Podcast: Working Scientist (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: How to get media coverage for your research
Pub date: 2020-02-27

Your paper has been accepted, reviewed and published. Now you need to get it talked about by journalists, the public, your peers and funders.

Pippa Whitehouse recalls seeking advice and media training from colleagues in her university press office when her first paper was published.

“I recorded some soundbites and listened back to them and reflected on how to communicate information very clearly. It gave me a lot of confidence,” says Whitehouse, an Antarctica researcher at the University of Durham, UK.

”All of the interaction I’ve had with the press has been really positive,” she adds. “It can seem a little bit daunting to begin with, but if you give it a go I think you’ll find the media are very interested in finding out about science.”

In the third episode of this four-part podcast series about getting published, Jane Hughes describes her role as director of communications and public engagement at The Francis Crick Institute in London.

She and her team help 1,500 researchers communicate their science to the press, public, policymakers and funders. Hughes recommends reaching out to press-office colleagues as soon as possible to discuss a paper’s potential for attracting newspaper, broadcast or online media coverage.

Researchers can take other steps themselves to get a paper talked about, she tells Levy. ”One thing that can make a difference is an image, a video or something alongside the paper that you can share on social media,” says Hughes.

She also warns against over-hyping a paper’s findings. ”Try not to sensationalize or over-simplify. You can work with your press office to make sure the message gets across properly.”

 

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Podcast: Hello PhD (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: 151. Avoid These Phrases in Your Peer Review
Pub date: 2021-03-01

The Peer Review villain, alternatively known as ‘Reviewer 2’ or ‘Reviewer 3’, has gained meme status. This is the person who takes your submitted journal article, drenches it in red ink, shreds it, burns it, and feeds the ashes to feral pigs.

And unfortunately, it has happened to all of us. There always seems to be one reviewer that doesn’t just ask for additional experiments, but finds a way to cut a little deeper.

Maybe it comes in the form of an emotive shaming (“Disappointingly, the authors failed to cite Smith, 2015”) or a veiled accusation (“It seems possible that the outlier data has been scrubbed from this report.”), but however it happens, it can affect something more than your experiments.

Some hostile comments might make you wonder whether you belong in science at all.

But, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it shouldn’t be this way.

This week, we talk with a linguist and a psychologist about carefully crafting your peer reviews.

Peer Review Detox

Dr. Rebekah Baglini and Dr. Christine Parsons realized there was a toxic undercurrent in some reviewers’ writing.

“Rejection is always difficult, but reviews that use emotive or sarcastic language are often the hardest for recipients to deal with, particularly if they are early-career researchers,” the two wrote in their recent article “If you can’t be kind in peer review, be neutral” published in Nature, November 30, 2020.

They argue that scientific reviews should look more like scientific writing: reviews should be neutral, fact-based, and not reflect the personality or emotions of the author.

But the shift to negativity can be subtle, and their article gives many examples:

The fact-based statement “The project proposal didn’t fulfill the stated requirements” can be modified to:

“The project proposal didn’t bother to fulfill the stated requirements.”

or

“The ‘project proposal’ didn’t fulfill the stated requirements.”

Both modifications drip with contempt, but neither adds value or new information. They just tell us how the reviewer was feeling in that moment.

This week, we talk with Drs. Baglini and Parsons as they unpack the importance of neutral peer review, the words to watch for, and some simple things you can do to make your own writing more appropriate and helpful.

And isn’t that the point?

Dr. Parsons concludes, “You don’t go around punching players on your own team. One of the objectives of peer review is to improve scholarship. Not just your own scholarship, but to improve scholarship in your field.”

For a full list of expressive words and phrases to avoid, see their article in Nature.

To follow their work, find them on Twitter (@RebekahBaglini and @ce_parsons ), or at the

Podcast: Women in Data Science (LS 40 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Cecilia Aragon | Aerobatic Pilot, Author and Data Scientist
Pub date: 2021-05-06

The multi-talented Cecilia Aragon is a data scientist, professor, author and champion aerobatic pilot. In this podcast, she explains how learning to fly gave her the confidence to pursue her career in human-centered data science and as an author.

Her book, Flying Free: My Victory Over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the US Aerobatic Team, is the story of how a timid daughter of immigrants who had terrible phobias overcame her fears to become a champion pilot. Learning to fly and excelling at it helped her overcome emotional barriers from childhood when she was fearful and doubted her abilities.

In her mid-20s, she was pursuing her PhD and felt a lack of confidence, so dropped out of the program. “It wasn’t that I had failed life, but I was living a very narrow life. I was just saying no to everything that might be exciting or interesting. And I saw my life stretching in front of me as incredibly narrow. A colleague offered me a ride in a small airplane…It suddenly occurred to me that living life too safely was dangerous for my spirit.” So, she took her first ride in the small plane and knew that she was going to learn how to fly.

She was very fearful as she was learning to fly and realized it was the same feeling she had in grad school when she didn’t think she knew enough to be there. She practiced a discipline of constant learning, trying, making mistakes, relearning, and trying again until you get it right. She builds in safety protocols to anticipate potential problems, and most of all, never gives up.

She applies these same techniques in data science. As director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab, Cecilia explains that every algorithm you write has potential human impact. A small error can be magnified and can have dramatic effects for thousands or millions of people.

She has co-authored a book called Human Centered Data Science: An Introduction to help experienced and new data scientists learn how to plan for and manage the unintended consequences from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of very large data sets. There are human decisions at every stage of the work of data science, and we discuss how bias and inequality may result from these choices and what to do to help prevent this. She says we need to put human needs and ethics at the center of data science and place data in its social context.

RELATED LINKS
Connect with Cecilia Aragon on LinkedIN and Twitter
Find out more about Cecilia on her University of Washington profile page
Find out more about Cecilia’s book
Learn more about the Human-Centered Data Science Lab at the University of Washington
Connect with Margot Gerritsen on Twitter (@margootjeg) and LinkedIn
Find out more about Margot on her Stanford Profile

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Professor Margot Gerritsen, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Teaching in Higher Ed (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Fostering Curiosity in STEM and Beyond
Pub date: 2020-10-27

Heloise Stevance shares how to foster curiosity in STEM and (other disciplines) on episode 333 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Some of the most fundamental questions you can ask are the hardest to answer and explain in a concise way.
-Héloïse Stevance

You captivate them with the things that are fun… because learning is fun.
-Héloïse Stevance

Good outreach doesn’t make you sound clever. It makes the audience feel smart.
-Héloïse Stevance

Failure is just part of the process. It is an ongoing part and never really goes away.
-Héloïse Stevance

Podcast: Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves. (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Bots’ Meddling in the 2020 Presidential Election – Emilio Ferrara
Pub date: 2021-01-12

Are automated bots on social media having extraordinary influence on our political discourse? In episode 91, Emilio Ferrara from the University of Southern California discusses about his research into the prevalence of bots and the injection of conspiracies theories across more than 240 million tweets regarding the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves., which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.