Bioinformatics Zen | Keep focused, keep an up to date list of ten specific questions

Keep focused, keep an up to date list of ten specific questions

2007.May.20

Does your immediate work answer questions that begin with "Are", "Does", or "Is"?
Do you spend a shameful amount of your day checking for email, reading websites, and playing flash games?
Do you find it a pain to get out of bed in the morning?
Is reading the literature an extremely dull activity, and you rarely read a paper completely?

Ok, so these questions aren't perfect. Nobody reads scientific papers for fun, and you're a lucky person if you leap of bed with the expectation of a day solving the world's scientific problems. But you get my point I'm trying to make. Being a computational scientist is hard work. No one really knows what you do, day-to-day. You have to be your own boss - is the next slice of code you write going to move you any closer to your goal?

I'm writing this, because this has been my own personal experience recently. Slipping off the road of enlightenment and publication, moonwalking into the playground of incongruity and jayisgames.com. You can't get a PhD or a paper in systems biology, metagenomics, synthetic biology, or any other buzzword you can think of. You get scientific recognition by answering questions.

So how I could I escape the malaise of crap science. Well, with a great suggestion from a friend in my department.

"Protein A regulates glutamate synthesis. Is it significantly upregulated in nitrogen limiting conditions?" Once question like this is somewhere I can get started, I can answer it with one afternoon's work. Ten questions is a set of directions back to the scientific interhighway, and the respect of my peers.

Keep a page on your labbook wiki with ten questions. Keep rewriting these questions until each one is specific enough, that it can be answered with 1-2 days work. Update your questions page regularly, during lab meetings for example. You'll probably find that answering one question will probably result if five new ones.

So what do you think? Helpful, or a pile of poorly written rubbish? If you've got some tips about managing your research, please, write a short suggestion in the comments.