MIYO and mentor co-authorships

A note to my fellows and mentees:

I learned a habit from Morton Kramer at Johns Hopkins. You'll have to tell me whether it's a bad habit.

During my early years studying with him, I would give Mort a close-to-final draft of a paper and tell him I was going to submit it after I did a bit more work on it. Promptly, and typically within a few days, he would hand it back to me (or more often would put it in my mailbox), and it would be covered with red pen marked suggestions for improvement, accompanied by some background papers I should read and cite. Often there would be a copy of one of his papers on the topic because he didn't use Bitnet or primordial FTP file-sharing protocols, and there was essentially no access to electronic library resources.

He never told me that I had to make a change. He simply gave suggestions and left it to me to 'make it my own' and this is the orign of the MIYO acronym in this blog post's title.

When I give you something I have edited, you will see two main types of marks. One type involves issues that I formerly had to fix when I was editor for newsletters and newspapers. Typos. Word choice ambiguities leaving one's meaning as an uncertainty. Grammar mistakes. A lead paragraph that did not tell who, what, where, when, how in order to lead the reader from the first page of the issue into the body of the issue where the advertisements would be seen.

The other type of mark will consist of whole sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs, of the type I never had time to draft when I was an editor.

The first type of mark requires deliberate decision-making by the first author, and contradiction when the first author thinks that I am making a mistake. (Yes, I still make mistakes in this category. The British and the Americans have different practices when it comes to punctuation of quotations, and whether the quotation mark goes inside or outside the comma or period of a sentence. I never bothered to store those rules in memory.)

Another example of an opportunity for contradiction includes my insistence that the reader of a science article deserves a first paragraph that declares the research question or its equivalent (e.g., a hypothesis) in order to provide a True North orientation -- i.e., say where you are going in the first paragraph before you bog me down in the scholarly details that you've worked so hard to master. I might decide that I'm not at all interested in where you are going and I can make an efficient decision when I read your first paragraph.

Where does this insistent point of view come from? In good science writing, the lead paragraph is equivalent to the who-what-where-when-how material that every good journalist learns to place in the lead paragraph of a front page newspaper story, with exceptions being certain types of human interest story. (If a man bit a dog, it sure better be stated in the first paragraph of the story. If the story is about a dog biting a man, you might want to bury that detail in a later paragraph.) One of the best lead sentences I ever read was from a Science article by Linus Pauling, and it started out something like this: "Vitamin C is an interesting compound." And of course the rest of the article was about the vitamin. (It might not have been C. It was one of the electron-grabbers but it's been decades since I read the article.)

The style of starting articles with a scholarly review of the literature that funnels down to a statement of purpose or intent is perfect for the medieval university tradition of scholarship out of which the PhD concept emerged. It's pretty much what you are required to do in a degree thesis or dissertation. But it's not quite right for science writing, even though many journal article reviewers never learned to draw that distinction and will complain about what you are covering in your first paragraph. You have to be strong enough to tell the editor and those reviewers that this is an issue of style rather than substance, and that your approach has good logic.

It is the second type of marking that always should prompt discussion until you understand the meaning behind what I have marked up. No need to discuss whether to put the comma inside or outside of the quotation mark; do what the journal tells you to do in its style guide, and don't worry about teaching me what that journal thinks is right.

But do discuss anything of substance about which you disagree or do not understand. It's an opportunity for you to teach me something I'll value

And now I cycle back to what I always had to do when Mort gave me a paper with lots of red pen marks. I had to learn from him, and then 'make it my own' from which the 'make it your own' MIYO acronym originates.

Finally, it was a rare occasion when Mort asked for a co-authorship role on the papers he worked hard to mark up. In this, he followed the tradition of his mentors, who were like Wade Hampton Frost (first Professor of Epidemiology in the US, and perhaps in the world). Frost's perspective that he had no need to be listed as an author of anything being written by his students.

[When I no longer have to report on my own scientific productivity to NIH, and when the university begins to count mentoring as a duty that is the equivalent of a PI writing his or her own grant applications, I will do the same. When Frost and Kramer were professors, the university counted mentoring as more than the equivalent of being a PI on an NIH grant application. Nowadays it seems that the only thing valued by the university is the size of your latest (and preferably this year's) NIH notice of grant award for which you are the main PI, whether you are submitting your own proposals for new funding, and whether you keep publishing new discoveries and making progress as shown via publications in the peer reviewed scientific literature. In the meantime, I won't object when I'm responsible for your funding and career development, and I do heavy-lifting on your papers, and you listed me as author. In time, I start asking people to take my name off the paper's authorship list, and if I've done anything, it's acknowledged only in the paper's acknowledgments section. This might be taken as a signal that I don't want to have anything to do with the paper, but if you begin thinking along those lines, I want you to remember the Frost and Kramer tradition, and MIYO.]

So what does MIYO mean, operationally?

(1) You are going to analyze the meaning of what is being conveyed, as best you can, and re-write it in your own words and sentences, and submit the paper (if you are first author). Typically, when my first drafts have long Latinate/Germanic sentences. (Read Kant if you want to see what I mean about long Germanic sentences.)  At minimum, you need to replace the Latinate polysyllables with pithy Anglo-Saxon equivalents, if you can. And you need to break those long sentences into shorter pieces so that the ideas are understood more readily. (A man bit a dog and there was no full moon.)

(2) You are not going to understand what I'm trying to convey, and you are going to put it on the agenda for discussion so that we can talk about the issues in our weekly work group meeting. Or, if time is of the essence, you are going to take it up with me directly. (Better the first approach so that others can learn and I can allow others to contradict me as well.)

(3) You are going to add or subtract details, perhaps not even cite the papers that I'm recommending for you to cite (e.g., you face a hard deadline and you don't have time to read and digest them and add them into the material).

ETC.

Via the MIYO process, you develop independence as a scientist. Isn't that your goal at this stage of your career in neuropsychiatric epidemiology?

Is it a bad habit I picked up from Mort Kramer?