You can’t escape issues of management by becoming a scientist.

Today’s anecdote: my student submitted an abstract at the last minute to an important conference, a version that was not the one I thought she would submit and had corrected. Immediately, my thoughts sprang to this post in which two levels of etiquette breeching had been broached. One was the discovery of oneself as an author on a conference abstract or paper that had been submitted without any knowledge of one’s participation.

This is universally vilipended.

Then there is this more fuzzy and oftimes tolerable situation:

I have another colleague who tends to submit manuscripts after receiving what my co-authors and I think of as an initial round of comments, expecting to see one more version before final submission. Fortunately the submitted versions have been pretty good, so I have been more startled than upset by his precipitous submissions.

(I should specify that my student and I are in two physically distant locations for the moment.)

I composed a grumpy e-mail last night, put it in my “Later” box, and went to bed.

I dusted it off this morning, tempered it to state in a non-accusatory manner that I expect to see all definitive versions before submission of abstracts, papers and theses when I am purportedly the last author and the thesis advisor.

Turns out she just made a simple mistake. She honestly submitted a revision of my revision, that she meant to send back to me and then did not have time. She had intended to revert to my correction. Okay. My reputation will not suffer from it, certainly. Her possibility to be considered for an oral presentation might, though. So she will see if it is possible to resubmit today.

“Quality control freak” – yeah, that’s me. But it’s one of the few things over which I do have any control. I worry, of course, because every example of a relationship between an advisor and their first Ph.D. student I have seen has been highly conflictual. I’d rather get it right the first time.

Reviews, too. I just sent back a review for an article in which some non-essential data was reported to be statistically significant because it had p-values ranging from p < 0.4 to p < 0.9! No, it was not a typographical error with dropped zeros. You’d think that if people used statistical packages, they might have an idea about the concept of what it means to reject a null hypothesis. I would think that, anyhow. I did not suggest rejection (this is already a resubmit and this is relative to additional data), but rather to remove those particular calculations and certainly the conclusions derived therefrom.

I feel petty, Oh so petty, I feel petty and witty and bright!

Update:
Because I hit submit before I find all my tabs and things, I’m now adding that Virginia Walbot has written an open access article provocatively titled “Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts?” Her sub-question is, “How do we teach what constitutes a timely ‘publishable unit’ – not complete proof of a major concept but a defined step in that direction?” and she makes a few suggestions for the professors among you. I think it can be summed up by the injunction to have empathy while maintaining standards of excellence.