A Day In The Life

By publishing, reading

#paperoftheday #potd

A common complaint from other PIs is that they “don’t read enough any more”. I feel like this too and a solution was proposed by a friend of a friend*: try to read one paper per day.

This seemed like a good idea and I started to do this in 2013. The rules, obviously, can be set by you. Here’s my version:

  1. Read one paper each working day.
  2. If I am away, or reviewing a paper for a journal or colleague, then I get a pass.
  3. Read it sufficiently to be able to explain it to somebody else, i.e. don’t just scan the abstract and look at the figures. Really read it and understand it. Scan and skim as many other papers as you normally would!
  4. Only papers reporting primary research count towards #paperoftheday.
  5. If it was really good or worth telling people about – tweet about it.
  6. Make a simple database in Excel or Papers – this helps you keep track, make notes about the paper (to see if you meet #3) and allows you to find the paper easily in the future (this last point turned out to be very useful).

I started this in 2013 (for one full year) and am trying to continue in 2014. I feel that this is succeeding in making me read more than I would have otherwise done.

My stats for 2013 were:

  • 85% success rate. Filling that last 15% will be tough.
  • Stats errors in 48% of papers! Most common error was incorrect use of Student’s  t-test.
  • 68% of papers were from 2013 and 22% were from 2009-2012.

The big surprise was which journals I read most:

  1. J Cell Biol 13
  2. PLOS One 12
  3. Nat Cell Biol 10
  4. PNAS 10
  5. Curr Biol 9
  6. Mol Biol Cell 8
  7. Nature 8
  8. Dev Cell 7
  9. eLife 7
  10. Nature Methods 7
  11. Cell 6
  12. Neuron 6
  13. Traffic 6
  14. J Cell Sci 4
  15. Science 4

I thought that Cell would be much higher and PNAS would be much lower. Since where we publish is dictated by who is likely to see and read the paper, this list was thought-provoking.

*I think this was a colleague of @david_s_bristol who suggested it, sometime in 2012.

The post title is of course from A Day in The Life – The Beatles from the LP Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For the first line…

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