Laurence Tratt

How do research papers end up looking the way that they do? I take two papers

that I've been involved with and detail the human story behind them and their

underlying research. You may also wish to look at the accompanying animations

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1IgtLLPL9GY and

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JCamO4P10NY

All of us have points in our lives where we have to decide whether we

should continue down our current path or change to another.

As a researcher, I often face a constrained

version of this problem: should I continue on my current research path

or change to another? For a long time I wasn't aware that I was being faced

with such decisions; and, when I did become aware, I wasn't sure how best to

make a decision. Over time I've realised that a simple "stick or twist?"

heuristic mostly works well for me. I don’t claim that anything in this article is

novel, nor do I think I'm describing an approach that’s applicable to every

situation - but it might provide some useful food for thought.

With slowly increasing frequency, I am asked for my advice on life or careers,

or something similar. Let us put aside worries about this sign of my increasing

decrepitude or the poor taste that some people show in those from whom they

seek advice. The brutal truth is that most of the advice that I've received as

an adult - nearly all of which has been well intentioned - has not been right

for me. I therefore assume that any advice I might give others would be equally

wrong, and so I try and avoid doing so. In this blog post, I will try to

enumerate the problems I have with advice as it is commonly given and look at

one way that we can do things differently.