pubmed-induced jealousy
Since I'm already feeling crappy about my prospects of ever publishing anything, I decided to feed my negativity with the scientific equivalent of googling my peers: searching for their names on Pubmed, the biomedical literature database.
My first few attempts were kind of reassuring. I discovered several PhD students from my lab at home graduated with no publications*, and several others with a couple in not-especially-distinguished journals. The student who boasted that he'd have a Nature paper within a year, back in 2002, has only published a review (or possibly nothing, since he has a somewhat google-proof name and the review is on a different topic, with co-authors from a different lab).
Unfortunately, I just entered the name of the guy from my friend's lab who was known and disparaged for caring more about making pretty pictures for the calendar competition than actual results, and discovered that he has his name on a frickin' Science paper. At least he's only third author...
There's also the guy who graduated from undergrad the same year as me who's already been doing a post-doc at UCSF for the past entire year**, but he's the only superstar from our year, as far as I can tell.
If I look up people in my current class, the results are more mixed. At least I'm still with the majority in not having any grad school publications, and nobody has a first authorship yet, but the proportion of Nature Publishing Group papers is much higher*** and I'm pretty sure at least one person has a first author paper submitted.
Well, that was certainly a good use of my time... Does anyone else do this or am I alone in my petty jealousy and schadenfreude****?
*something that makes me wonder if I should've just stayed at home for my PhD
**see *, although it's probably not possible for both things to happen for the same person
***Understandably, since this is Prestigious U, not Somewhat-Prestigious-Within-C'land U
****not quite schadenfreude, since seeing other people's less-than-stellar publications doesn't make me happy, just relieved that I'm not the only one.
posted by Lucy @ 4:44 PM
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comments
4 Comments:
I've kind of done that. I once made a list of all the phd students I knew and googled/asked around until I found out how many publications they had.
Unfortunately they all have lots (apart from my two closest friends, neither of whom have any---hmmm... I wonder if I became friends with them because I sensed we were all on the same train to loserdom?)
One guy who graduated last year had a list so long he needed an extra page on his CV for them. But they are all in a very dodgy area of linguistics that isn't really accepted outside of Australia, so I reassure myself with that.
My plan is that when I finish I won't find a job for ages anyway, so I'll work part-time in dead-end jobs and turn my thesis into lots of publications until I'm competitive
Oh, dear. I have done that, but not for a long time. It's kind of like when I checked property listings right after I bought my house. Then wondered if I could have found a better location or price. Nothing good can come of that. :)
I just published my first first-author paper from my graduate work and I graduated over a year ago. It took me 3 years to get that one published. And I'm still dealing with 2 others. There are always - no matter how cool you are - going to be people who are better. And then there are some who are worse. The comparisons just make me feel badly about myself, so I try to avoid them (when I can - sometimes I can't).
I promise it will be fine. If I can get a PhD, you can definitely do it. But I rarely felt confident and positive about the process, so if you figure that out, please let me know.
I'm glad I'm not the only one :)
Styley, papers like that totally don't count. You will have awesome ones :) Plus, you have plenty of unpublished stuff, at least, which I don't.
Post-doc, I was kind of hoping to find people who were worse so I could feel better about myself...
angrygrad, I do that too! Except for I look at people who got fellowships I might want, since even looking that far ahead is too demoralising.
great... an academic equivalent of drunk-googling exes! I'm happy to say there are no "superstars" in my graduating class. I don't think there are more than 2 or 3 who wound up doing physics at all.
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