Not all students have access to guidance on navigating the unique world of academic research. To help address this problem, I am providing the following documents to share my perspective on academic research. These are my personal opinions and not the policy or views of my employer. All names of people have been changed to protect anonymity.
Many of the topics below are covered in much greater depth and with a unified design framework in my book Communication by Design.
If you find the following articles useful, you'll love the book! Learn more →
If you have ideas for other topics or dissemination mechanisms, e-mail me! I will continue developing these documents, so appreciate your feedback.
General advice
Expectations of graduate students in my research group
Meeting with your advisor
Establishing an online presence
Building and maintaining your CV
Collaboration
Building expertise
Picking conferences to attend
Attending a conference
Requesting letters of recommendation
Further resources
Productivity and process
Being a productive writer
The process of writing a paper
Three reader-centric academic writing principles
Literature review
Paper formatting advice
Setting up a paper project
Sections of your paper
Title
List of authors
Abstract
Introduction
Materials and methods (with Mark Denavit, Erica Fischer, Matthew Eatherton)
Conclusions
Peer review
Overview of the peer-review process
Choosing where to publish your work
Reasons journals reject papers (and how to avoid them)
Five challenging peer-review situations, and what to do about them
How to review a paper
Responding to paper review comments
Latex template for paper review responses
Getting published in Earthquake Spectra and beyond (video, with David Wald)
Checklist for effective presentations (with Sabine Loos)
Developing and giving technical presentations (video)
General strategies for preparing presentations (video)
Creating effective graphics (video)
Choosing colors for figures
Presenting at a conference
Increase your impact by sharing papers and source code
The corrupting effects of academic citation metrics
What an academic misconduct accusation taught me about sharing research (in Nature Career Column)
Sharing data and code facilitates reproducible and impactful research (Earthquake Spectra opinion)
Don't wait for things to get easy
Promoting classroom discussion
Stand-up meeting format
Group technical meeting format
Being a professor
Developing a winning mindset when applying for research funding (with Brendon Bradley)
Why I am writing advice articles
An honest bio
What I like and don't like about being a professor
Negative proposal review comments
My 20 published mistakes (and counting)
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Lukas Bodenmann, Corinne Bowers, Francisco Galvis, Erica Fischer, Anne Hulsey, Peter Lee, Dawn Lehman, Sabine Loos, Rodrigo Silva Lopez, Maryia Markhvida, Simona Meiler, Emily Mongold, Michael Scott, Neetesh Sharma, Danielle Vidal, Jimmy Zhang, Tinger Zhu, Oregon State University Civil and Construction Engineering's Write Club, and the rest of my research group for helpful suggestions and feedback on the above documents and this general project. Thanks to Ashly Cabas, Gemma Cremen, Roberto Gentile, Yolanda Lin, Sabine Loos, Chukwuebuka Nweke, and Lisa Tobber for excellent insights and feedback on the faculty articles.
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