Welcome to my channel, where I delve deep into the art of conducting great research. I am passionate about exploring the secrets to success and helping researchers overcome their fears and doubts.
I am a Professor at a Russell Group University in the UK and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow.
My channel is designed for anyone interested in research. Whether you're a student, academic, or professional, I cover a wide range of topics that will teach you how to design better studies, analyze data more effectively, and write academic papers that get noticed.
But I can't do this alone - I need your feedback and suggestions to make this a truly supportive and collaborative community. Join us and subscribe to my channel, where together we can support great research and great researchers!
Thank you for this video. I'm just starting my journey as an academician in medical education and I still have minimal idea about all these points you mentioned. I appreciate this!
knowing is a human word we made and made up its meaning. to know means to understand something basically. the ways of knowing are the tools we have to get to our definition of knowing something. our ways and tools of knowing require logic and evidence to be taken seriously and produce outcomes. our tools work well enough because they produce evidence based outcomes most if not all of the time. knowing is not a black and white concept. we can know something 50%,60% or x%. the skeptisism how do we know that we know something is actually a thing that is doubting. its what ifing basically. since we can what if everything, we can doubt all of our knowledge and how we get there in the first place if taken to the extreme we can go full descartes more (the philosopher) and even further than that. however, in the human experience that we are having we cannot achieve perfection. otherwise chances are we wouldve found it thus the problem of knowing wouldnt exist. but does it really? lets assume that we cant know anything and that this premise is true despite its self defeating role. we can achieve pretty good outcomes that serve us in the human experience. we can get an understanding in our human experience that serves us no matter if we cant ''know'' anything. even if all the skeptics are true. the world works. you wont see a skeptic jump of a bridge if he doubts his eyesight gravity and so on. you wont see a skeptic not drink water because he doubts water to be a thing required for human survival. the fact that we cant achieve perfection in anything, doesnt mean we cant achieve good-enoughness and that we cant continue striving for better and learn in the cases we make mistakes. so we need to for now at least - until a better alternative is out there - do what we can with what we have. in case someone disagrees with this comment. think about it. does it change anything? even if im wrong here does it change anything? live life and see for your self. do you need water? does gravity work? do all those what if's come true? does it matter if ''absolute'' truth and ''absolute'' certainty exist? do you want a life where you doubt everything or do you want a functional life for you, your children and advance human kind further? thats my take on it. apply any philosophy and thought experiment on it. it doesnt really matter. we can clearly have a good enough advancing and self correcting human experience despite any philosophical stuff going on and no matter what its true. in the human experience of things things just are. you have 80 years to live on earth. psychology says that 80+% of our worries dont even come true (what ifing is another form of worrying). the whole thing really changes nothing. the regress arguement, full blown skeptisism, empirealism, any ''ism'' that exists. it really changes nothing. you have a life to live. its stable enough and you can use tools to improve it and figure out stuff when stuff goes wrong. just do that. it will be fine in the long run
I feel a strong repulsion when listening to this type of videos. I guess that is a clear sign that it is time to leave academia. I have actually enjoyed doing research a lot, but the culture and the pyramid that one has to climb is hollow to me. Everyone faking to be collaborative but secretly always competing with you, almost as if hoping that you fail.
How to survive it: 1) Don't get taken advantage of by people who just want to use you to put their name on your papers. 2) Go into industry instead, be valued, and make good money and do research there instead.
As a recently retired academic I used to tell new faculty to “pick their no’s”… I’d tell them not to accept every invitation to join a committee or agree to every request because over commitment in these kinds of things would come back and bite them big time at their evaluations. It’s sad to see young faculty penalized for doing the things they were asked to do and had to slight their teaching or research for. It wasn’t that there was a conspiracy against these new faculty, but just too many different voices coming up with tasks for them to do.
I spent hours reading ERC projects to get me inspired for some research ideas. But I can't understand what are those winning researchers are actually doing. Another issue is that those grants are very short term focused. They didn't lit the fire.
I’m really enjoying your videos, thanks for sharing your expertise. I have a slight hearing loss so I find the background music a little loud in comparison to your voice - turning it down a little would help me to tune into your voice and advice. Much appreciated.
You aren’t the first to mention the music. More recent videos don’t have music because of this. I am working on getting the sound to be better overall.
Hi Prof, thank you for this video and also for other videos! I'm currently preparing to apply for PhD and need motivation and a gentle reminder from time to time on things, as well as looking for support systems and community to grow and improve by learning from others. A huge help that I found your channel, thank you!
Grant money is fixed though.😊. If there were 20 versions of you, then 18 would not get if there was money for 2 grants. All the same, put in your best. Good luck.
Thanks for the review James. Will have to give this one a look. Might try and slip a lecture in on data visualization in my digital multimedia module next semester. I have to admit though, when I heard the examples were in R, I let out an audible sigh. I'll have a go at converting some of the examples into python/pyplot.
I would say that the minority of the book is about R. Mostly it’s the concept that you can do a pretty bad job of making figures and with a small bit of understanding you can turn that frown upside down and make them much nicer. The R part should be portable fairly easily to Python. I hope.
@@JamesMcInerney007 I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem transferring between the languages. It's more just programming language snobbery than anything else 😂
Really enjoyed this review James, thanks for bringing this book to my attention - as a working engineer I unfortunately don't typically get the time to produce really good figures but its always something i like to think about. It can definitely be a challenge to represent multivariate data to a broad audience, which i think clever figure design can go some way towards mitigating. I can remember a well known old book on data visualisation (possibly pre-computer) but can't for the life of me think of the title; I'm sure the concept of proportionality was brought up there too.
A very interesting video, thank you for the useful pieces of advise. What is your opinion regarding publishing a single paper vs. dividing it to smaller ones? Specifically for early researchers. I'm finishing my phd and sitting on a lot of unpublished results which need a few more months to be a strong paper, but I'm currently out of funds. I've been advised to publish a part of it, but I've refused so far. Thank you very much.
Great question. If you had all the time and money you needed, then I would definitely wait until you had a large, comprehensive paper. However, if you don't have the resources right now, then it is always best to have published some of the "big picture", rather than none of it at all. Having published a piece of work can help to establish your career and then maybe you can get more financial resources to get back to publishing the rest? This is a great question and there is never an easy answer.
@@jamestalksresearch Thank you very much for answering so quickly. I should've heeded the advise of an old professor and published. I'll get back on it. Thank you again.
Hi James, Do you have any advice for early career researchers who are striving to maintain these strategies but struggling with the bigger picture in research? I frequently find that I am often list-making with activities that often seem like just getting through this week, or to the end of next week, or to the end of the month. And then the rest feels rather unclear or opaque... Thanks in advance.
Hi Chris - Set long-term goals and stick to them. Not all jobs are equally important - find out which one might be put on hold. I would also visualise your journey - have a map in your mind for where you want to go. It really helps if you focus on that. Strategies are not the same as plans - strategies define the What, Where and How. What will you do? Where (in terms of research space) will you do it. How will you WIN?? Keep these in mind and it will help answer your daily question of whether the thing you are doing right now is important.
Takeaways 1. New to-do list everyday 2. Time block things not multitask 3. Take a break to refresh and enjoy 4. Don't try to do everything,do things in which you expertise 5. Self love and self care should be your priority
Points for good PhD student 1. Resilience 2. Consistency and Discipline( Jerry sciencefield- chain method)-Don't break the chain- Consistency and discipline beats talent and enthusiasm 3.Growth mindset- hunger to learn more and what you learn from failure .Learn from your failure and rejection
Yes, this isn't a comprehensive treatment of everything that every philosopher has ever said, but hopefully it is useful for you to think about the lens through which you view your research.
Hi James, I’m writing from Melbourne where I’m a PhD candidate in phylodynamics. My supervisor and I both enjoy your videos. I especially appreciate your points about prioritising good questions and taking time away. I think time away is what lets the subconscious consoliate good questions. It’s possibly contentious to say the subconscious plays an important role, but my experience is that research is as creative an endeavour as any!
totally agree. At some level, I suspect that good ideas are being crowded out of your mind by the constant noise of day-to-day activities. A bit of down-time can do wonders for your ability to make progress. Slightly counter-intuitive, but perhaps not so much. Glad you like the videos.
I don't like these lists of things you need to do to achieve "insert whatever achievement here". Such lists never consider contexts. In this case you're forgetting that to become a great researcher you also need to navigate a system where primarily people from a particular demographic review applications, grants, papers from everyone else. That this system is not forgiving to folks which despite their resilience, their growth mindset or their enthusiasm, can't dedicate hours and hours to research because they have to go to do other jobs to make ends meet or are the primary care givers in their households. These points ignore also the fact that science, or "fantastic research" takes money. Grant agencies don't line up to fund scientist from everywhere. Students from everywhere. Simply ask scientists how much it costs to publish research in a prestigious journal (CNS?), not everyone can afford that. And without these prestigious papers, chances for many grants decrease. We have all seen that paper where they tracked university of origin from professors of prestigious universities in the United States. They all come from mostly the same 8-7 universities. Tons of resilience and growth mindset may be nice but a degree from a top tier school doesn't hurt. I am not saying you don't need resilience or everything that is mentioned in this video, what I am saying is that this is complex and resilience and growth mindset alone is not enough. One needs a combination luck, pedigree, contacts, resilience, hard work, discipline, enthusiasm, support from family and nice mentors. And even then, you may not make it. It is a lot more complex, and I feel people starting out should be aware of this too.
Nobody told me about the "bad things" of academia when I got into it and, honestly, I'm glad. Imagine that somebody from a 'disadvantaged' demographic approaches you for advice because they want to become a scientist and you just start telling them "well too bad you are not x, y, and z, you will probably not make it and shouldn't even try". Many of the things you mentioned are not even academia's duty to fix. Luck helps? sure, but opportunities do not fall from the sky. The more you try, the more "luck" you are likely to have. Pedigree? yes, but whose fault is that? Contacts? yes, but is one's work to make contacts as well (and one of science's best parts). Support from family? of course, but again, I don't think is academia's job to account for that. Nice mentors? yes, but that's luck and any student from any background can end up with a bad mentor. Inequalities are the reality in this world, but to justify all of the obstacles we face with the realities we come from is harmful. If you really want to do research for a living you should know that the process is not going to be easy. However, if from the beginning your mindset is "I'm at a disadvantage" then you will be sabotaging yourself (and sadly that seems to be the mindset of many early career researchers). Do not focus on your disadvantages, but on the things you have to do to achieve whatever goals you have. Is better to earn respect through your work (for which you get all the credit) than through your "background" (which you happen to be born with). Finally, I think the video is ok. My main problem with these lists is that people are different and different (even unorthodox) strategies might be valid for different types of people. The points here are quite general though, so I think they will apply regardless of your personal strategies and/or background. pd: I'm not white, my native language is not english, I'm from a 3rd world country, no scientists in my family, and I'm not rich. I mention this not because it matters or because it adds any value to what I have achieved, but so you know that I don't write these things from a position of 'privilege'.
Another brilliant video. Thank you. Suggestion for a video: building collaborations. How early career researchers can build a strong collaborative network. If you could share you thoughts on for example, how to find good collaborators, how to maintain long-term collaborative relationships, any dos and don'ts of collaboration etc.
Thank you for taking the time to do these videos. As an early career researcher, I deeply appreciate the clear, concise way you are explaining things. Fnding the time to think clearly about the research I want to do is already quite a struggle. It helps that I am not too confused now about what I should be thinking when I get a bit of clear-headed time.
Thank you for your videos. They are very informative. I wonder if you can run the audience through a mock example of what a research strategy looks like. I think it would help anchor your advice even more. Thank you!
