Tag: papers

Behind the Paper: Discipline Based Education Research for Animal Welfare Science

I’ve been working in education research longer than I worked in animal behaviour. Who knew?

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Note: This has been sitting in my drafts for weeks and isn’t getting any more written, so here it is!

I’ve been meaning to do more ‘behind the paper’ posts whenever an article gets published, but I keep forgetting. Oops. One of my recent papers, Discipline Based Education Research for Animal Welfare Science has motivated me to start up the practice again.

This paper is somewhat of a Dear John letter to my former career. You see, as of 2020, I’ve been working in veterinary education research longer than I worked in animal behaviour and welfare. Moving disciplines from ethology to veterinary education was more than a little scary, and committing myself to work in a truly interdisciplinary space was a dive into the unknown.

DBER for Animal Welfare Science marks my sixth first author paper in education research, versus my four ethology papers and my one human-animal interactions paper. In terms of time and experience, I’ve been working in education longer than I was an ethologist. 

I have a couple of reflections on changing disciplines from your PhD studies that I thought others contemplating a similar move would find useful. 

The Deficit

There’s no way of getting around it – when you jump disciplines you have a massive knowledge/reputation deficit that you need to take time to recover. I’ve been exceptionally lucky in the team I ended up in, and I was supported during that year where my productivity dived and I was getting my teeth into some gigantic projects. I have two particular projects that I think of as my second PhD, one of which has also recently been published (here) and the other I’m currently writing up. The sense of scale on those tasks felt comparable to writing a PhD, not least because you’re doing them on top of the day job. You just don’t need to do all the ‘learning to research’ part of the PhD. You already  have your workflows and your skills, and its just translating them to a new context. 

Another aspect of the deficit though is progression. I ‘only’ made it to the Lecturer position in August 2019. My friends who stayed in the same field outpaced me in earning capacity relatively quickly. I’ve had many people assuming I’m further up the academic ladder than I am. Again, I’ve got a very supportive team around me who were supportive of me taking on responsibility before I was necessarily ‘supposed’ to. I did encounter the odd person who thought a Research Fellow shouldn’t be doing whatever thing I was off doing because I wasn’t ready yet. And I am the kind of awful person who gets bothered by that. I like being recognised for what I do. Know your value, and don’t be afraid to fight for recognition as an interdisciplinary researcher. 

The Culture

Something I didn’t expect when I switched disciplines was the need to take a long hard look at myself. The cultural biases I had as an ethologist only became clear to me when they were smashed up against the norms of educational research. This was really useful for me in a lot of ways, but it was also humbling. I now sometimes find myself gritting my teeth when I hear ethologists repeat those biases. Although by the same token, I see what education researchers ‘think’ they know being spouted forward when I’m able to say “actually, in this other field we do …”

Of course you soon develop new biases and ways of thinking. Something that gets my goat very badly is how ‘interdisciplinary’ is bandied around very freely.  I don’t think you’re interdisciplinary until you’re jumping across a ‘purity’ level. Two forms of biology no longer cut it for me. This makes me very fun at departmental meetings and wins me lots of friends. 

The Goods

I have been able to take things from one field into the other. For example, we have a really interesting PTAS project looking at human behaviour using an ethology lens. And of course DBER is part of it.  

I’m also so much happier in DBER than I was in ethology. This field always appealed to me, but felt like such a strange jump after I started investing in my career path. I started my PhD, not really out of any great love of the subject, but because it was 2009 and a paid job during a recession. I came to love it, and I don’t regret it at all, and more importantly I’m better at what I do now because of that time I spent in another field.

I truly believe that academia is going to experience some big changes soon. I believe that the old postdoc model is dead and careers like mine will become more common place. If you do find yourself staring at a frightening opportunity in the next few months, I can’t tell you what to do. But I can say that I have no regrets, and being interdisciplinary is the happiest I’ve ever been

100 Papers

This is as close as I’ll come to an academic year in review

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In 2019 I took part in the #100papers challenge. The idea is that you aim to read (fully) 100 scientific papers in a year. 

As I understand it, the challenge was born from the #365papers challenge. Some fools well-intentioned folks aim for averaging a paper a day for a year, and others thought “I’ll be lucky if I manage a third of it”. With both #365papers and #100papers, the idea is that you’ll commit to reading more if you’re publicly tracking it, and maybe also read more widely. I knew that #365papers would not be achievable for me, but #100papers might have been within my grasp (spoilers, it wasn’t). 

I really like setting myself challenges. I’ve done a variety of photography and reading challenges over the years. Tracking the papers that I read on Twitter is innately appealing to me. I also wanted to put a potted summary or key outcome from each paper onto my tweets to force me to read the papers instead of cheating the essence of the challenge by skimming. 

I have a pretty good work-life balance. I set aside a day a week to devote to research and I manage to keep that day protected about 60% of the time I’d say. How many papers did I read in their entirety in 2019? 

40. I read 40 papers cover to cover. 

I have some thoughts about this exercise. Firstly, I don’t think this is The Way to read papers. Something I noticed about reading whole papers was how pointless it often is. I teach students to be selective about how they approach papers, and when I was trying to find out how someone set up a study or I wanted an overview of a particular field, I wasn’t sitting down to read a whole paper, I was flicking to the relevant parts of various papers. So my first big takeaway is that reading whole papers isn’t something that I would prioritise over strategic paper skimming. 

With that being said, there is something quite meditative and indulgent about reading a whole paper. There were some very fun papers like Jenny Scoles’ one on messy boundary objects where the narrative itself is enjoyable. 

(There was also this deeply enjoyable rant where you could feel the authors’ visceral hatred of the right-brain-thinking myth.)

And I also really liked having the Twitter thread of all the papers I’d read, and the ability to jump back into that thread to share with people was massively useful. Bauer et al 2017, alongside reading Invisible Women, has changed my research practice quite considerably this year: 

The performative aspect of talking about the papers I’m reading online was also interesting. I think you can track what projects I was working on with this twitter thread. You can see when I started reading up on our Widening Participation cluster for example, and I like some of the conversations the spawned from the thread. 


In 2020, I’m probably not going to do the challenge again, but I’ll certainly be posting a papers thread, maybe #paperswotiread or something along those lines. The target of 100 fully read papers is not feasible for me, and if its not feasible for me, I’m not comfortable advertising it to those academics who may be following me. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how I model what I view as ‘good’ academic practice, and I’m trying to make positive choices. So I’ll be doing something like this in 2020, just without the targets.  

Dear Readers

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Dear readers,

I have confession to make. In 2017 I did not publish a single paper. In fact in 2018 so far I’ve only had one paper accepted. That’s worrying for someone whose job is ‘researcher’. Someone whose worth is often judged by the length of the publication section of their CV.

It’s fair to say I’m quietly shitting myself about this and it’s been the source of great existential angst.

First of all – there are lots of ways to explain and justify why my publications section is light at the moment, but I should not. I am trying, very hard, to internalise the message that I am more than my publication count, and I don’t want to spend time justifying why I haven’t met an arbitrary target. Suffice to say there’s little I would have done differently.

Instead I want to talk about some of the steps I’ve taken to change this.

Over the last six weeks I’ve adopted a practice I’ve called ‘Writing Fridays’. This is where I’ve blocked off the whole of a Friday simply to write. In this period, I wrote and submitted a short paper, did major revisions on another paper, and published my first preprint. Writing Fridays has been successful enough for me to decide to maintain the practice.

I remember once taking a workplace personality test, most likely an MBTI rip off (see the book for my feelings on this), and whatever my type was called (Eldritch Abomination?), the test made this prediction. “Whenever someone knocks on your door for help you’ll drop everything to do it, even if there’s somebody already talking to you mid-crisis. You just want to be needed.” It’s one of the few times personality tests have really ‘got’ me. I am very guilty of this behaviour.

For me, writing is not about finding ‘time’ but about finding and protecting the mental space to write. I need a whole day set aside, with no meetings, with no expectation that I’ll also be supporting students and colleagues. That support is a hugely valuable part of my role, and I love doing it, but for me writing papers is an expensive mental activity. By blocking off one day in the week I’ve been much more productive at what is actually a core part of my role. I think when I return to work next term, I will be very explicit about my office hours being Monday-Thursday.

The next step has been about more positive about feedback. I’ve spoken about feedback a lot on this blog, and my challenges with it. So part of that, and part of making my work more accessible, has been publishing my first pre-print.

Pre-prints are inarguably a good thing, but somehow in my head only hard science is ‘deserving’ of pre-prints. The kind of fluffy science I do is somehow trying to hide behind pre-printing. This is yet another example of my own internalised prejudices about the kind of work I do. For example, I am more than happy to share a git repository for example about the NSS analysis even though it’s an unfinished flow of consciousness, but my carefully collected thoughts about Discipline Based Educational Research in two fields I know well feels . . . it feels presumptuous.

I hope the pre-print gets feedback, and I hope I listen to it.

And finally, I have been keen to keep a record of my other activities. All academics should be recording their publications and activities for ref. At Edinburgh we use a tool called Pure for this (pure dead brilliant so it is). In pure there’s a category for publications > other> multi media forms. This blog lives there, so do other types of entry.

Let’s be clear. This blog doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t count towards my ref eligible publications. But the other types of publication do matter, and we have the facility to record it. We should be tracking all of our activity, especially as publications become more contentious.

But for now it’s time for me to take some annual leave. I’ve uninstalled outlook from my phone, I’m going to work very hard at forgetting about work, and I’m going to come back to it more productive.

We all have dreams 😉