Productivity is important in research. Ultimately, you'll be judged on the importance, quality (and number) of papers that you publish. This got me thinking about whether there was a simple way of encapsulating this and I came up with the following:
Aim to do more and more important research per unit-time.
It's sort of obvious, but the key quantity is the rate at which you produce important, high-quality research. If you hardly ever publish anything, that's a bad thing. If you publish plenty, but all your papers are low-grade rubbish, that's a bad thing too. And even if you produce large numbers of high (technical) quality papers, but they're all studying unimportant problems, that's not great.
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Hey Rich! I've been enjoying your reflections on how to do better research.
ReplyDeleteThis post, and your meme-pool posts earlier, remind me of Hamming's talk "You and Your Research". If you haven't seen it already, it's certainly worth a read:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Hey Daniel! Glad you've been enjoying them :-) I have indeed read Richard Hamming's talk - I found it extremely inspiring. It's something I'd recommend every academic to read.
ReplyDelete(I actually wrote a blog post about it a while back: http://21stcenturyscientist.blogspot.com/2009/06/do-you-work-on-important-problems.html)
D'oh! Should've searched before I mentioned it :)
ReplyDeleteIn any case, keep up the good work.