The reasons why I am grateful to my PhD supervisor are countless. He was not only supervising my research and helping me to write papers, but he was also mentoring my person to make an ecologist out of a student, and he managed to build a friendship meanwhile. In this post, I will talk about one of the things he did for me and I appreciated, which is probably something that he would never guess. Thank you Gabor for having me taught the importance of and how to reviewing manuscripts!
I have always been eager to learn. I was one of those students that studied when he was supposed to study and also when he wasn’t. If I found interesting scientific books or articles, I was reading it in my spare time. I was trying to get as much information as possible on an interesting topic and memorise them, convinced that this would have made of myself a knowledgable student and therefore a good scientist in the future. It never occurred to me that scientists are not sponges.
The books and the articles that I was reading were perfect. Of course, they weren’t. But for me, at that time, they were. I was not critical enough to put ideas, methods, analyses, results, conclusions into discussions, and I was absorbing everything without filters. I was maybe a good student, but as a scientist I was useless. Scientific discovery is a slow process that, more often than not, requires the contribution of many. It’s a collective work done by a community. The work of a scientist is being critical toward her work and the work of her peers. When you learn to critically discuss the work of another scientist with professionalism, you are doing a service for this community.
Criticism is essential to improve theories until they become accepted. Each article is a piece of work that serves to push ahead some ideas and push back others. No theory was born exactly as it looked in the end. When I was studying in Italy I had the feeling that the professors were oracles (and also that many of them wanted to give this impression). Their knowledge would have flown to generations and generations of students for centuries. Amen. Fortunately, they were not all like this and some of them tried to prompt discussions. Nobody likes to be contradicted or doubted, it’s understandable, but what students of science need to learn at university is to doubt. After all, the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
I have to thank Gabor for having me trained to review papers and for having suggested me as a reviewer once he thought that I was ready to contribute to the scientific community. He explained me how to do it and also the importance of what I was going to do. Chances are that you are going to review manuscripts in your free time and nobody is going to pay you for this. At best you may get a pat on the shoulder. Metaphorically. I met other postdocs that never reviewed a manuscript and I thought it was sad. Understandably, at the beginning of your career is likely that your name is unheard of among editors. The only person who could suggest you as a reviewer is your supervisor, but apparently this does not always happen. If it does not, my suggestion is that you ask your supervisor about it. It may have not occurred to him that you want to do it. Maybe you can suggest to do it together the first time to see how it is done (remember that manuscripts are confidential matter). You are going to learn to be critical, which is going to make you a better researcher, and to be part of the process of making science, which is one of the things that will turn you into a scientist.
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