6 ms·

That's kind of my experience with research, but in physics. Already have three projects under my belt w/ no publishable results. All of them involved much mor

• dguest 7y ago
  What branch of physics? There are hundreds of published null results looking for dark matter or Supersymmetry, for example. Instead of documenting a failed search, the papers focus on what versions of the theories the experiment excludes to 95% confidence.
  • djaque 7y ago
    I'm in acceleraror physics and study photocathodes. Unfortunately the state of those projects is that we thought a material should have great photoemission properties under some very specific circumstances. When we measured it, the material was actually terrible and we don't understand why it's that way outside of some speculation. Unfortunately it also feels like our lab doesn't have the type of expertise to explain why it's so bad either at least not without years of learning. My advisor's explanation on publishing was that if we had great results that followed our initial theory of what's going on then we could write a paper and nobody would question it. But, now that we contradict theory the threshold of evidence is much higher and he doesn't want to go ahead with it. We trust our data, but he's concerned about getting it through peer review. For what it's worth we did publish it in a conference proceeding, but it doesn't have the same weight as a journal article.
    • darawk 7y ago
      > My advisor's explanation on publishing was that if we had great results that followed our initial theory of what's going on then we could write a paper and nobody would question it. But, now that we contradict theory the threshold of evidence is much higher and he doesn't want to go ahead with it. Isn't that sort of the most important thing to publish? Something that contradicts theory means something new. Seems like all the more reason to pursue it, no?
      • missosoup 7y ago
        In a vacuum yes. In the world of academia and its perverse incentives, no. Publishing something that goes against the grain means a lot more scrutiny on your work and bigger humiliation for any mistakes made. If you're publishing against the grain, you have to double triple check every single detail to make sure it's all iron-clad. This costs a lot of additional time and money. When publishing research that preaches to the choir, no such considerations are required. In an ideal world, publishing against the grain should be encouraged and there should be no extra reputational penalty for getting caught with errors in that type of research (heaps of errors go unnoticed in mainstream papers, even popular ones). But that's not how it works sadly.
        • jschwartzi 7y ago
          Really academia needs a way to request comment on an experimental procedure without requiring results or conclusions. Then you could publish negative or questionable results and seek speculation from other researchers.
          • vageli 7y ago
            > Really academia needs a way to request comment on an experimental procedure without requiring results or conclusions. Then you could publish negative or questionable results and seek speculation from other researchers. I feel like anonymity could possibly go a long way for this.
          • ridaj 7y ago
            It does: for example, as djaque's comment points out, in their case this was published at conference proceeding. And of course advice can be sought in private as well.
            • djaque 7y ago
              Yes, exactly. I also gave an invited talk about it at the largest domestic conference in my field. This is kind of unusual for a grad. student which should give you an idea of how unique the problem is. We actually received good advice about our experiment that we might try later. The issue is just how niche what I study is. There's probably less than 10 experts in the world on the specific problem I was tackling.
    • BurningFrog 7y ago
      Yet another example of how 2020 institutional science is broken. For the purpose of producing knowledge. It does other things.
      • djaque 7y ago
        Could you please explain why you think this means science is broken? There are real issues in academia, but I disagree that what happened here is wrong. We did publish our data, we just didn't do it in a journal article. In my fields, this is actually fairly typical and journals are less of the norm unless you have a big result. The whole problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Sometimes when you don't have much funding and there's only a few grad. students in the lab, that evidence is no longer worth the time to collect. See the comments below about the "neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light" paper. There is a real danger in publishing theory-breaking results when you don't have 100% confidence in them.
        • BurningFrog 7y ago
          > Could you please explain why you think this means science is broken? To be precise, I already think science is broken, and your story seemed to confirm it. Obviously, that "this is actually fairly typical" is not a counterargument to a systemic belief. That said, it's entirely possible I jumped the gun here. I take the reproducibility crisis to be a strong indicator that something is Very Wrong with science. I'm also convinced that the modern peer review system is fundamentally broken.
• joshvm 7y ago
  Don't worry. Instrumentation is a pain for publishing because often it creeps into engineering territory. I spent a year of my PhD trying to get something to work, it didn't and I ended up building an entirely new instrument in the third year. That's how it goes. I know people who came out of their PhDs with five papers (in the UK that's a big deal), but they're in fields where its relatively easy to publish and/or got lucky with their topic. Or you work with someone with a funky new dataset that breeds publications. I think most instrumentation scientists are sympathetic to this. There are also lots of instrumentation jobs that don't require stupid numbers of publications because it's not practical to find candidates. There are relatively few good hardware people in the sciences (especially fields where you can't get a mech/electrical engineer). I suggest finding some conferences to start. They're a good venue for telling people what you did. There are also journals specifically for building stuff, SPIE has a lot for astrophysics, for example.
  • djaque 7y ago
    Thanks, that's good to hear. Fortunately I do have two papers in the works right now, one of them from an instrument I made and another from some simulation work. The engineering really is the crux of the problem. I personally find it very interesting and I feel like an oddity in my department for that. Most other physicists kind of look down on the "e-word" to the point that my advisors made me change references to "engineering challenges" into "experimental challenges" for a conference talk I gave. I'm in a very equipment heavy field too which is why I find it so strange. What's frustrating though is that sometimes it feels like I'm only doing engineering with no physics in the mix. Hopefully thay will change over the next year though.
    • cushychicken 7y ago
      What field would you go into if you were interested in making instruments for scientific research? Would that be engineering physics?
      • joshvm 7y ago
        Instrumentation is field-specific. It really depends how bespoke your requirements are. Some places buy stuff off the shelf, others fabricate in-house. In astronomy it's called instrumentation. Astro has relatively sane nomenclature. You have observational (looking at stuff and gathering data), theoretical (theory and simulations) and instrumentation (building stuff). Everyone in the field understands those terms. That said, instrumentation spans everything from construction, design, calibration/characterisation, etc. In other branches, as the OP pointed out it may be "experimental" physics. Problem with that term is it's extremely vague. That's essentially anything which doesn't involve theory or simulation - lab work. That doesn't necessarily mean you actually build anything though. I was surprised at how little we got taught about instrumentation during my physics degree. Of course we had labs, but it was more about using kit than how it was built. It's almost as if it's someone else's problem, even though that's not how research actually works. The irony of physicists sneering at engineers is that most labs employ a bunch of them who do most of the actual design and build work. They tend to be less focused on publication, but they are absolutely critical employees. The sorts of people who've spent 20-30 years working on some uber niche detector tech and know more than the people writing the papers for sure. A good chunk have physics PhDs. When you get to big money stuff like particle accelerators and telescopes, a lot of this is contracted out. Physicists and engineers are responsible for designing the spec, but it's less tinkering in a lab with hardware. In industry it's mostly called engineering (e.g. optical, mechanical, electrical), but I've seen engineering physics too. That tends to be in companies that build very niche equipment specifically for physics research.
• wodenokoto 7y ago
  I never got published in the field I have a masters in, for what I'd like to think of as somewhat comparable reasons. However, my take-away was that the successful researchers were the ones who could take any decent experiment and figure out what was publishable about it, or at least steer it into a publishable direction.
• 101404 7y ago
  Why would the results not be publishable?