44
Thought processes are messy.
If you wrote out the thought process behind the typical papers I contribute to, you'd have to distill hours of weekly meetings, circular avenues where the same idea comes up 2 or 3 or 2 dozen different times before it gets incorporated definitively, endless iterations of experimental design, dead ends and failed experiments where ...
26
You need to be prepared to offer a lot more detail. Most academics have no need for entering a library anymore, so if you do, you need to explain that. If the library offered curbside pickup for some books, you need to explain what that did not work in your case.
Perhaps you work exclusively with rare documents and had medical reasons to not be able to ...
20
My answer is from a mathematics perspective.
I like the analogy of exploring an alien landscape for doing research in mathematics. In this analogy, the ideal mathematical paper reports on having found some astonishing landmark together with useful instructions of how to get there.
Good instructions for how to find a place will look very, very different than ...
16
Since review times in math can easily take 12 months, you achieve this by writing at least four short papers at least 18 months before you want to graduate. Then find journals that are scopus ranked that are not too prestigious and where there is someone on the editorial board in your area. Do not write long papers and do not do anything too revolutionary. ...
15
Let me suggest two reasons for loss of productivity that have nothing to do with libraries.
The first is burn-out. If you went through an intense period of you life (academic or other wise) prior to the time the pandemic hit, you might just be suffering from that. It can be debilitating. My solution (long ago) for dealing with it was to make a rather large ...
12
In papers from my field (chemistry/materials science), it is actually quite common to do exactly what you suggest. However, you will not find anything of that in the typical methods/experimental sections because those are reserved for a description of what was done. The why is part of the discussion part of papers where authors explain what the underlying ...
11
Many "breakthroughs" outside academia are secret and professors never hear about them. This includes trade secrets and military secrets.
Achievements from industrial research labs which do become public are treated in the same way that achievements from academic labs are treated.
Most science, including the really good stuff, is incremental ...
10
I can speak to why this is the case in mathematics; I suspect this bled over into the physical sciences as well but that's just a hunch.
When I was an undergrad I tried to read Rudin's Principles of Mathematical
Analysis and at first I was totally perplexed -- seemingly out of the blue, he'd pull out the value of what some constant had to be in order to make ...
9
It's very improbable. If you don't know the terminology, odds are you don't know what you're talking about and cannot contribute meaningfully to the field, especially if the field is theoretical physics (this field is complex enough that many physics graduates cannot contribute meaningfully to it).
If I received a paper discussing, e.g., dark matter and it's ...
9
It is possible, but very unlikely that such a paper would be published. It would be likely to confuse experts if you use terms that aren't standard, though good explanations would help.
More seriously though, is that your lack of knowledge is likely to lead you to write things that experts consider trivial and that you might wind up making erroneous ...
7
I assumed that since I was, in a way, a part of this group, any research that they may have under preparation or review would be accessible to me, in some manner, and I wouldn't have to wait until the published versions came out to access the research. Is my assumption correct, and is my experience less common than the alternative?
It would be typical in ...
7
You don't give a lot of background details, so let me also say that it doesn't seem clear why you would need to "address this in interviews" at all. Focussing on things you weren't able to do, and making excuses — even if they might be valid excuses — is usually not something that should be discussed in any great detail, unless there are some very ...
7
I don't know any specifics about Firat University, but I will mention a few points:
There are a lot universities in Turkey more reputable than Firat, both private unis and state unis (e.g. state: Bogazici, METU, ITU, Ege, Ankara; private: Koc, Sabanci, Bilkent, Ozyegin, etc.). So I would not put the university to a high standard.
State universities in Turkey,...
7
I am not sure that we really have access to our actual thought processes behind our research, just the post-hoc internal explanation that we remember. It would require us to actively analyse and record our thought processes as we go along and who has the time for that. This may just be me, but if I am working on something my ideas and assumptions change ...
6
When you read a fiction book, you never have the author's thought process on how he designed the book. You may have the narrator's thought process in some books, but not the author. You only get the final output.
When you watch a movie, you don't have the thought process of the director included in the movie. You only get the final output. That would be dump ...
6
Breakthroughs from outside academia are nothing new. The light bulb was not invented by a professor, nor was the telephone. In fact, you might be interested in stories about the Bell Labs and the Xerox Labs as examples of research institutions run by companies.
As such, most professors will probably neither be surprised nor bothered or concerned in the least ...
6
Publishing a solo paper is a big ask for someone at the level of "very beginner." Papers take a long time (often at least a month) for experienced people to write well because there are so many layers of details -- ranging from making sure every statement is technically accurate, to making sure there are no ambiguities or ways a sentence can be ...
6
Yes, you can do that, but I'd suggest caution until you know a lot more. Perhaps you should, at least, wait or explore further.
Quoting a comment by Dan Romik:
This sounds suspicious. Why only “provisionally”? What needs to happen in order to get the award non-provisionally? I suspect they’ll be asking you for money, which means it’s 100% a scam. Even if ...
4
This community wiki answer was created from answers-in-comments.
The other answers explain mechanisms by which "normal" academics can have very high paper counts. But there are also some (very unusual) instances of people who are just insanely productive (and not just putting their names on papers where their proteges do all the work). For instance,...
4
As the comments already indicate, you're not likely to get any useful answers to your question, in particular and also because there is no practical way of making use of the effect if it exists: Unlike sports where you can focus on one event, research is a year-round thing. You can't go to high altitude for a month and then come back for 2 weeks of intense ...
4
Contrary to Bryan Krause's experience, none of the research groups I've ever belonged to had any kind of structured shared access to work-in-progress. I also had not heard of other groups with such arrangements before. If any of my colleagues would express entitlement to see my work-in-progress, I would be rather peeved. But polite requests by people I know (...
4
Talk with your supervisor first.
Sure, you're behind schedule because of working an inadequate number of hours over an extended period of time, but you know what won't help? Covering it up and pretending everything's fine until the deadline comes and there's nothing to show for it.
Come clean, talk to your academic supervisor, and work out a plan for the two ...
3
No, you should not accept this offer without consulting university x. You are likely limited in the outside work that you can undertake.
This is assuming that you are receiving financial support from University X. If you are not, then they have little grounds to say no, although university regulations should always be consulted, particularly if you are on a ...
3
You're already doing the things I would suggest as 'softer' tips: setting a specific agenda and preparing a presentation on a specific project is a pretty good cue to everyone in the room that it's the focus of discussion. You could be more direct and say "today I've prepared these slides to discuss project A, so I'd rather finish that before moving on ...
2
I would just start working and on the next meeting honestly present what you have done (installing the software, trying out basic examples and understanding the theoretical foundation counts towards that though your partners would, probably, expect a bit more) and what is the next stage (I hope that you haven't made the mistake of claiming that something ...
2
For many research-level results I have obtained, the thought processes involved hundreds of wrong turns, including useless definitions and wrong proofs, and it would be really silly to include all those. Unfortunately, it is rare to be able to cogently deduce the results without significant trial and error, otherwise it would not be worthy of research, would ...
2
(I’m coming mainly from mathematics, with some crossover experience in theoretical CS.)
Most good academic writing does include a bit of “thought-process” explanation. The style you describe as “the default way” — writing as though everything “fell out of the blue” — does exist, but it’s not the default in fields I know (though it was more common a ...
1
Different people follow extremely different thought processes. Thus, it is not, in general, extremely productive to force all people to arrive at a certain conclusion in the same manner. A closely related concept is described quite well by physicist Richard Feynman in this video on youtube(section beginning at 55:01) (from a BBC special "Fun to Imagine&...
1
Also from a mathematics perspective.
I was working on a problem for two years now, and, recently, in the process discovered another (in my opinion) nice connection/result. I wrote a paper about that (under review). I also felt it might be helpful for a potential reader, to better evaluate and understand the results, to give away some history and thought ...
1
Okay in the west it’s fairly common to have access to the group’s research as you go along, build up partnerships and write papers together. However, based on some of the horror stories I’ve heard about in Indian universities, that might not be the norm because of part experience of stealing research and whatnot (this also happens in the west, but only with ...
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