•••quote:•••Bikini Princess: "In an ideal world, you want to be the person interpreting the results, not the person doing them. And get a chance to write proposals or abstracts for meetings too. You want your name first; not wedged between the post-doc, the PI, and five other people." ••••I think you're exactly right in the above statement. And your questions are almost the same as mine a few months earlier.
It's good that your PI said that you might have a chance being the first author. My PI explicitly mentioned that he won't have the students write papers. At this stage, I think it's good enough to just have your name as one of the authors. Reasons are that :
1. the postdocs have a much easier time writing them.
2. we're the labor force
spending time writing papers, we'll lower our productivity.
3. at the postdoc level, people tend to look at the # of pubs and recent publications, not pubs that were published years back.
So my tips for getting names on publications:
1. choose an active PI.
2. discuss with your PI about the # of possible papers
3. discuss about the amount of work necessary to be one of the authors
4. be involved in many projects
5. express an interest in having pubs
6. work hard and provide as much brainpower as possible.
*. Though grasp every opportunity to be 1st.
We could be the 1st author only when it's our project or when we write the paper. It's definitely more worthwhile to analyze data and interpret results than to do experimental procedures. However, most likely we're expected to do lab work, so avoid competing with postdocs and grad students because it's a competition that we don't often end up winning.
At my current laboratory, I have been doing lab work and interpreting data though I'd prefer writing papers instead. It's okay 'cause I had decided to settle for the number of publications.
Good luck in finding the balance of power.
RT
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Btw, where's the bikini?
