CC button on the screen to turn on the English captions!  

2012 Goals

Ok, these are a little late in coming, but here are our goals for 2012

1. Hold our annual SIG meeting in Budapest

2. Hold two lunch round tables in Budapest aimed at career development for NIs. We will organize for senior researchers to join us and we will recycle much of the information we put together for the workshop last year. The working titles are:

a.    CVs, Resumes, and Cover Letters, oh my!

b.    Interview Tips and Strategies

3. Submit the Tricks of the Trade proposal for a symposium. This year we have Dr Juan Dapueto. Prof. John Brazier, Dr Dennis Revicki and Prof. Mirjam Sprangers partaking. We aim to make this an annual event at ISOQOL and are looking into recording the secession so that we can share it on our blog with researchers who were unable to attend.

4. Hold a meet-and-great for new investigators in Budapest.  This will be done outside the hotel at a local, nearby location.  We will hold it the same day as the SIG meeting, and will use this type of event to encourage people to get to know each other and talk about their research and quality-of-life research in general.

5. Hold SIG Elections.  We will work with Rebecca Brandt to run our first online election of a new Co-Chair this summer. (Bellinda King-Kallimanis’ 2-year term is up at the end of this year.)

6. Continue to build our blog site, which we hope to be able to integrate into the new ISOQOL website once that is launched.

Author Order in Peer Review

When do you consider author order? This can be a difficult topic for new investigators and can very much depend on the department you work in. In my experience, it is always best to have a discussion about author order early on, this of course isn't to say things can't be changed later on, but at least you know where you stand.

There is a nifty, little program that can help determine order call Authorder. While there are nuisances to choosing the order that this program won't pick up, it might help you to make an argument about order when you feel that perhaps your contribution to the work isn't being given enough weight.