Editorial pubs.acs.org/ac
So You Want to Be a Principal Investigator?
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my odds of becoming a PI are about 38%. If I change my gender to female with the same publication record, my probability of success drops by 9%. I am left with two conclusions about my own results: (1) I am glad my career is already launched, and (2) I need to consider whether these noncited editorials are hindering my future career prospects. But seriously, there are lessons to be learned from this study, and many of the conclusions are not surprising. Obtain high quality results and publish them in the best journal possible. If you do, you are more likely to become successful in academics. Perhaps this is not especially newsworthy, but it is important to keep in mind as you launch your career.
lways on the look-out for interesting topics to write about, I was especially intrigued by the article by Dijk et al.1 describing their online software for predicting the probability that a researcher will become a Principal Investigator (PI); the tool can be found at http://www.pipredictor.com/. Their machine-learning approach compiled PubMed data from more than 25 000 scientists. Their statistical analyses suggest that their tool is able to fairly accurately predict who will become a PI and how long it will take. I found the results impressive, fun to examine but also, in some respects, disappointing. How did the authors determine what it takes for you to be successful in academics? Among the over 200 metrics quantified, they examined the importance of first or second authorship, the number of publications, the impact factor of the journals published in, and even considered the influence of “hot” papers that received more than the average number of citations. The good news is that it is not just these parameters that determine the probability of becoming a PIquality publications, regardless of journal impact factor, do matter! What else contributes to the likelihood of your academic success? The rank of your university is important in determining your future, perhaps suggesting that a paper published in Analytical Chemistry by someone on the faculty at Harvard is worth more than one by someone affiliated with a less prestigious institution. Obviously, many scientists become PIs without high impact publications. Why is this? The authors found that if the number of first-author articles is high enough, this supposedly compensates for fewer high impact publications. The disappointing aspect is not with the assessment tool itself but what the overall results of the statistical analyses indicate. Gender remains a large factor in achieving PI status, and of course, this should not be the case. This observation is supported by an even more recent study by Sheltzer and Smith2 entitled “Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women”; sadly, this is true for both postdoctoral associates and graduate students. The difference in the number of female versus male trainees is greater when a male faculty member is considered “elite”, such as being an NAS member, having HHMI funding, or receiving major awards. Given that these prominent professors train a disproportionate number of nextgeneration scientists, collectively speaking, we must address this gender disparity! Until this is resolved, we as a community are wasting a valuable resource the creative female minds within our ranks. Getting back to the academic predictor study, there are several limitations to the models used. The data was collected from biomedical researchers more than a decade ago; perhaps our field of analytical chemistry uses different metrics and evaluating more recent data would yield a distinct model. Does the predictor work? I entered 34 of my publications from the last 2 years (from a current PubMed search), including a Nature and a Science article, both with many authors, as well as my recent Analytical Chemistry editorials, which have very few citations. The PIPredictor reported that © 2014 American Chemical Society
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Jonathan V. Sweedler AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) van Dijk, D.; Manor, O.; Carey, L. B Curr. Biol. 2014, 24, R516− 17. (2) Sheltzer, J. M.; Smith, J. C. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2014, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1403334111.
Published: July 16, 2014 7159
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac502543w | Anal. Chem. 2014, 86, 7159−7159
