Predicting publishing success in scientists.

Men with printing press circa 1930s
Image – Flickr/ Seattle Municipal Archives.

A provocative new study suggests it is straightforward to predict which academics will succeed as publishing scientists.

Those who publish earlier and more often while young are typically the long-term winners.

“We were really surprised,” said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who led the study.

“It doesn’t matter if you go to Harvard or a low-ranked university. If you begin publishing scientific articles when you’re still a graduate student, you are far more likely to succeed in the long run.”

Laurance’s team scrutinized more than 1400 biologists on four continents, and then selected 182 to study intensively.

They found the researchers varied greatly – by almost a hundred-fold – in the number of scientific articles they published during their careers.

“For reasons that are not totally clear, some people just ‘get’ the publishing game early in their careers, and it’s these scientists who are most likely to keep on publishing strong research,” said Professor Corey Bradshaw of the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute in South Australia.

Another finding was that women faced some disadvantages in publishing research, even those who overcame the well-documented attrition of senior female academics.

“Women have to jump a lot of hurdles in science,” said Carolina Useche of the Humboldt Institute in Colombia. “Family responsibilities weigh heavily on them, and they don’t seem to promote themselves as aggressively as some men do.”

Language also plays a role, according to Ms Useche. “Those who grow up speaking and writing English have an advantage, because most scientific journals are in English,” she said.

The research team reached two key conclusions.

First, far too few women make it to the top in science, in large part because they do not, on average, publish as often as men.

“For women scientists, it’s just not a level playing field, and we need to find ways to help them advance professionally,” Professor Bradshaw said.

Second, those who publish early and often are most likely to become scientific superstars, regardless of the international standing of the universities where they obtained their PhD.

“We need to pay a lot of attention to the early training of scientists,” Professor Laurance said. “If we do a good job, we can give them a head start that will last their whole lives. This research gives us a good evidence base for our efforts.”

 

Predicting publication success for biologists by William F. Laurance, D. Carolina Useche, Susan G. Laurance, and Corey J. A. Bradshaw was just published online in BioScience: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/bio.2013.63.10.9?uid=3737720&uid=2129&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102642299977

 

A new measure for species extinction threat.

A new index has been developed to help conservationists better understand how close species are to extinction.

The index, developed by a team of Australian researchers from the University of Adelaide and James Cook University, is called SAFE (Species Ability to Forestall Extinction).

The SAFE index builds on previous studies into the minimum population sizes needed by species to survive in the wild. It measures how close species are to their minimum viable population size.

“SAFE is a leap forward in how we measure relative threat risk among species,” says co-author Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.

“The idea is fairly simple – it’s the distance a population is (in terms of abundance) from its minimum viable population size. While we provide a formula for working this out, it’s more than just a formula – we’ve shown that SAFE is the best predictor yet of the vulnerability of mammal species to extinction.”

Professor Bradshaw says SAFE is designed to be an adjunct to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, not a replacement.

“Our index shows that not all Critically Endangered species are equal. A combined approach – using the IUCN Red List threat categories together with the SAFE index – is more informative than the IUCN categories alone, and provides a good method for gauging the relative ‘safety’ of a species from extinction,” he says.

Of the 95 mammal species considered in the team’s analysis, more than one in five are close to extinction, and more than half of them are at ‘tipping points’ that could take their populations to the point of no return.

“For example, our studies show that practitioners of conservation triage may want to prioritise resources on the Sumatran rhinoceros instead of the Javan rhinoceros. Both species are Critically Endangered, but the Sumatran rhino is more likely to be brought back from the brink of extinction based on its SAFE index,” Professor Bradshaw says.

“Alternatively, conservationists with limited resources may want to channel their efforts on saving the tiger, a species that is at the ‘tipping point’ and could have reasonable chance of survival.”

The SAFE index is detailed in a new paper published this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Environment (http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/100177). It is co-authored by Reuben Clements (James Cook University), Professor Corey Bradshaw and Professor Barry Brook (The University of Adelaide) and Professor Bill Laurance (James Cook University).