The benefits of having a lab wiki

December 14, 2008
A few months ago Mike Kaspari over at Getting Things Done in Academia emailed me to ask “how do you use your Lab Wiki? Has it been worth it?”. I sent back much of what is included below and Mike asked if he could use some of my thoughts for a post on wikis. I of course said yes, but since GTDA has been silent for quite a while now I figured I’d go ahead and post on it myself.

First, for those of you whose only exposure to wikis is wikipedia, a wiki is basically just a group of web pages that can be edited online (i.e., inside a browser). These pages might be editable by anyone (like wikipedia) or only by users with permission. They also might be viewable by anyone, or only by a small set of people. For a lab wiki I’d recommend that most of the wiki only be accessible and editable by members of the lab with some areas accessible by specific external collaborators.

So, why have a lab wiki?

1. Collaboration – The wiki provides a central place for idea development, conversation, posting of results and interpretation, etc. It is particularly valuable for remote collaboration in that it switches the paradigm from one or a few people taking the lead and dealing with keeping everyone else informed to a system where it is the participants responsibility to keep an eye on what is going on and everyone decides their own level of involvement.

2. Idea generation, motivation and storage – Have you ever had a cool idea but didn’t have time to think about it at the moment. I jot down 2 sentences on the research ideas page of my wiki. The idea of this page is to put interesting ideas out in front of larger audiences and see if anyone is interesting in working on them. This has already lead progress being made on one project that I wouldn’t have gotten around to otherwise. At the very least the idea is there for later if I want to go back to it myself.

3. Progress in small steps – If I have an idea about something, even a small one, I just login and jot it down on that projects page. If I have 20 minutes of spare time I can do one simple analysis, or learn how to do a single step in an statistical or computational problem and post the answer. A small step might allow one of my collaborators to make their next step on a project, or seeing progress may motivate them to do something themselves. In general I find that this medium encourages and allows progress to be accomplished with more smaller steps, thus lowering the activation energy for some projects.

4. Information aggregation – When someone in the lab finds a useful tool, good advice on some academic task (e.g., writing papers), etc. this information can be stored on the wiki. This sort of thing can be done via email or via blog, but I think that permanent archiving in well structured pages combined with the inherently improved potential for participation by members of the lab makes the wiki superior for this task. For example, a third year student who is starting to write papers in 2012 can just go to the wiki page on advice for writing and get going. If I’d just emailed the relevent link to my current students then it won’t reach future students and it won’t even reach many current students at a time when it’s useful to them.

5. Lab openness – Most of the pages on our wiki are open to anyone in the lab (though we do have the ability to restrict access and do for outside guests and in a few other circumstances). My hope is that this will help with a variety of minor issues I’ve observed over the years (not in my labs, but in labs I’ve been a member of and/or known people in) including territorial disputes resulting from a lack of communication and the classic graduate student mistake of thinking that because it took your advisor three weeks to read your paper that it’s because they’re at home playing Xbox all evening. I don’t know if this will work but my feeling is that openness is in general a good solution to a lot of problems and the wiki makes such openness happen almost by default and provides a historical record for cases where disputes still occur.

So, that’s my plug for having a lab wiki. There are a variety of ways to setup a wiki, with the easiest being to use one of several online hosts. We use PBwiki, which I can’t say enough great things about, but there are a variety of options. Many of these wiki sites have full WYSIWYG editors so editing a page is just as easy as editing a Word document. So, go find a wiki provider, set up a free wiki, and try it out. Maybe you’ll find it as essential a tool for a modern academic lab as we do.

3 Comments | productivity, web resources | Permalink
Posted by Ethan

Why senior authorship is bad for ecology (and probably science in general)

December 10, 2008

I’ve been giving a fair bit of thought recently to the concept of “senior authorship”. Senior authorship is the practice whereby the last position on an author line is occupied by the leader of the lab in which the project was conducted (i.e., the P.I., the advisor, whatever terminology you prefer). Being the senior author on a paper is considered a sign of leadership on the project and is arguably at least as prestigious as being the first author. The importance of this position on the line is illustrated by the fact that Nature in its RSS feed lists the senior author, not the first author, on the ‘by line’ for the abstract. This practice is commonplace (i.e., practically required) in the cellular, molecular & biomedical fields, and is becoming increasingly prevalent in ecology.

This practice might make a certain amount of sense in traditional lab environments where it is practically impossible to do research without grant money and where most work is conducted primarily by members of a single lab, but it makes a lot less sense in ecology. For starters, many graduate student projects don’t depend on grant support from the advisor: field projects are done on the cheap with only small dollar support directly to the graduate student, increasing amounts of research are based on already collected data, and theory plays a prevalent role. Certainly advisors still play important roles in these projects (well, some of them anyway), but not necessarily in some way that is inherently different than that of other contributors.

But whether or not the advisor/PI “deserves” special recognition for projects conducted entirely by members of their labs isn’t the real issue. The real issue is that ecology is increasingly a collaborative science. Ecology is increasingly so interdisciplinary that it is difficult or impossible for a single lab to conduct the most interesting research on its own. Numerous projects combine field work and genetics, field work and theory or advanced statistical analysis, work on multiple major taxonomic groups, etc. The best way to conduct this type of research is for there to be collaboration among labs with different areas of expertise and this practice is increasingly common. But if several labs and therefore several faculty members are involved in a project then who should be senior author?

I have been involved in this type of collaboration and this issue can, in some cases, lead to substantial tension regarding who should be the senior author. I’ve had friends who have had similar experiences as well. These always get sorted out, and if you’re working with the right people there are no hard feelings in the end, but does it even make any sense to elevate one faculty member who has done just a little bit more than another to a position that conotes to the wider world a completely different level of contribution? The logical answer is simply no. In fact this is what causes the resulting tension in the first place. If the issue was who should be second or third author it wouldn’t be such a big deal because there is a level of gradation to the contributions, but senior authorship is completely distinct from all other positions. This doesn’t reflect the reality of cross-laboratory collaboration (except in some very specific circumstances) and it shouldn’t be reflected in the author line.

Now, I don’t care much about author order personally (unless someone else is trying to take a position they clearly don’t deserve), but I’m actually really concerned about this issue. The reason is that I suspect that the increasing emphasis on senior authorship that I’ve been seeing in ecology (an increasing prevalence in its practice, distinction of senior authorship for promotion and tenure, etc.) is actually going to decrease the number of truly collaborative cross-lab projects, just when we need them the most. Increasing pressure for faculty to be the senior author on papers can only lead them to spend less time working on projects where they will not (or risk not) being senior author. This means both not starting collaborative projects and also investing less in those collaborative projects when they do start them (I’ve heard a disturbing number of young faculty say things that support this possibility recently).

I suspect that these kinds of problems have impeded cross-disciplinary research in other fields, but I fear that the concept of senior authorship may be so ingrained in those fields that it may be too late to change it. In contrast, in ecology we still have a chance to insist that our discipline maintains its traditional approach to authorship where the author line is ordered from start to finish with respect to contribution. I believe that this will foster the cross-lab interdisciplinary collaborations that are so critical to understanding ecology and ecological challenges. Or, we can let the tail wag the dog and accept measures of personal success that impede scientific progress. The choice is up to you.

1 Comment | publishing | Permalink
Posted by Ethan