So you want to be a research assistant? Advice for psychologists

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The dire state of the academic jobs market was brought home to me recently. I’d advertised for someone to act as a graduate research assistant/co-ordinator. This kind of post is a good choice for a junior person who wants to gain experience before applying for clinical or educational psychology training, or while considering whether to do a doctorate.  Normally I get around 30-40 applicants for this kind of job. This time it was 123.  This, apparently, is nothing. These days, for psychology assistant jobs, which act as a gateway to oversubscribed clinical psychology doctorate programmes,  the number of applicants can run into the hundreds.

One thing that strikes me is how little insight many applicants have into what happens to their job application. I hope that this post, explaining the process from the employer's perspective, might help aspiring job-seekers improve their chances of getting to interview.

With over 120 applications to process, if I allowed only two minutes for each application, it’d take me four hours to shortlist. Of course, that’s not how it works. There has to be an initial triage procedure where the selection panel views the applications looking for reasons not to shortlist. We were able to exclude around ¾ of the applications on the basis of a fairly brief scan. But we then had to select a shortlist of five from the remainder. This is done on the basis of a careful re-reading of those applications that survive triage.

So how do you get past this double hurdle and avoid initial triage, and then make it to the shortlist? Well, here are some tips. They seem very obvious and simple, but worth stating, as many of the applications we received didn’t seem aware of them.

• Follow the instructions for job applicants, and read the further particulars. I gather that there are some careers advisors who recommend candidates should send their application direct to the principal investigator, rather than via administration, because it will get noticed. It will indeed, but it will create the impression that you are incapable of reading instructions.
• Specify how you meet the selection criteria. Our university bends over backwards to operate a fair and transparent recruitment policy. We need to be able to demonstrate that our decisions are based on the selection criteria in the job advert, and not on some idiosyncratic prejudice. The ideal applicant lists the selection criteria in the same order that they appear in the job description and briefly explains how they meet them. It makes the job of the selection panel much, much easier, and they will give you credit for being both intelligent and considerate.
• Don’t apply if you don’t meet the essential selection criteria. So, if the job requires you to drive, then don’t apply if you don’t have a driving licence (or a chauffeur).  When I was young and naïve, I assumed people wouldn’t apply for a job if they didn’t meet the criteria, and ended up appointing a non-driver to a job that involved travelling to remote locations with heavy equipment. It is not a mistake I’ll make again.
• Don’t assume anything is obvious. To continue with the example above, if the job involves driving and you don’t mention that you can drive, the person evaluating your application won’t know whether you’ve forgotten to tell them, or if you are avoiding mentioning this because you can’t drive. Either way, it’s bad news for your application, and in the current market, it’ll go on the ‘no’ pile.
• Don’t send a standard application that is appropriate for any job. It’s key to include a cover letter or personal statement that indicates that you have read the further particulars for this specific post. Use Google to find out more about the post/employer. On the other hand, the employer really doesn’t want or need to be told about the subject matter of the research - once I had the equivalent of a short undergraduate essay, complete with references, included in an application, and though it demonstrated keeness, it was complete overkill.
• Read through your application before you submit it. I’ve had applicants who describe how enthusiastic they are about the prospect of working, not in my institution, but in another university. I’ve had applications where entire paragraphs were duplicated. A melange of fonts changing mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence, creates a poor impression.
• Run the cover letter/personal statement through a spell checker, and check the English. Anyone working for me will be sending letters and information sheets out to the general public on my behalf. It creates a bad impression if there are errors, and so you’ve a very high chance of getting on the ‘no’ pile if you make mistakes on an important document like a job application.
• Be honest. If there’s something unusual about your application, explain it. I have, for instance, shortlisted a person who’d had a prolonged period of sick leave, but who gave a clear and honest explanation of the situation and was able to offer reassurance about ability to do the job.
• Be concise, but not too concise. The cover letter/personal statement should cover all the selection criteria, but avoid wordiness. One to two single-spaced pages is about right.

And if you get to interview? Well, this blog post has some useful hints:

10 Psychological Techniques to Help You Get a New Job

But what if you follow all my advice and still fail to get to interview? Alas, given the massive mismatch between the number of bright, talented people and the number of jobs on offer, many good candidates are bound to miss out. It certainly doesn’t mean you are unemployable. But try this exercise: look at the selection criteria and your application, and pretend you are the employer, not the candidate: An employer with a huge stack of applications and limited time. What do you think looks good, and what are the weaker points? Can you gain further experience so that the weaker points can be remedied in future job applications? Or maybe the weaknesses include something like a poor degree class, which can’t be fixed. Perhaps your specific set of talents and interests just aren’t a good fit to this kind of job, in which case you need to consider other options.  

If all else fails, you may want to cheer yourself up by reflecting on how people who don’t go along with the system can nevertheless have interesting and influential lives, by reading  Hunter S. Thompson's 1958 job application to the Vancouver Sun  

Susan Greenfield and autistic spectrum disorder: was she misrepresented?

I have had many emails in response to my open letter to Baroness Greenfield. All but one have been approving. The one exception is an eminent Professor who has chided me for misrepresenting her views. I am reproducing here our unedited email correspondence. I have anonymised the name of the correspondent, as he has not given permission for it to be used, though I will happily break the anonymity if he wishes me to do so, so he can take credit for his arguments.

As a non-celebrity scientist, I would like to get on with my day job and do some data analysis, and so have decided to reproduce the debate here, so that others can pursue it. Please feel free to comment, though please note, I will delete any comments that are off-topic, i.e. those not pertaining to issues around the validity of Greenfield’s claims, and the extent to which they have been misrepresented.

From: xxx@xxx.ac.uk

Sent: 10 August 2011 13:27 

To: Dorothy Bishop

Re: Misrepresentation of Greenfield’s article

 Dear Professor Bishop,

In your blog of 28 September 2010 you flattered yourself with the aspiration of being a “Paragon”. However, your blog of 4 August 2011 betrays that aspiration and violates the principles of scientific debate. You are misrepresenting Greenfield’s article in New Scientist. To claim that she is blaming what you call “internet use” for the grievous condition of autism is a travesty. The word autism does not appear in that article; Greenfield specifically refers to “autistic spectrum disorders”. Nevertheless, you implore her to “stop talking about autism” and unpleasantly characterise her comments as “illogical garbage”. For clarity I shall repeat myself: autism is not the subject of that article.

It is imperative that scientists engage with all sectors of society and do so accurately, honourably and without intemperate, personal comments. Publishing an assertion which misrepresents the evidence is unacceptable. Furthermore, your blog ignores Greenfield’s explicit references to peer-reviewed papers which provide data consistent with aspects of her general hypothesis (which is not about autism). Perhaps I should remind you of one of the key sentences in Greenfield’s article: “it is not the technologies themselves that I'm criticising, but how they are used and the extent to which they are used”.

Your failure to live up to the aspiration you expressed in your blog of 28 September 2010 saddens me and many other members of our community. In that blog you stated: “Paragons write personal letters to authors”. However, given the public pronouncements which you have made, a public retraction of your misrepresentation is now required. Your earlier experiences as an journal editor will no doubt confirm this requirement.

-------------------------------------------------------------

From: Dorothy Bishop

Sent: 10 August 2011 16:31 

To: xxx@xxx.ac.uk

Re: Misrepresentation of Greenfield’s article

I have no intention of withdrawing what I have said. I am happy to defend it.

You seem to think there is a clear distinction between autism and 'autistic spectrum disorders'.

There is not; many people treat them as synonyms, and those who interpret them differently regard ASD as a milder form of the same condition. There is no justification for linking either the severe or the broader category with internet use. The argument I made about a cause needing to precede it effect applies just as much to ASD, broadly defined, as to core autism. ASD does not suddenly appear in middle childhood - the symptoms are evident from around 2 years of age, and so are not plausibly caused by internet use.

If the article is not 'about' ASD/autism, then why does Greenfield mention it at all? This really does upset parents of affected children.

And isn't she aware of the large literature debating reasons for the increasing prevalence of ASD/autism diagnosis? - if she is going to cite this to support her argument, then it behoves her to do her homework.

It is really not acceptable to use innuendo to imply associations, but then back off if challenged to produce evidence.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2011/aug/08/1

There is a more fundamental problem here. Susan Greenfield is listened to because she is a scientist. But unlike other scientists engaged in public communcation, she does not confine herself to explaining science to a broader audience. She uses the media to promote her own new theories. What she conspicuously does not do is to publish these ideas in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This is a shame because it means she has become disconnected from the rest of the scientific community. I would have been happy to voice my criticism by the more conventional means of peer review, which would have been private, or as commentary on a scientific paper, but I am denied that opportunity because Susan Greenfield does not publish these ideas in the scientific literature. Since her views are widely distributed through magazines and newspapers, those of us who find them flawed have no alternative but to challenge them in the public domain. I am aware that a great many people have made 'intemperate personal comments' about Susan Greenfield, but I do not accept that I have done so; I criticised the ideas rather than the person.

I might add that yours is the first critical comment I've had. I have had numerous supportive emails and comments from scientists who have not only written to say they agree, but have thanked me for raising this.

----------------------------------------------------------

From: xxx@xxx.ac.uk

Sent: 11 August 2011 09:49 

To: Dorothy Bishop

Re: Misrepresentation of Greenfield’s article

Dear Professor Bishop,

Thanks for your response.

You present yourself as sanguine about conflating Autism and Autistic Spectrum Disorders. I find this surprising and alarming.

Your case now rests on your conviction that all of the adolescents or adults who are currently being diagnosed with any Autistic Spectrum Disorder (at an increasing incidence) could have been diagnosed as such “from around 2 years of age”. Please direct me towards peer-reviewed prospective studies which support this claim.

---------------------------------------------------------------

From: Dorothy Bishop

Sent: 11 August 2011 10:49 

To: xxx@xxx.ac.uk

Re: Misrepresentation of Greenfield’s article

I will send you some peer-reviewed papers when I have some free time, but meanwhile, please see Criterion C in the DSM5 proposed revision, as well as the rationale section, which explains the terminology.

You might also find it useful to talk to Professor Sir Michael Rutter, who is the world's leading expert on autism.

--------------------------------------------------------------

From: xxx@xxx.ac.uk

Sent: 11 August 2011 12:00 

To: Dorothy Bishop

Re: Misrepresentation of Greenfield’s article

Criterion C in the link you have provided does not address the matter in question: namely, whether there is well-controlled evidence which supports your conviction that all of the adolescents or adults who are currently being diagnosed with any Autistic Spectrum Disorder (at an increasing incidence) could have been diagnosed as such “from around 2 years of age”.

Criterion C merely raises a circular argument, which would be susceptible to unreliable retrospection.

I will indeed raise these matters with Michael Rutter.

But, more importantly, I look forward to receiving from you peer-reviewed papers which substantiate your specific claims.

Sincerely

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Dorothy Bishop

Sent: 11 August 2011 15:51 

To: xxx@xxx.ac.uk

Re: Greenfield’s article

Your initial complaint was that I had misrepresented Greenfield because I had failed to distinguish ASD and autism. I trust the DSM5 document has clarified the point for you and you now accept this was not misrepresentation.

You are now demanding that I provide peer reviewed evidence for my supposed "conviction" that "all of the adolescents or adults who are currently being diagnosed with any Autistic Spectrum Disorder (at an increasing incidence) could have been diagnosed as such “from around 2 years of age”.

I have sent you information pointing out that it is is part of the diagnostic criteria for ASD to have onset in early childhood.

This is not a circular argument. It is merely pointing out that ASD, as defined by gold standard diagnostic criteria, could not be caused by environmental influences that only start in later childhood.  I reiterate the last sentence from the DSM 5 rationale section: "Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder and must be present from infancy or early childhood, but may not be detected until later because of minimal social demands and support from parents or caregivers in early years."

Note that this does not mean that all children with ASD will be diagnosed in childhood, but it does mean that they have evidence of autism in early childhood.  This is typically identified by an interview instrument such as the Autism Diagnostic Interview.

To clarify my argument.

1. When asked for evidence that the internet is changing people's brains, Greenfield stated, among other things, "There is an increase in people with autistic spectrum disorders."

To most people this would imply that she is saying the internet is a causal factor in the increase in autistic spectrum disorders.

2. There has been an increase in autistic spectrum diagnoses over the years.

However, this evidence comes from epidemiological studies that do use standard diagnostic criteria including the onset criteria (see attached articles).

3. Since internet use cannot plausibly cause a disorder starting in a toddler, this is not a valid argument.

You now demand that I prove that "all of the adolescents or adults who are currently being diagnosed with any Autistic Spectrum Disorder (at an increasing incidence) could have been diagnosed as such “from around 2 years of age”. "

This is an attempt to move the goalposts. Of course diagnosis is not perfect. There may be misdiagnosed cases. The fact that you demand this evidence suggests that Greenfield's argument (as filtered by you) is now :

a) there are children who don't have autism in early childhood but who develop some kind of quasi-autism in middle childhood

b) this is caused by internet use

c) such cases account for the increase in ASD diagnoses, even though they don't meet DSM criteria for ASD

Do you have any evidence for any of these postulates ?

If that is not what you are saying, what exactly is the claim?

You have also not responded to the point I made about the appropriate place for a scientist to publish new scientific theories. Do you think it is appropriate to make statements about aetiology of a major neurodevelopmental disorder in a non peer-reviewed journal such as New Scientist, when there is no peer-reviewed work to back them up, even if the causal claims are by innuendo rather than direct statement?

If you would like your point of view have broader recognition, I would be happy to publish this correspondence on my blog, so that Greenfield's position and the supposed limitations of my arguments could be given wider publicity.

 pdfs of the following papers were attached:

Baird G, Simonoff E, Pickles A, Chandler S, Loucas T, Meldrum D, Charman T: Prevalence of disorders of the autism spectrum in a population cohort of children in South Thames: the Special Needs and Autism Project (SNAP). Lancet 2006, 368 (9531):210-215.

Baron-Cohen S, Scott FJ, Allison C, Williams J, Bolton P, Matthews FE, Brayne C: Prevalence of autism-spectrum conditions: UK school-based population study. British Journal of Psychiatry 2009, 194:500-509.

Brugha, T. S., McManus, S., Bankart, J., Scott, F., Purdon, S., Smith, J., et al. (2011). Epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adults in the Community in England. Arch Gen Psychiatry, 68(5), 459-465.

Fombonne, E. (2005). The changing epidemiology of autism. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 18, 281-294.

Kim, Y. S., Leventhal, B. L., Koh, Y.-J., Fombonne, E., Laska, E., Lim, E.-C., et al. (2011). Prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in a total population sample. American Journal of Psychiatry.

Rutter, M. (2005). Incidence of autism spectrum disorders: Changes over time and their meaning. Acta Paediatrica, 94, 2-15.

Taylor, B. (2006). Vaccines and the changing epidemiology of autism. Child: care, health and development, 32(5), 511-519.

Williams, J. G., Higgins, J. P. T., & Brayne, C. E. G. (2006). Systematic review of prevalence studies of autism spectrum disorders. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 91, 8-15.

Wing, L., & Potter, D. (2002). The epidemiology of autistic spectrum disorders: is the prevalence rising? Ment Retard Dev Disabil Res Rev, 8, 151-161.

P.S. 13.52 on 12th August 2011
A further response from xxx

Dear Professor Bishop,

I am astonished by your peremptory decision to publish our correspondence without permission. I ask you to add the response below, without any editing, as a matter of urgency.

Dear Professor Bishop,

In your first email you stated: “ASD does not suddenly appear in middle childhood - the symptoms are evident from around 2 years of age”. This non-ambiguous statement means that all people who are diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder after early childhood will have been displaying its symptoms from around 2 years of age.

You now point out: “it is part of the diagnostic criteria for ASD to have onset in early childhood”. The difference from your initial statement is salient. Thus, it is the case that that unless those symptoms are present in early childhood, an Autistic Spectrum Disorder may not, by definition, be diagnosed.

In this context, you draw attention to “Criterion C in the DSM5 proposed revision”. As I am sure you realise, DSM5 will not supersede DSM-IV until 2013. The criteria you describe as “gold standard diagnostic criteria” are part of a proposed revision.

I shall consider just one matter arising:

Autistic Disorder and Asperger’s Disorder are addressed separately under DSM-IV. The current diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s Disorder (DSM-IV) include the following: “There is no clinically significant general delay in language (e.g. single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years). There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behaviour (other than in social interaction), and curiosity about the environment in childhood”. Indeed, a delay in social interaction is the only age-related point mentioned; no critical age is given for its onset.

I recognise that the revisions for DSM5 under current consideration are being guided by the following:

”Asperger’s Disorder. The work group is proposing that this disorder be subsumed into an existing disorder:  Autistic Disorder (Autism Spectrum Disorder)”.

If this were to be enacted, diagnosis of Asperger’s Disorder would be precluded, unless its symptoms were present in early childhood (as specified by Criterion C). Again, I feel it is appropriate to ask for evidence which supports your original statement: “the symptoms are evident from around 2 years of age”. According to your gold standard DSM5, this must apply to Asperger’s Disorder. It is reasonable for me to ask whether this has been substantiated by prospective studies which are free from potentially unreliable parental retrospection. I may be in error, but I have found no such study among the papers you kindly sent me. I sincerely apologise if I have overlooked something relevant.

The immensely complex matters of aetiology and diagnosis are not given due consideration if proposed revisions (which are still subject to consultation) are presented as “gold standard”.

In my preceding email I wrote: “I look forward to receiving from you peer-reviewed papers which substantiate your specific claims”. I am saddened to note that you have chosen to misrepresent this polite request as “demanding”. It seems that our discourse will not be fruitful and that it should be closed.

An open letter to Baroness Susan Greenfield

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As a contemporary of yours, I have followed your career with interest over the years. I was delighted when in 1994 you were selected to give the Royal Institution Christmas lectures - the first woman ever to be so honoured. The lectures were fun and informative and delivered with enthusiasm and charisma. Since then, however, I’ve been dismayed by the way in which your public communications have moved increasingly away from science. You are frequently invited to give your opinion on topical matters, because of your status as a ‘top neuroscientist’. This leads people to assume that what you say is grounded in evidence. You have a splendid opportunity to act as an ambassador for science, but you don’t seem interested in doing that. Instead, we are increasingly treated to opinions without the evidence to support them.

I would just shake my head sadly at this lost opportunity, except that in recent years your speculations have wandered onto my turf and it's starting to get irritating. In the New Scientist this week, you mention the rise in autism as evidence for your concerns about the impact of the internet on children’s brains. Previously I’ve read that you've made similar comments about ADHD. You may not realise just how much illogical garbage and ill-formed speculation parents of children with these conditions are exposed to. Over the years, they’ve been told that their children’s problems are caused by their cold style of interaction, inoculations, dental amalgams, faulty diets, allergies, drinking in pregnancy - the list is endless. Now we can add to this list internet use. Except that here, at least, parents will be able to detect the flaw in the logic. A cause has to precede its effect. This test of causality fails in two regards. First, demographically - the rise in autism diagnoses occurred well before internet use became widespread. Second, in individuals: autism is typically evident by 2 years of age, long before children become avid users of Twitter or Facebook. You also seem unaware of the large literature discussing possible causes of the increase in autism diagnoses, most of which concludes that most, if not all, of the increase is down to changes in diagnostic criteria, (see e.g. Fombonne et al., 2005).

I wish you would focus on communicating about your areas of expertise - there’s plenty of public interest in neurodegenerative diseases, and I’m sure you could do a great job explaining this topic to a broad audience. Or  you could give up the work on neurodegenerative diseases and devote your time doing research to follow up your hunches about effects of internet use, which I agree is an interesting topic. But please, please, stop talking about autism.

Update November 2014
If I had hoped this open letter might persuade Susan Greenfield to stop talking about autism, I was wrong. Three years on, she is claiming there is evidence to support her assertion of a link between internet use and autistic spectrum disorder. For a look at the 'evidence' and a detailed critique of her claims, please see this blogpost.

What does it take to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine?

According to Andy Lewis, aka @lecanardnoir, the answer is around £356 for a London resident*. He revealed this discovery in a blogpost a couple of years ago. He was investigating the c.v. of Jayney Goddard, President of the Complementary Medical Association. Her website describes how she uses homeopathy, psychotherapy and hypno-analysis and ... is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. Can this be true?, you might ask. Isn’t the Royal Society of Medicine like a medical wing of the Royal Society, an organisation to which only those of the highest academic stature are elected?  Er, well, no. It isn’t, and many of those working in alternative and complementary medicine are delighted at the ease to which they can gain an affiliation, and so embellish their CVs with impressive-sounding medical credentials. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that HRH the Prince of Wales was made an Honorary Fellow of the RSM in 2005.

Here are just a few of those who mention their affiliation to the RSM on their websites, and no doubt impress members of the public by doing so. I haven't been able to find a directory of members or fellows to check accuracy of these claims.

• Dr Dato' Steve Yap. Complementary medical director, DSY Wellness & Longevity Center, Malaysia. His website has the initials FRSM after his name, even though this is specifically prohibited by the RSM. His qualifications include a Masters degree in Administration from the University of Durham, and Board certification in Nutritional Medicine and Anti-Aging Medicine from the World Society of Anti-Aging Medicine, France.
• Terence Watts. Founder of The Essex Institute, where students learn advanced skills in both psychotherapy and hypnotherapy, and the Association for Professional Hypnosis and Psychotherapy.  His website disarmingly explains how he was a late starter who came to hypnotherapy at the age of 48, after working as a professional ballroom and Latin-American dancer, supplemented by spells as aTV engineer, electronics design, tailor, carpet-layer, computer programmer, furniture shop assistant, factory hand, salesman (fire extinguishers and alarms) and part time rock 'n' roller (lead guitar). He notes proudly that he is the first in his profession to be made a Member of the City and Guilds Institute, which he states is comparable to a British Masters degree.
• Harald Camillo Gaier. Homeopath, naturopath, master herbalist, acupuncturist and author of the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Homoeopathy. 
• Peter King. Principal tutor at the British School of Traditional Japanese medicine. He has an MA in ‘Sports Science & Japanese Budo Studies’and also has qualifications in osteopathy, cranial osteopathy, acupuncture, Shiatsu, and Advanced Chinese Tuina. The website also notes that the Honorary Principal of the British School of Japanese Medicine, Hatsumi Sensei, has been honoured at the RSM by the permanent inscription of his name on the 'Wall of Honour'. 
• The late Prof. Dr. Sir Anton Jayasuriya. Founder of Medicina Alternativa International, promoting and propagating acupuncture, homeopathy and natural medicine. 
• David Reeves. President of the (British) National Register of Advanced Hypnotherapists. In private practice as a Psychoanalyst, Hypnotherapist since 1991, and as a Stress Management Consultant since 1994. Before moving into the field of Hypnotherapy and Stress, his background was in the commercial sector reaching the level of Managing Director.
• Dr. Lyn M. Bateman. Has a Doctorate in Clinical Hypnosis/Hypnoanalysis and Doctorate and Ph.D. (sic!) in Alternative Medicine. I'm not clear which institutions offer such qualifications. Also has a seriously illiterate website, which advertises training in medical hypnosis for non-medical persons.
• Marcus Webb. Registered Naturopath and Osteopath who qualified in 1988 from the British College of Osteopathic medicine (formally the British College of Naturopathy and Osteopathy) where he served as a part-time lecturer for four years.  
• Iskra Harle. Naturopath offering treatment for "Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Infertility (men & women), Acne, Hypothyroidism, Allergies, Irritable bowel syndrome, Wheat intolerance, Milk intolerance, Weight control, Fatigue, Depression, Migraine & all kinds of headaches, Early stages of Alzheimer's disease/senile dementia, Back pain, Frozen shoulder, Post surgery recovery, Post chemotherapy recovery, and many more".

Do they turn anyone away? It’s hard to tell. The closest case I could find was Ingrid P. Dickenson, BRCP EMR, Electromagnetic Pollution Consultant, who is trained in Colour Therapy, Psychosynthesis Counselling, Reiki, Oneiric (Dream) Therapy, Communication Skills with children, Group Facilitation and Electro Crystal Therapy. She describes herself as a former associate member of the RSM, noting sniffily, “Due to The Royal Society of Medicine's inability to acknowledge the effects of electromagentic pollution (despite Ingrid's multiple contacts to them) Ingrid decided to cancel her subscription in early 2011.”

*Now stands at £365. See RSM site.

How to survive in psychological research

A Handbook of Skills and Methods in Behavioural Research is not the place you’d expect to find something to make you smile, but many years ago one of my graduate students pointed me to a wickedly funny piece by Ray Hodgson and Stephen Rollnick. Since then I’ve found myself loaning an increasingly dog-eared photocopy of the article to new generations of students and postdocs. Sadly, the article is not available electronically, though copies of the book can be tracked down. So here’s a summary of Hodgson and Rollnick’s laws, all of which are as pertinent to the older, seasoned researcher as to the intended readership of the ‘young, lively, questioning researcher who has great expectations but a lack of practical experience’:

Law #1. Getting started will take at least as long as the data collection

The barriers are various: perhaps the most salient for the newcomer is dithering induced by fear of commiting to a non-optimal design. Another barrier is having too many people involved; this just multiplies the dithering, as each person tries to include additional measures or graft on subsidiary projects. It’s vital to have someone who will take control for decision-making - a point emphasised in my previous post on the NationalChildren’s Study.

Hodgson and Rollnick also mention the need to get ethics approval, another topic that has featured on my blog. It’s got a lot worse in the years since they wrote their article: there’s even a kind of ‘meta-research’ in which the goal is to quantify the baleful influence of ethical scrutiny on research efficiency (e.g. Elwyn et al, 2005).

Law #2. The number of available subjects will be one-tenth of your first estimate

Note to young readers: ‘subjects’ are what we used to call ‘participants’ until someone decided that the term implied an unheathily controlling attitude to those taking part in experiment.

Quite simply, "as soon as somebody starts to research a particular condition, people with that condition leave the district". It’s totally true and totally mysterious.

Law #3. Completion of a research project will take twice as long as your last estimate and three times as long as your first estimate

This may be moderated by whether you are a pessimist or optimist, but no true pessimist would ever embark on a research project.

Law #4. A research project will change twice in the middle

Hodgson and Rollnick cite their experience with a one-year project to test the effectiveness of a Drinkwatchers program for problem drinking. “All we needed were thirty subjects from amongst the estimated 10,000 problem drinkers in South Glamorgan. One hundred and sixty problem drinkers answered the advertisement…Of these only eight volunteered to join a Drinkwatchers group, three turned up to the first meeting and one of these came to the second.” Since the study had been funded, the researchers decided the best they could do was an alternative study to discover what kinds of help problem drinkers really want. Needless to say, these days, such a change of plan would necessitate fresh ethics approval which would consume all the remaining time on the grant.

Law #5. The help provided by other people has a half-life of two weeks

Yes, yes, yes. Never do a study that depends on the kindness of strangers.

Law #6. The tedium of research is directly proportional to its objectivity

You really do need to know this when you start out in research. If you detest mundane, repetitive activities, try another career.

Law #7. The effort of writing up is an exponential function of the time since the data were collected

If the person who collected the data has left by the time you come to write it up, then it can be hard to remember exactly what was done, so you’d better be sure to have had a real obsessive in charge, who will document thoroughly every step of the research collection and data coding. Hodgson and Rollnick reckon that data that sit in a filing cabinet for 4 years will never escape.

On a more serious note, failure to get stuff written up is incredibly wasteful, especially if the funding for the study came from public funds. Sometimes the failure just comes from writer’s block, and sometimes because the researcher discovers a flaw that makes the study unpublishable. More commonly, though, the failure to write up is because the results are deemed uninteresting. This has the unfortunate effect of distorting the research literature, as null results are left in the file drawer. I'd like to see journal editors adopting a policy of determining ‘publishability’ of a paper on the basis of Introduction and Methods alone: if an interesting problem has been identified and the study is well-designed and adequately powered to answer it, then it should be published, regardless of the results.

Yet another reason for failure to publish is researchers who bite off more than they can chew. As I’ve suggested in a previous post, we need to move away from a system whereby the rewards for researchers are proportional to the amount of grant income they receive, to one that rewards thrift. And if research funders find themselves overwhelmed with far more proposals than they can fund, they should consider vetoing those who already have substantial funding, even if they are ace researchers. There is a limit to how much research someone can do and do well.

Law #8. Evidence is never enough

So you are lucky enough to get an interesting result, and are confident that this will change the field and make your reputation. And what happens? Nobody takes any notice. Hodgson and Rollnick note that research that conflicts with the prevailing view is likely to be ignored, but that’s not the only problem. You do also have to sell your science. But that does not need to mean cutting corners or distorting findings. But learn to write accessibly, get out there and give talks, start a blog (!) and, most important of all, focus on problems that are important.

Get hold of the original Hodgson and Rollnick chapter if you want positive tips on how to be a successful researcher. And for further advice, it’s hard to better Peter Medawar’s 1979 book Advice to a Young Scientist.

References
Elwyn, G. (2005). Ethics and research governance in a multicentre study: add 150 days to your study protocol BMJ, 330 (7495), 847-847 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.330.7495.847
Hodgson, R., & Rollnick, S. (1989). More fun, less stress: How to survive in research. In G. Parry & F.-N. Watts (Eds.), Behavioural and mental health research: A handbook of skills and methods (pp. 3-13). Hove, England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
 

The National Children’s Study: a view from across the pond

The National Institutes of Health, the major government funding agency for medical research in the US, is in trouble. Although a threat of a serious funding cut was largely averted, funding for 2011 is nevertheless $260 million less than for 2010. It is predicted that only 1 in 6 grant applications will be funded this year, the lowest level yet. Such low funding levels are not only disappointing for researchers with good ideas, they also are inefficient, because scientists end up spending more time writing unsuccessful grant proposals than in doing research.

So it gets interesting to see what does get funded. NIH has a great website where you can find out how they spend their money. I came across it when doing a study on the amount of funding going to research on different neurodevelopmental disorders. I revisited the site recently to look in more detail at the kinds of study that get funded in this general area, and I had a bit of a surprise. There were huge sums of money going to something called the National Children’s Study. I added them up and they came to around $500 million.

More Googling revealed that the National Children’s Study is a longitudinal cohort study that plans to follow 100,000 children from the prenatal period to 21 years of age,  to investigate environmental and genetic influences on health and development. There’s no doubt that big longitudinal cohort studies have provided invaluable data in the past; they can provide samples that are large enough to detect small effects, and if the sample is representative of the population, they can be used to estimate prevalence of different conditions. They are essentially correlational, though, and therefore less conclusive than experimental studies for establishing cause and effect. 

The cost of such a large-scale enterprise is bound to be high, but just how high is acceptable? The National Children’s Study website indicated that the spend to date was actually higher than the figure I had from the NIH source - $608 million, with the bulk of the expenditure, $553 million, since 2007 when the Implementation phase of the project began. And it is clear that the future spend will be higher still, as the cost of following up children and assessing their development is taken into account. The total cost was estimated in 2004 to be $2.7 billion. 

The background to the study is clearly explained in an article by Nigel Paneth. During the Clinton presidency The Children's Act of 2000 was passed, instructing the NIH and other federal agencies to “. . . plan, develop, and implement a prospective cohort study, from birth to adulthood, to . . . incorporate behavioral, emotional, educational, and contextual consequences to enable a complete assessment of the physical, chemical, biologic, and psychosocial environmental influences on children's well-being . . . .” As Paneth drily pointed out, this directive was not accompanied by any funding during the 7 years of the Bush administration, so efforts were expended instead on planning and piloting the study, in anticipation of future funding. However, too much planning can be a bad thing, and “as a ship lying in port too long becomes encrusted with barnacles, so the National Children's Study became weighted down with a myriad of measures and instruments” (Paneth, 2010). But then, salvation. Under the Obama administration, the study returned to the political agenda, and $200 million per annum was allocated for 2009-2010. But problems remain. In an article entitled “Saving the National Children’s Study”, David Savitz and Roberta Ness argued that the study is in trouble. There has been debate about the best methods of recruitment of participants, and about the organizational structure of the project. “There are multiple advisory groups representing the lead federal agencies, the extramural research community; an executive committee consisting of selected Center investigators; and oversight by the National Children’s Study Program Office, the Director of NICHD, and the Director of NIH—yet how the major decisions affecting the future of the National Children’s Study will be made remains unclear.” (Savitz & Ness, 2010). Despite the huge sums of money allocated to the project, there is still uncertainty about methods. “To decide where the study should be done and who is capable of doing it, one has to know what the study will entail. The lack of a clear protocol has led to an extended, expensive, and not-fully informative pilot phase.” (ibid).

Of course you can’t know in advance exactly how longitudinal cohort data will be used: one of the benefits of previous cohort studies has been that they provide a resource to allow investigators to test their ideas against existing data, rather than having to collect a new dataset. For example, in the UK, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which started in the 1990s, is now being used to investigate hypotheses about genetic and environmental influences on behaviour.  When the project started, it wasn't possible to anticipate the developments in genetics, but the prescience of the researchers in gathering DNA samples mean that the data are invaluable, especially since a wealth of environmental and psychological measures are also available. Nevertheless, even allowing for such uncertainty the vagueness of the Hypotheses section of the National Children’s Study website, is worrying:

“Working hypotheses developed by the multiple teams of scientists have been summarized as an efficient and dynamic reference of the current questions to be addressed by the Study. The current list of hypotheses continues to evolve. It is expected that some hypotheses still being refined will be added and, over the long course of the Study, new questions will emerge and be added to the Study and some of the hypotheses included may become outdated and discarded. However, there is consensus among scientists planning the Study that as a group, the hypotheses alone can neither convey the true breadth of the Study nor completely guide the planning and design of the Study. To further define the full scope and topics of the Study, priority outcomes along with priority exposures are identified as health areas for the Study. The priority exposures and outcomes serve as an organizing framework for the Study hypotheses.” This sounds awfully like “We’re going to gather loads of data and hope that it pans out.”

Well, you might say, any nationally-based study of 100,000 families is bound to be complicated and expensive. But, as Savitz and Ness point out, there are examples of European studies that are comparable in size and scope, yet do not appear to have got so mired in difficulties. They draw attention to the Danish National Birth Cohort and the Mothers and Babies study in Norway, each of which is studying over 100,000 children enrolled in utero. I have not yet been able to find figures for the Danish study*, but the Norwegian study costed around $45 million over the 10 year recruitment period. Funding was announced this year for a new British Birth Cohort study that will follow 90,000 children from birth at a cost of £33.5 million. I’m sure that all these European cohort studies will ultimately cost far more than initially planned - such studies have a tendency to gobble up funds as the children grow older and the difficulties of maintaining a follow-up increase. The articles written on the Danish and Norwegian studies emphasise the logistic and ethical difficulties of doing studies of this kind, and the uncertainty about the future. But even so, the costs of the National Children’s Study seem set to exceed those of European studies by an order of magnitude.

I’m struck, as Savitz and Ness were, by the organizational differences between the European and US studies. Commenting on the Scandinavian cohort studies, they point out “These studies, each led by a very small group of investigators, took an early and consistent approach to their specifications and made tough decisions about what aspects to promote and what to curtail, based on a shared, explicit vision for the study.” This is very different from the huge committee-based structure in charge of the National Children’s Study. Committee-based decision-making even extends in the US study to writing up work for publication: “The Publications Committee will identify topics, set priorities, and facilitate the preparation of primary Study publications. The Committee will define the general scope and content of primary publications and assemble Writing Teams to prepare those publications. The Committee will define the charge of these Teams, monitor their progress, and review the manuscripts to ensure adherence to the charge given to the Teams, before the manuscript is submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.” As an approach to scientific communication, this approach seems designed to kill stone dead any enthusiasm or creativity in the researchers. I think if NIH wants to get good science for its money, it would be better off taking an analogy of the scientist as an enthusiastic market gardener rather than factory farmer.

But a more fundamental question is whether the outcomes of this study will justify the enormous cost, or whether the money might be better spent elsewhere. A key question is how far we need another longitudinal cohort study, or whether the existing European studies will be able to answer many of the questions that the researchers are interested in. It’s not easy doing a cohort study anywhere, but it seems particularly tricky in a country that does not have a national health service. There are many areas funded by NIH where an individual investigator could do useful work with a grant of around half a million dollars. The funds spent to date on the National Children’s Study could have funded over 1200 such research projects. Viewed from this side of the pond it seems that, with the best of intentions, US funding for health research is simultaneously starving out the best of its scientists while feeding a bloated monster.

* Update on 2nd July 2011. I've now got a couple of estimates from researchers involved in the Danish study and both indicate a total cost since 1994 of less than $US 20 million. That is around 1/10th the cost of the National Children's Study just for one year, 2010. The Danish researchers make the point that the study benefits from the existence of national registers that minimize costs of case-finding, and that already contain much relevant information.

References
Kaiser, J. (2004). NIH Launches Controversial Long-Term Study of 100,000 U.S. Kids Science, 306 (5703), 1883-1883 DOI: 10.1126/science.306.5703.1883
Magnus, P., Irgens, L., Haug, K., Nystad, W., Skjaerven, R., Stoltenberg, C., & , . (2006). Cohort profile: The Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) International Journal of Epidemiology, 35 (5), 1146-1150 DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyl170
Olsen, J., Melbye, M., Olsen, S., Sorensen, T., Aaby, P., Nybo Andersen, A., Taxbol, D., Hansen, K., Juhl, M., Schow, T., Sorensen, H., Andresen, J., Mortensen, E., Wind Olesen, A., & Sondergaard, C. (2001). The Danish National Birth Cohort - its background, structure and aim Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 29 (4), 300-307 DOI: 10.1177/14034948010290040201
Paneth, N. (2010). Saving the National Childrenʼs Study From Its Saviors Epidemiology, 21 (5), 602-604 DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e3181ea5f89
Savitz, D., & Ness, R. (2010). Saving the National Childrenʼs Study Epidemiology, 21 (5), 598-601 DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e3181e942cc

Autism diagnosis and hyper-systemizing parents: Nottingham vs. Eindhoven

Family life in Eindhoven?

© cartoonstock.com

With an insensitivity one might have expected from a Sun headline writer, the New Scientist summarised the findings from a recent study thus: Childhood autism spikes in geek heartlands.  The bottom line is that autism is diagnosed more than twice as often in Eindhoven, a city in the Netherlands where many are employed in the IT industry, than in two other cities of comparable size, Haarlem and Utrecht. The explanation favoured by the researchers is that autism is characterised by a ‘systemizing’ style of thinking, which is part of normal human variation, and which is common in those in technical and mathematical occupations. Cities with a strong IT presence will attract an unusually high number of high-systemizer residents, and these people will be more likely to have offspring with autism. This is, then, a genetic explanation, and it’s given some plausibility by a large body of research demonstrating that parents of children with autism are more likely than other parents to show indicators of mild autistic-like characteristics, the so-called ‘broad autism phenotype’. (Although, on an admittedly quick search, the evidence that parents of children with autism tend to be high systemizers seems rather weak: mild symptoms of social and communicative problems seem a more pronounced feature of the broad autism phenotype than hyper-systemizing behaviours (Bishop et al., 2004; Wheelwright et al., 2010; Windham et al., 2010)).

As the researchers themselves note, the hyper-systemizing account is not the only possible explanation for their result. Crucially, the study relied on counting diagnoses from school records, rather than screening the population in a standard fashion. Although it’s not hard to recognise a case of classic Kanner autism, there’s far more disagreement about diagnoses for children with milder symptoms. As I argued on a Guardian blog, unless we have clear objective criteria for diagnosis, it’s hard to compare one prevalence rate with another. The different numbers could just reflect local expertise, policy or practice in diagnosing autism.

One limitation of the published study is that the researchers are quoted as saying that their study was prompted by anecdotal reports that autism was abnormally common in Eindhoven. While it is worth checking out if the anecdote is accurate, this makes Eindhoven less than ideal for testing the hyper-systemizing hypothesis, as it potentially capitalises on a chance blip. What would be better would be a study with clear a priori predictions, based solely on levels of IT industries in different cities. In theory, it should be possible to do this using publicly-available data from the UK published by the Department of Children, Schools and Families. This dataset has the advantage of being comprehensive, unlike the school report data from the Eindhoven study, which relied on schools providing the data (- the response rate was 75% for Eindhoven but only 50% for Haarlem and 46% for Utrecht). A recent report by Lindsay (2011)  presented some data from this UK database on numbers of children with Special Educational Needs categorised as having Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN) or Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The numbers of children with these labels varied massively from place to place, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Percentages of children with SEN diagnosed with SLCN or ASD; 

Data from local authorities with the highest or lowest % of either diagnosis

I have no idea whether the number of IT experts is higher in Nottingham than Leeds, but it’s noteworthy that places where you might expect high levels of hyper-systemizing, such as the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, don’t feature among the places with very high rates of ASD diagnoses. Lindsay also points out that “the two neighbouring authorities of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire have almost identical prevalence rates for SLCN and ASD, despite one being a large city, and the other a shire county” (p. 143). Clearly, my intuitions are no substitute for real data, and it’s also important to note that the data in Table 1 are not population prevalence figures, but instead are proportions of children who have already been identified as having Special Educational Needs. One would need to use the frequencies of ASD in the population as a whole to test the hypothesis of a correlation between level of IT industry and rates of autism. The data are available, and this might seem like a nice project for someone to do, except for a major problem. As Lindsay emphasised, it is impossible to conclude from the UK data whether prevalence really do vary across the country, because the definitions of disorders are inconsistent from one area to another. It’s possible that criteria for autism are more standardised in the Netherlands than in the UK, but the UK data make me suspect that it’s just not possible to draw meaningful conclusions about prevalence from data based on educational records.

References

Bishop, D. V. M., Maybery, M., Maley, A., Wong, D., Hill, W., & Hallmayer, J. (2004). Using self-report to identify the broad phenotype in parents of children with autistic spectrum disorders: a study using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 1431-1436.

Lindsay, G. (2011). The collection and analysis of data on children with speech, language and communication needs: The challenge to education and health services. Child Language Teaching & Therapy, 27(2), 135-150.

Roelfsema, M., Hoekstra, R., Allison, C., Wheelwright, S., Brayne, C., Matthews, F., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). Are Autism Spectrum Conditions More Prevalent in an Information-Technology Region? A School-Based Study of Three Regions in the Netherlands Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders DOI: 10.1007/s10803-011-1302-1 

Wheelwright, S., Auyeung, B., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2010). Defining the broader, medium and narrow autism phenotype among parents using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Molecular Autism, 1(1), 1-9. 

Windham, G. C., Fessel, K., & Grether, J. K. (2009). Autism spectrum disorders in relation to parental occupation in technical fields. Autism Research, 2(4), 183-191.

Should we ever fight lies with lies?

Photo from verdammelt's photostream

So here’s my moral dilemma. The pangolin is a threatened species. It is a peaceful creature which has evolved an impressive strategy of self-defence; it curls up into a scaly ball. The effectiveness of this strategy against predators can be seen here.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t work when your opponent has hands, and can just pick you up. Pangolin numbers are being depleted by poachers who sell them for Chinese medicine. Pangolin scales are known as Chuan Shan Jia and are reckoned to be effective for such purposes as “expelling wind-damp from the channels”. They are also recommended for treatment of cancer, see for instance, this website.

Although sterling work is being done by conservation agencies, time seems to be running out. So I wondered about taking a different tack. As Ben Goldacre has famously remarked, the Daily Mail has a mission to classify inanimate objects into those that give you cancer vs those that cause cancer, so how about getting pangolin scales on the former list? This idea has been germinating in my brain for a while, but there are two major obstacles. First, I have a reputation for truthfulness, which I’d be sorry to lose, and second, how would I start such a rumour?

Well, a recent post by Jo Brodie gave me an answer for part 2. Jo noted that if you upload photos to Flickr, they get picked up by people doing Google searches. Her photos of ads for weight-loss tea, accompanied by her comments that there’s no evidence for effectiveness, have actually appeared on websites advertising the stuff.

But Jo’s posts don’t involve any dishonesty. I want to spread a rumour about Chuan Shan Jia that is completely fictitious. I had some misgivings, but I did it. I opened a Flickr account and made a graph. I took a figure from a powerpoint presentation on cancer rates and doctored it to be about pangolin scales. You can see it here. [No you can't, link removed. See P.S. below!]. Whether the sort of people who use Chinese medicines will actually ever find this seems unlikely, but it seemed worth a shot. If anyone would be willing to translate the slide into Chinese, I'd be most grateful.

I had a moment wondering whether I’d get sued by purveyors of Chinese medicines, but I don't think I need to worry, since the use of endangered species in medicines is illegal.

So what about my reputation? Well I am hoping that I can preserve it by declaring here that you can rely on me to be honest in my science communications on all topics except use of medicines based on endangered species. If my pangolin hoax works, you can anticipate a Flickr posting on rhino horn next.

My husband is very disapproving and thinks it is never right to fight lies with lies. What do others think?

P.S. 20th June 2011

Well, the verdict in the comments is clear, and my husband is now feeling extremely smug. To go down this route is not just unethical but also foolish. So I won't. I had hoped that by declaring myself as a hoaxer at the same time as initiating a hoax, I could defend my integrity, but I see that this would be a dangerous assumption, and the unintended consequences could be serious.
Thanks to Jo, I've discovered that my inexperience with Flickr means that my hoax graph wasn't copyable anyway.
But I'm glad I posted this: very interesting and helpful to get the reactions, and Jo has given me ideas for pursuing my vendetta against pangolin medicines without any dishonesty. I also inspired a great set of tweets from @Artvanderley that demonstrate another approach: implant the idea there could be bad effects of pangolin medicine without claiming it: e.g. "40 years ago no one believed that ingesting pangolins was linked with cancer, excessive weight gain and genital atrophy". I suspect that some of you may think that even this may be sailing too close to the wind, but it's clearly far less heinous than inventing data.
I'm left feeling just a bit disappointed, as I have always been very well-behaved and law-abiding and was rather enjoying my brief dalliance with hoaxing. But yes, the issues are serious, and so I will climb wearily back up on the moral high ground.

A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic

If I tell people I’m on Twitter, I tend to get one of three reactions:

a) Isn’t it all about what Lady Gaga had for breakfast?

b) How do you find the time?

c) You?!!! (Implication: Twitter is for hip juveniles rather than fossilised academics)

This is unfortunate, because Twitter is a valuable resource for academics. If you’re allowing  inaccurate stereotypes to deter you, you’re missing out.

First of all, you have to understand what Twitter is. It’s totally different from email, and more like a news broadcast. People all over the world are continually emitting tweets (very short messages) any of which can be viewed by anyone. You select what you want to attend to. There are two ways of doing this. The default method is to ‘follow’ particular people or organisations who tweet. Their tweets then appear in your timeline, which appears as a scrolling list when you open your Twitter page. The other method is to search for tweets that include a particular word: for instance, if you type ‘neuroscience’ into the search box at the top of the page, you’ll see all the tweets in the twitterverse that include that word, starting with the most recent.

If you want news about Lady Gaga, there’s plenty out there. But if you want information of a different kind, you can follow organisations such as the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust, Guardian Science, the New York Times, Nature, etc. etc. Most scientific organisations, newspapers, and science journals are on Twitter, and by following them you have an up-to-date news stream about their activities.

It's OK to be a purely passive user of Twitter, just following people who interest you. In the circles I move in, a high proportion of tweets are messages pointing to a weblink, which may be a newspaper or journal article or a blog. This is where Twitter is such a useful resource for the academic: if you follow those who share your academic interests, they will point you to interesting stuff. When I first joined up I was impressed to find that within the first few days, I’d been directed to two new papers in my field that were very relevant to my work and that I hadn’t known about.

Many people remain as passive users, but you’ll get much more out of Twitter if you use it actively and emit your own tweets. Written an interesting paper? Starting up a blog? Twitter is a great way of informing people, but there’s a catch: you need to have followers, a topic I discuss more below.

How do I get started?

You can Google to find plenty of good guides to the mechanics of tweeting. See, for instance:

http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/

http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

However, most of these are directed towards people who do have a keen interest in Lady Gaga’s breakfast, or who wish to use Twitter for business purposes. The suggestions here are to complement the ‘how to do it’ guides with advice geared towards academic users.

Signing up is dead easy: just follow the instructions at http://twitter.com/.

You need a username. Keep it fairly short and avoid numbers or underlines: you want others to be able to remember it and type it easily. You can be anonymous if you wish, but I’d not recommend it: you are more likely to have interesting interactions with others if they know who you are. A brief description of what you do and what your interests are will help kindred spirits discover you. You get the chance to select your avatar, a little picture that appears alongside your tweets. It’s a good idea to have something other than the default picture of an egg - if you don’t want a photo of yourself, you can pick something symbolic, but aim for something to give yourself a distinctive presence. If you want, though, you can start with the egg and change it later.

How do I decide who to follow?

I started out by following my old friend and colleague Sophie Scott, or @sophiescott as she is known on Twitter. We have similar interests and a similar sense of humour, and so the first thing I did was to see who she was following. You can check out someone’s followers by clicking on their username at the top of a tweet. You’ll see their profile on the right hand side, with an indication of how many followers they have, and who is following them. Further clicking lets you see who these people are, and read their recent tweets. So it’s easy to get an idea of whether you’d like to see their tweets on a regular basis: if yes, a single click allows you to follow them.

The people I follow divide mostly into (a) organisations/public media, such as those mentioned above; (b) academics who work in areas that interest me; (c) journalists and bloggers. Although I have friendly relationships with many of those I follow, I don’t use Twitter as a means of keeping up with friends - it’s too public and the short message format is not useful for that.

I suggest you start out by just identifying a few people that look interesting to follow, and see whether you enjoy the Twitter experience. My recommendation would be to keep the number of people you follow restricted to no more than around 100. Many people follow far more than this, but I like my twitterstream to move at a reasonably sedate pace.

Getting fed up with tweets from someone you’re following? You can just unfollow them. They don’t get a message about this, so you can do it without embarrassment.

Active tweeting and attracting followers

You can have most fun with Twitter if you tweet yourself. For the beginner, there is a major problem: if you emit a tweet, the only people who will see it are your followers, and at the outset you have no followers. You may have something very amusing to say, or a really interesting paper just published, but it’s like standing at the top of a cliff and shouting into the wind. To get started, it helps to either be well-known, or to have tweeting friends. You can look for friends and colleagues by clicking on the ‘who to follow’ button, and if you find they have a Twitter presence, send them an email with your username to let them know you are there. With luck they’ll follow you, and tell others about your presence. It’s only worth doing this, though, if they are active Twitter users with followers: lots of people sign up but never use Twitter.

You may also drum up followers by following others. This is where it is important not to be too secretive: if I get a new follower, I’ll see their name and the brief bio that comes along with it, and if they look interesting, I may check out what they’ve been tweeting to see if I want to follow them. Twitter etiquette does not require that you follow someone just because they follow you, but following someone is a way of indicating your presence to them.

Another way to draw your tweeting to people’s attention is to use hashtags in your tweets. These act as keywords and are just words with the hash sign attached at the front, such as #neuroscience or #psychology. People who are searching on these topics will find your tweets and may decide to follow you.

If you are sending interesting tweets, the message will spread around the twittersphere and you will gradually get a following. You may wonder how on earth you are supposed to generate those interesting tweets that will persuade people to follow you. You don’t always have to. You can act as a transmitter for other people’s interesting tweets, by using the Retweet button below the tweet. This will just resend the tweet to your followers, preceded by RT and your username.  

You should not despair if at first you don’t have many followers. Although it’s true that a famous name will attract followers in droves, there are plenty of people who aren’t famous, but who have hundreds or even thousands of followers just because they give good value. And at the end of the day, you should not get too hung up on follower numbers. The charm of Twitter is that it lets you reach out to communicate with people all over the globe whom you might otherwise never encounter: a handful of like-minded people who appreciate your tweets is more important than a horde of followers who seldom read your messages.

What about spam?

Many newbies are worried that they will get followed by odd people. That certainly will happen. But the nice thing is that it has no impact on you. I attracted lots of provocatively dressed pouting followers when I started out. But they can follow me as much as they like; they won’t affect my stream of incoming tweets unless I follow them back. Various unsavoury characters will appear as followers for a day or two and then drop away. They hope that by following you you’ll take notice of them and buy whatever product they are purveying, but you just ignore them and they go away. Twitter discourages users who simply see it as a marketing opportunity, and is set up so you can readily report people for spam if it looks like they are doing that, but mostly the only bad thing that happens is that you have a fleeting moment of excitement at gaining a new follower, only to be disappointed to find they are someone who sees you as a potential client.

The one place where you may get more intrusive spam is if you press the @Mentions button at the top of the screen. [Update: in later versions of Twitter this is called @Connect]. Now, instead of your usual stream of tweets by followers, you will see just those tweets that mention you by username, and these will not necessarily be by your followers. In general, if you get people mentioning you in tweets, this creates a warm glow that others are interested in your tweets, but there are people who will try to exploit this, and so you may find tweets that mention your name in a tweet to lure you in to clicking a link to their website. In my experience, these are very rare, and when they occur they are usually easy to spot: if you click on their username, you’ll see they’ve sent the same message to many others. You should just report them for spam.

What should I tweet?

Quite simply, tweet to others things you think will interest them. Looking at tweets by others should give you an idea of what makes for a good tweet. Some very famous people are hopeless tweeters, because they just describe the mundane details of their life. What I actually want are either amusing observations, or useful information. Some people use Twitter to record their stream of consciousness. Unless you’re James Joyce, this is very dull for everyone else, and just makes you look egotistical. Come to think of it, James Joyce would have been a disaster on Twitter.

When you start tweeting, the 140 character limit seems impossible, but you learn by experience.  If you want to include a link to a website in a tweet, you will almost certainly need to shorten it. There are various programs for doing this, e.g.

http://tinyurl.com/

http://bit.ly/

As mentioned above, if I read a tweet by someone that I think will interest my followers, I'll retweet it. That’s a single click operation, one of the options given below each tweet. Retweeting is what makes Twitter such an effective communication medium: if an interesting message is retweeted by several people with many followers, who in turn retweet to their followers, it can rapidly spread all over the world.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll start to appreciate that tweets are a kind of currency; your status on Twitter is tied up with the extent to which you emit popular tweets. It is therefore as important to acknowledge the source of a good tweet as it is to reference an idea in a scientific article. If you use the retweet function, this happens automatically: the retweeted tweet will be marked RT and will show both your name and that of the originator. What’s a definite no-no is to copy someone else’s tweet and resend it without acknowledging the source. Etiquette is less clear on the extent to which one should send a tweet to thank others who promote one’s tweets. This may seem polite, but if over-used, it can descend into a rather irritating form of self-promotion -  in effect you are publicly drawing attention to the fact that others liked your tweet. A lot depends on how it’s done, but there’s a narrow line between being seen as courteous, and coming across as a self-congratulatory dick.

How much should you tweet? I’m more likely to unfollow someone who tweets too much rather than too little. Anyone who keeps repeating the same self-promotional message is quickly dropped from my list. If you have a blog or article you want to promote, it’s reasonable to plug it a few times on different days and at different times of day, to make sure the message gets out, but you’ll turn people off if you overdo it. If it’s interesting enough, your followers will do the work of promotion for you, by retweeting. On the other hand, there's not much point in following someone who tweets less than once a week, unless their tweets are really something special.

Remember, Twitter is totally public. I can search for someone’s name and then look at all their tweets. I would therefore strongly advise against tweeting anything at all that you would not want your friends and colleagues to see, or that could be deemed defamatory. There is a Delete option you can use on tweets that you come to regret, but by the time you select it, your tweet could have been sent all around the world.

How do I find the time?

It’s a big mistake to think you have to read every tweet that appears in your stream. I just turn to Twitter when I need distraction or entertainment. So you really don’t need to spend very long on Twitter unless you want to. The difficulty is that what’s happening on Twitter is often more interesting that what’s happening in other areas of life, and it can become quite addictive for that reason. I usually resolve not to look at Twitter during the working day, especially if I have a paper to write or an analysis to run. But sometimes the resolve faulters.

I hope that’s enough to persuade you to give Twitter a try. Happy tweeting!

P.S. 18th June 2011

The Reply Option

I’ve been asked about the Reply option that appears when you hover over a tweet.

You can use this even if you aren’t following someone. Your message will automatically be prefaced by the username of the person you reply to. It won’t appear in their regular stream of tweets, but they will see it if they look under @Mentions. This can be a way of getting yourself involved in a discussion, even if you don’t have followers. And if the discussion develops well, the person you reply to may decide to follow you.

Twitter won’t show your Reply to your followers unless they are also following the person you reply to. Complicated, huh? The reason is that otherwise your followers will be treated to just one side of a personal conversation. But if you think your reply may be of interest to a broader audience, you can make it visible to all by just putting a full stop in front of the @ at the start of the Reply. (In fact, any character will do, but . is traditional. The rule is that provided tweets don’t start with @ your followers will see them).

P.P.S.28th October 2011
I've written a short piece about blogging for academics that may interest readers of this post.

26.3.12. PPPS. A final warning! There is one bad thing that can happen to you on Twitter, that won’t happen to you provided you are forewarned. These are what I call “drink me” tweets, after the tempting bottles that Alice was confronted with in Wonderland. They say things like “Someone is writing bad things about you”, or “Here’s a funny photo of your”, or “Find out your Twitter ranking”, and point you to a link. Usually they come from someone you have never heard of (and so will only be seen on the @Connect timeline). NEVER CLICK ON THE LINK. These are attempts to take over your Twitter account (they may actually ask you to click to confirm this is OK. It isn’t). Once your account is compromised, the fun begins. Your account will be used to send messages to all your followers, typically advertising something, and often encouraging them to respond in a way that will compromise their account. Deeply embarrassing. For the same reason, if you get a message from someone you ARE following which looks weird - e.g. “My Twitter ranking is 5.5, find out yours!”, don’t go near it.

There is useful advice on what to do if your account is compromised here. 

And a note on Favourites. I didn’t mention Favourites in my original post, as it was pretty self-evident how they worked. However, the good folks at Twitter then updated the interface, and it’s no longer obvious. If you want to keep a Tweet - perhaps to read later, or to refer back to - select the option to Favourite it. To see your Favourites, you need to go to My Profile.

On other Twitter platforms, such as Tweetdeck, you can have a column showing Favourites without additional clicking.

7th Nov 2012. PPPPS. Email and Twitter
Unfortunately, whenever Twitter produces an upgrade, it seems to make the experience worse. One relatively recent change has been the irritating expansion of Email Notifications. The last thing I want is Twitter stuff intruding into my email, but when you first sign up to Twitter (or upgrade to latest version) these notifications are On by default. It's easy to switch them off though.
From top menu bar select Me, then Edit your Profile.
Then from menu bar on left, Email Notifications will allow you to select or deselect specific kinds of email that Twitter can send you.