If and When: publishing and productivity in the lab

I thought I’d share this piece of analysis looking at productivity of people in the lab. Here, productivity means publishing papers. This is unfortunate since some people in my lab have made some great contributions to other peoples’ projects or have generally got something going, but these haven’t necessarily transferred into print. Also, the projects people have been involved in have varied in toughness. I’ve had students on an 8-week rotation who just collected some data which went straight into a paper and I’ve had postdocs toil for two years trying to purify a protein complex… I wasn’t looking to single out who was the most productive person (I knew who that was already), but I was interested to look at other things, e.g. how long is it on average from someone joining the lab to them publishing their first paper?

The information below would be really useful if it was available for all labs. When trainees are looking for jobs, it would be worth knowing the productivity of a given lab. This can be very hard to discern, since it is difficult to see how many people have worked in the lab and for how long. Often all you have to go on is the PubMed record of the PI. Two papers published per year in the field of cell biology is a fantastic output, but not if you have a lab of thirty people. How likely are you – as a future lab member – to publish your own 1st author paper? This would be very handy to know before applying to a lab.

I extracted the date of online publication for all of our papers as well as author position and other details. I had a record of start and end dates for everyone in the lab. Although as I write this, I realise that I’ve left one person off by mistake. All of this could be dumped into IgorPro and I wrote some code to array the data in a plot vs time. People are anonymous – they’ll know who they are, if they’re reading. Also we have one paper which is close to being accepted so I included this although it is not in press yet.

The first plot shows when people joined the lab and how long they stayed. Each person has been colour-coded according to their position. The lines represent their time spent in the lab. Some post-graduates (PG) came as a masters student for a rotation and then came back for a PhD and hence have a broken line. Publications are shown by markers according to when a paper featuring that person was published online. There’s a key to indicate a paper versus review/methods paper and if the person was 1st author or not. We have published two papers that I would call collaborative, i.e. a minor component from our lab. Not shown here are the publications that are authored by me but don’t feature anyone else working in the lab.

This plot starts when I got my first independent position. As you can see it was ~1 year until I was able to recruit my first tech. It was almost another 2 years before we published our first paper. Our second one took almost another 2 years! What is not factored in here is the time spent waiting to get something published – see here. The early part of getting a lab going is tough, however you can see that once we were up-and-running the papers came out more quickly.

In the second plot, I offset the traces to show duration in the lab and relative time to publication from the start date in the lab. I also grouped people according to their position and ranked them by duration in the lab. This plot is clearer for comparing publication rates and lag to getting the first paper etc. This plot shows quite nicely that lots of people from the lab publish “posthumously”. This is thanks to the publication lag but also to things not getting finished or results that needed further experiments to make sense etc. Luckily the people in my lab have been well organised, which has made it possible to publish things after they’ve left.

I was surprised to see that five people published within ~1.5 years of joining the lab. However, in each case the papers came about because of some groundwork by other people.

I think the number of people and the number of papers are both too low to begin to predict how long someone will take to get their first paper out, but these plots give a sense of how tough it is and how much effort and work is required to make it into print.

Methods: To recreate this for your own lab, you just need a list of lab members with start and end dates. The rest can be extracted from PubMed. Dataviz fans may be interested that the colour scheme is taken from Paul Tol’s guide.

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The post title comes from “If and When” by The dB’s from Ride The Wild Tomtom