Career Development: Writing Methods Papers

Writing methods papers/commentaries or primers on study design or study techniques can be a very useful career booster.  A strong methods paper can cite well and will have longevity, thus contributing to your H-index.  These papers can be “back-burner” projects you work on sporadically while there is down time in your substantive research, such as when you are waiting for data collection to be completed or for the lab to finish running assays for you.  They can also be good projects to work on with graduate students. Methods papers also serve the greater good of hopefully reducing the amount of flawed research being done and/or pointing out where prior research may have generated spurious conclusions.

Odds ratios diverge from prevalence ratios as outcome prevalence in the reference group increases.  (Lovasi et al 2012)

These types of papers are also good for establishing your reputation as an expert in your academic discipline.  This can open doors for you to serve as a co-investigator focused on methodology for other researcher’s grants and to serve on advisory boards for large studies and centers, both of which will contribute to your total grant funded percent effort. I have served as a methodologist co-investigator or adviser on several grants based on the strength of my methods papers.  Having effort covered by these grants has helped me maintain my overall grant funded coverage through the inevitable ups and downs of funding for my own substantive research.  Also being a co-investigator on these projects has given me opportunities to spin off my own papers and grants from these parent studies. These types of papers can also open doors to outside consulting jobs.

To get ideas for methods papers or commentaries look to the areas where your own discipline rubs up against another discipline, look for hyphenated research areas where one of the hyphenated words is your own discipline. These are often areas of friction where methodological issues need to be clarified, where people are making mistakes in the use of techniques and where methods and techniques need to be expanded and adapted. In short, the perfect place to contribute methodological insights.  For me, for a while now, these areas have been the field of molecular-epidemiology, and more recently the intersection of public health and urban design.

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

What is 2 + 11 ?
Please leave these two fields as-is:
IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-)