the current thing I can't do
I'm supposed to be presenting at the departmental journal club this week, which means I have to pick a paper to talk about. I forgot I was on this week until I got a reminder email on Thursday, asking me to send the paper, as soon as possible. I found a paper that I thought was interesting and would be reasonably easy to come up with stuff to say about it, but when I went to check with my advisor that it was okay, he didn't like it. There wasn't anything wrong with it per se, but he wanted me to find a perfect, paradigm-shifting paper.
This is where I've been stuck for the past two days. I suck at judging papers. I'm happy to believe everything that's printed, pretty much, although I was excited to discover recently that I was actually capable of thinking a paper was crap. I have no idea how to tell if something is a super-major contribution to the field, though. Probably because I've been bad about keeping up with the literature in general, so I don't know if something's new or not.
I've been going through the archives of the FancyPants journals, with the assumption that if something from my particular subfield makes it in there, it must be good, but most of it is stuff that seems either too specific to be Earth-shattering enough for what my advisor wants, or I'm just not remotely interested (which probably is not a good indication that it's not actually interesting, but would make it difficult to figure out what to say about it). I think I've been wasting my time, anyway, because I really have no idea what I'm looking for. I really don't trust my judgement enough to even have an opinion, too; I've just been trying to figure out what other people would think of the papers.
The whole weekend that stupid voice has been telling me I can't do this (not that I've been trying the whole weekend), and that certainly hasn't been helping me concentrate on the papers enough to evaluate them. I need to email my advisor tonight, either with new suggestions for a paper, or, what's looking more likely at this stage, an admission that I'm incompetent and can't identify a single good paper.
I am really not liking myself at all, right now.
Update: The paper I originally chose was actually used for the last journal club (to which I obviously didn't go). Could I be any more incompetent? I feel sick. But sadly not sick enough to get me out of doing this.
posted by Lucy @ 11:34 PM
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comments
3 Comments:
I have to say...if your advisor won't let you pick the paper on your own then maybe your advisor should just pick the paper in the first place. I understand that isnt' going to actually happen, but it bugs me when I see grad students who have to okay journal club papers with advisors. ok, /rant. now in your case it's a departmental-wide JC, right? so i can see why it matters more which pape you pick. why don't you pick three papers and tell your advisor you can't decide between them? if it has to be paradigm shifting then i suppose just go for cell, science or a nature journal. although i don't actually believe those are always tbe best papers, lots of other people do. good luck! and don't feel bad - i never knew which paper to pick or what to say about them either. it's normal.
I have some interesting articles in my possession. Would a psych article be okay? I think it'd be pretty funny if you submitted one.
One thing I learned recently is that professors LOVE using articles that are cited a lot (again, not always a testament to its quality - nor to its earth changingnes, but maybe a good heuristic). In our new version of psychinfo, you can tell that really easily. Dunno about your area.
I've been doing my share of feeling sick because I can't do my job lately too. Don't be too hard on yourself - journal clubs (especially large ones) are justifiably stressful. And you'll get better at selecting papers as you do it more and more.
I hope your advisor offered a bit of advice on picking the right one. I hope this is all over soon.
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