When you, as a professor, write a paper on which the first author is a relatively inexperienced student (or even a postdoc!), do you edit a paper copy or a pdf of the manuscript and return the corrections (in bleeding red ink!) or do you edit the electronic source file (e.g. Word or Latex) directly? If the paper is not really progressing well towards the final version, how many times do you go back and forth with the student, with you editing and the student incorporating the edits, before you say "Screw it! This is going nowhere," take over, and rewrite the paper? Or do you, perhaps, write the whole thing from scratch?
As you might have guessed, I am editing some of my group's manuscripts, hoping to have them ready for submission before the semester starts in a bit under two weeks. Clearly, I have completely lost my mind.
In the following polls, please check all that applies. Students can certainly respond based on how their advisors usually do things. Or how they wish their advisors did things!
14 comments:
With my advisor it's quite student dependent. On a first paper with a student he'll go back and forth quite a lot and only takes a heavy hand with discussion/conclusions. On later papers, we do most of it, and he reviews it one section at a time, starting with figures. With students who do badly with papers repeatedly, he does most of the writing and then writes lukewarm recommendations.
I am the one who checked the box that says "My students only make the figs and I write the paper." I realize that that's a horrible way to mentor grad students, but I only have undergrads. I just didn't want anybody to look at the results and think that one of your readers would mentor grad students that way.
I try to not edit the papers directly but just comment on the stuff, I'd like to have changed. This can be scientific content, style of figures or style of writing.In the final stage I might go through the paper and fix up the grammar and the typos.
I checked 4-10 times, but it really depends on the student. My best student could write perfectly and we had everything sorted in max. 2 iterations. With another student we are now on iteration 7 and counting (although I am getting totally fed up with this paper! So would REALLY like to completely over, but then I can't really, as this will constitute a part of student's PhD thesis...)
For the second poll, I checked both printed/pdf annotation, because that is equivalent in the way I treat the draft - I edit the the pdf electronically with sticky notes in the same way as I would write comments in the paper copy. So the choice paper and pdf depends only on external situations: I'll take a paper copy if I know I'll read it in the office and pdf copy if I know that I will be e.g. travelling and don't want to lug around another printout.
I make edits on a paper copy or PDF so that they can't just "accept all changes in document".
Let me second the comments that how many times you go back and forth really depends on the student. Also, on the student seniority -- inexperienced students are generally worse than experienced ones, but of course this is on average. My postdoc was pretty bad when he joined the group, he had received very little training in writing as a grad student, so the first joint paper was like pulling teeth. But the second one was already much, much better from the get-go, as he took the learning experience seriously, and he's a very good writer now. I have had a couple of such students too, who really took in the comments and improved to a very high level very quickly. But then there are those for whom it just does not sink in and they continue to require fairly extensive edits on all of their work until they graduate.
In the poll, I would say put the number of back-and-forth times you go with a fairly inexperienced student; I wanted to see what the limits are on professorial patience/time.
Anon, yes, annotating pdfs [I use sticky notes as well as all the text edit features (cross out, insert, etc.)] is essentially the same as correcting a paper copy. I, for instance, correct paper copies of early drafts of a manuscript, simply because edits tend to be extensive and it's faster if I scribble in the margins. If the paper improves quickly, I often just annotate the pdf of later versions.
@Alex: I'm sorry, but I don't think it's a particularly good way to mentor undergrads, either. As an undergrad, I *wrote* a paper which my research advisor then *edited.* I know that I'm a better writer than most, but then again, a lot of undergrads write theses in order to graduate, so why can't you at least give them a chance at writing the paper? On a related note, are your undergrad students listed as first authors even if they only contribute the figs?
My undergrads are listed as first authors because they performed all of the simulations themselves and solved most of the technical problems themselves. They did a lot of edits on my draft, FWIW. And the main reason I did the writing was that we wanted this paper on arXiv before recommendation letters were due. I could write this faster than them.
I agree that it is better if they write, but that process takes longer with undergrads. I might have them write the second paper on the project, now that they have an example of how this particular project should be explained.
I write them... as much as needed.
I am up for tenure soon, cannot afford lousy papers.
@Alex: "And the main reason I did the writing was that we wanted this paper on arXiv before recommendation letters were due."
Why would having something on arXiv make a bit of difference in the recommendation letter of an undergrad? You can easily mention in the letter that you and said student are working on a joint publication. And am I now supposed to think that this was just a one-time occurrence? Sorry, but it sounds to me like you're just making excuses here. If you don't provide your undergrads with this experience because it takes too much of your time, then fine -- sucks for them. But let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Hopefully, your undergrads will have graduate advisors that will take the time to teach them how to write. Though I don't see how they transform into better writers upon being handed a diploma, so I imagine the time investment on *someone's* part will be just as great down the line.
Anon, no need to berate Alex.
And it's really not the same to have an undergrad and a grad student draft a paper. Undergrads have many more obligations competing for their time (larger class load, often working to help pay for school) so it does take much, much longer for them to produce a draft. While they don't magically become better writers when they start graduate school, they have lighter course loads, in STEM fields are supported by TA, RA, or fellowships so they don't have to work like they did as undergrads. But, perhaps most importantly, they feel ownership of their project -- which generally means that, when the time comes to draft a paper, they are significantly more likely than an undergrad researcher to have read many many papers in the field, so they know better both how papers need to look and what the technical background is.
Bottom line: I feel that it's a important to teach a student how to write papers, but how worthwhile an endeavor it is depends on them having read enough papers, having enough time to devote to writing, and feeling enough ownership of the project that they actually want to see it published. (The first an the third are missing even in some grad students, e.g. those who don't really care for research and are in grad school for the wrong reasons or just have a bad attitude towards grad school and/or writing, so it's really a poor investment of everyone's time and energy to coach them in technical writing.)
Anybody can say ghat the undergrad is working on a project that is about to yield a paper. Having it on arXiv is proof.
And if it were for the benefit of my career the damn thing would be submitted somewhere as an LPU and would be in peer review already. But we decided after the arXiv submission to do a few more things before submission to a journal, and they can write that part now that there isn't a deadline hanging over us.
Also, for conference abstracts, travel grant applications, and other short pieces of writing they do it themselves and I just edit. I am starting them off on technical writing with short pieces. I am not ignoring the topic. But, as GMP says, they haven't yet read enough long papers to know what the genres requires. I teach them scientific word usages and conventions via abstracts and maybe a section of this paper, and once they have that down we will see if they are ready to write the second paper from this project.
It depends on the student and on how much of the project is mine rather than the students. For senior thesis projects, I'm often not the adviser of record, but am just helping out students learn to write as part of a "thesis-writing" class. In those classes, I do none of the writing, but provide extensive feedback on 5 drafts.
I won't touch a PhD thesis, but generally provide comments of 5 drafts of each chapter.
With papers for publication, students have to do the first draft on any paper for which they are first author, and I'll generally do several rounds of comments before starting direct editing. I'll generally edit the file directly if it is a LaTeX file, but only provide written comments on paper for ones done in Word. I won't use Word. If a student died while working on a paper in Word, I'd take the text and transfer it to a LaTeX file to finish the paper.
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