Ranking the NIH funding by Institution and by State

No idea what this “MedCities News” is but they’ve tabulated the FY 2010 NIH awards by Institution and by State.

A ranking of the Top 100 institutions getting NIH grants, followed by a ranking of all 50 states, is below. Johns Hopkins’ is a runaway leader in getting NIH grants, followed next by the University of Pennsylvania ($577 million), University of Washington ($571 million), University of Michigan ($565 million) and University of California San Francisco ($538 million).

Go read for the full table of Top 100….

On giving advice to newly transitioned Assistant Professors

Dr Becca has a post up in which she ponders a perennial issue for newly established labs….and many other labs as well.

The gist is that which journal you manage to get your work published in is absolutely a career concern. Absolutely. For any newcomers to the academic publishing game that stumbled on this post, suffice it to say that there are many journal ranking systems. These range from the formal to the generally-accepted to the highly personal. Scientists, being the people that they are, tend to take shortcuts when evaluating the quality of someone else’s work, particularly once it ranges afield from the highly specific disciplines which the reviewing individual inhabits. One such shortcut is inferring something about the quality of a particular academic paper by knowledge of the reputation of the journal in which it is published.

One is also judged, however, by the rate at which one publishes and, correspondingly, the total number of publications given a particular career status.

Generally speaking there will be an inverse correlation between rate (or total number) and the status of the journals in which the manuscripts are published.

This is for many reasons, ranging from the fact that a higher-profile work is (generally) going to require more work. More time spent in the lab. More experiments. More analysis. More people’s expertise. Also from the fact that the manuscript may need to be submitted to more higher-profile journals (in sequence, never simultaneously), on average, to get accepted then to get picked up by so-called lesser journals.

This negative correlation of profile/reputation with publishing rate is Dr Becca’s issue of the day. When to keep bashing your head against the “high profile journal” wall and when to decide that the goal of “just getting it published” somewhere/anywhere* takes priority.

I am one who advises balance. The balance that says “don’t bet the entire farm” on unknowables like GlamourMag acceptance. The balance that says to make sure a certain minimum publication rate is obtained. And for a newly transitioning scientist, I think that “at least one pub per year” needs to be the target. And I mean, per year, in print, pulled up in PubMed for that publishing year. Not an average, if you can help it. Not Epub in 2011, print in 2012. Again, if you can help it.

The target. This is not necessarily going to be sufficient…and in some cases a gap of a year or two can be okay. But I think this is a good general rubric for triaging your submission strategy.

It isn’t that one C/N/S pub won’t trump a sustained pub rate and a half-dozen society level publications. It will. The problem is that it is a far from certain outcome. So if you end up with a three year publication gap, no C/N/S pubs and you end up dumping the data in a half-dozen society level journal pubs anyway…well, in grant-getting and tenure-awarding terms, a 2-3 year publication gap with “yeah but NOW we’re submitting this stuff to dump journals like wild fire so all, good, k?” just isn’t smart.

My advice is to take care of business first, get that 1-2 pub per year in bare minimum or halfway decent journals track going, and then to think about layering high-profile risky business on top of that.

Dang, I got all distracted. What I really meant to blog about was a certain type of comment popping up in Dr. Becca’s thread.

The kind of comment that I think pushes the commenter’s pet agenda, vis a vis academic publishing, over what is actually good advice for someone that is newly transitioned to an independent laboratory position. I have my own issues when it comes to this stuff. I think the reification of IF and the pursuit of GlamorMag publication is absolutely ruining the pursuit of knowledge and academic science.

But it is absolutely foolish and bad mentoring to ignore the realities of our careers and the judging of our talents and accomplishments. I’d rather nobody *ever* submitted to journal solely because of the journal’s reputation. I long for the end of each and every academic journal in which the editors are anything other than actual working scientists. The professional journal “editors” will be, as they say, the first against the wall come the revolution in my glorious future. Etc.

But you would never catch me telling someone in Dr. Becca’s position that she should just ignore IF and journal status and publish everything in the easiest venue to get accepted. Never.

You wackaloon Open Access Nazdrul and followers need to dissociate your theology from your advice giving.
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*there are minimum standards. “Peer Reviewed” is one such standard. I would argue that “indexed in PubMed” (or your relevant major database) is another such. Also, my arbitrary sub-field snobbery** starts at an Impact Factor of around 1.something…..however I notice that the IF of my touchstone journals for “the bottom” have inched up over the years. Perhaps “2” is my lower bound now.

**see? for some fields this is snobbery. for others, a ridiculous, snarky statement. Are you getting the message yet?