Comment Cite This: Environ. Sci. Technol. 2018, 52, 929−930
pubs.acs.org/est
You Say You Want Some Resolutions?
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Resolution 5: Give better talks. No one likes a boring, poorly organized talk. This year, be the one who leaves the audience thinking after the session ends. Take advantage of resources available for improving your presentations. Ultimately, the most important elements of a great talk are preparation and practice in front of a critical audience. A professional musician would never dream of going on stage before they mastered the music. Why should a professional researcher be any different? Resolution 6: Put away that phone. E-mail, texts, WhatsApp, and Twitter can be great ways to stay in touch with friends, family, and your research community. But staring at your phone during a meeting is a sure sign that you are not really present (n.b., everyone knows that most people in a meeting with open laptops are not actually taking notes). If you are going to go through the effort of hauling yourself to a meeting, be part of it. Make this the year you learned to resist the allure of the glowing screen. Resolution 7: Go open access. Making research freely available to members of the public and professionals outside of academia is an important way of increasing our impact and maintaining public support for research. If you have the resources, make at least one paper per year open access. It costs about as much as an HPLC column. If you are strapped for funds, post a preprint on the ACS preprint server ChemRxiv or deposit the accepted version of the manuscript on a legitimate repository (e.g., PubMedCentral). While you are at it, delete your account with sharing sites that violate copyright. Resolution 8: Read something new. It is too easy to get into a rut, reading only topics directly related to your current research. This year, resolve to read 50 papers (about one per week) on topics tangentially related to your research. It is a long-term investment that will deliver dividends when new opportunities arise. If you are looking for ideas, screen the ACS Editors’ Choice, ES&T’s most read papers, or just skim the articles ASAP section of the journal. Resolution 9: Boldly go. It can be a bit intimidating to enter a new research field, especially when there is already an established cadre of researchers studying the topic. You have insights to share from your experience in a different area. Attend a conference session this year on a topic where you have no experience. Find a collaborator who can help you bridge the gap and jump into a new field. The excitement that comes from the cross-fertilization of new ideas, meeting new people, and the challenge of a new subject is worth the extra effort. Resolution 10: Stop procrastinating. It might seem like this editorial is a little late, but actually it is right on time. Happy Year of the Dog!
or many people, New Year’s resolutions are both a timehonored tradition and a means of motivating selfimprovement. You may have already starting working on resolutions related to your relationships, health, and spiritual well-being. If you have not already also made some professional resolutions, we offer 10 suggestions for members of the Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T) community: Resolution 1: Engage the public. As researchers, we have important insights into technical aspects of environmental issues that we want to share with the public. But with so many professional obligations competing for our time and few tangible short-term career rewards for such activities, we often fail to get involved. This year, resolve to tithe 2% of your time to public engagement. This translates to an average of about 1 h per week writing op-ed pieces, giving lectures to community groups, providing pro bono support to a civic group essentially anything that brings you into contact with people who do not know the difference between an IC and a GC. Resolution 2: Confront the contradictions. As ES&T readers, we are all aware of the impacts of our lifestyles on the environment, yet we often fail to alter our behavior in response to this knowledge. As teachers, mentors, and ambassadors of the environmental community, we need to serve as examples. Make this the year you confronted the contradiction between your interest in environmental protection and the massive greenhouse gas emissions associated with your air travel. Target a 25% reduction in your emissions by bundling trips together and declining to attend a few of the less important meetings that you might have agreed to take part in last year. Purchase carbon offsets as a means of reducing your impact and familiarizing your sponsors with the economics of a carbon tax. Resolution 3: Produce better papers. We all want our research to have a greater impact. One way to do so is by improving our writing. From experience, editors can tell you that the difference between rejection and acceptance of a manuscript often comes down to the quality of the presentation. In addition to taking advantage of ACS Authoring Services and online tutorials, we offer a few suggestions for ES&T authors: (a) obtain internal reviews from people who were not directly involved in the research; (b) spend as much time improving graphics as you do on editing and revising the manuscript’s text; and, (c) refrain from using any abbreviation that has not appeared in at least three papers that have already been published in the journal. Resolution 4: Write better reviews. All too often ES&T receives superficial reviews consisting of a few general sentences and a suggestion to cite a few publications from the reviewer. When this happens, we may be forced to go through the timeconsuming process of soliciting new reviews. Become a star reviewer this year. Take advantage of online tutorials. When we say that authors owe the community reviews, we mean useful reviews. If you find that you need more time to complete your review, ask the editor for an extension. A late, substantive review beats a useless, incomplete review every time. © 2018 American Chemical Society
Published: January 24, 2018 929
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.8b00279 Environ. Sci. Technol. 2018, 52, 929−930
Environmental Science & Technology
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Comment
David Sedlak, Editor-in-Chief 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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DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.8b00279 Environ. Sci. Technol. 2018, 52, 929−930
