If you’re trying to make your products better, it’s nice when your customers almost have to fill out a user feedback form. “Publish or perish” is nothing but upside if you want to figure out what scientists are doing in the lab.
If you’re trying to make your products better, it’s nice when your customers almost have to fill out a user feedback form. “Publish or perish” is nothing but upside if you want to figure out what scientists are doing in the lab.
One of the things we do here at my scientific-instruments company is literature review. If you buy one of our products and mention it in your peer-reviewed publications, we find and read over your paper to learn how you’re using our equipment. Since several of our machines have been out there for a few years now, our bibliography is getting pretty big, which is awesome. It’s also incredibly educational – I think it’s one of the best design resources we have.
Why do we love it? Well, first, the scientific community is huge and diverse, so some of our customers are working with analytical targets or sample types that we have no direct experience with ourselves. We do a lot of in-house testing as well, of course, but there are certain experiments we simply can’t do. (We don’t have ethical access to some sample types, for example, and there is no way we’re going to try to get around that!) So, seeing how the scientific community uses the machines is a great complement to the testing we do ourselves.
And that brings me to the second advantage, which is quality assurance. Being able to make something work in our hands is one thing, but if 35 different labs publish papers with high-quality data using our machines, that’s pretty robust. It means that our devices work consistently, and that they perform well in a wide variety of settings with many different researchers. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.
Those publications also create a built-in user community. If someone calls us up and asks whether, for example, they can use one of our machines to extract high-quality RNA from microalgae, then we can point them to a specific publication where they can see the results, and also contact the authors to ask additional questions. We also publish our full bibliography online, and some customers have told me that they decided to go with one of our instruments because they knew it had already worked for their experimental setup.
Finally, these publications let us know whether we could improve our devices or our training resources. If people are using our machines in a way we didn’t anticipate, or they seem to be having more trouble than we would expect for what they are doing, that’s a note to us that there might be areas where we could do better.
All of this, I suppose, is a long-winded way of saying that you never actually leave the literature behind, as long as you’re still in a job that deals with biology at all. If you’re a scientific recruiter, you still need to stay current so that you can evaluate a candidate’s qualifications. Science policy is likely to be bad policy if it’s based on old research. And so on. And you have to keep at it: techniques in my old specialty have already changed a little bit since I switched careers three years ago, and that means I will have to keep right up with things so that my knowledge doesn’t become hopelessly outdated. You should, too.
Resource Tip: If you don’t already have a favorite citation manager, Zotero is an excellent one. It’s free, lives right in your Web browser, and has powerful tools to let you store, tag and search publications. It can also generate perfectly-formatted bibliographies for scientific papers in a snap, and there is even an excellent WordPress plugin for it. I started using it several years ago, but I find it just as useful in my current career as I did in my previous one. If you’re serious about keeping up with the literature, give it a try.
