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Lab Principles

It is essential that lab members can speak up to challenge ideas, while also respecting one another. Principles for fostering this kind of environment are curiosity, willingness to be wrong, and the principle of charity, in which you assume the best interpretation of someone else’s argument. I’ll do my best to model these behaviors, and hope that you’ll let me know if you think I am falling short.

An Inclusive Environment

My goal is to create an environment where people are comfortable as their authentic selves. Any workplace has an implicit cultural atmosphere, and for academic spaces this culture has traditionally, and overwhelmingly, been hetero and “white”. This can create an invisible barrier to people from other backgrounds who have to navigate these spaces. A welcoming lab culture allows everyone to feel included and known. At a minimum, we should work to be aware of our own, often unconsciously-produced words and behaviors that can cause people to feel excluded. I invite people who join the lab to engage in this work with me.

Scientific Conduct

Please review this description of scientific misconduct. We document and report our experiments in such a way that there can never be any question about how we obtained our results.

Here are some thoughts to help keep you on the straight-and-narrow:

  • We are trying to discover new things. It’s fine to get the “wrong” result.
  • Mistakes happen. If you find you did something wrong in an experiment that leads you to question the data, let me know. We can fix the problem and try the experiment again.
  • Your conscience will haunt you if you analyze and re-analyze data trying to obtain the “right” result.
  • There is usually one right way to analyze data to address the initial hypothesis. We should design that analysis based upon pilot studies. If, after doing that analysis, we find something unexpected we can do post-hoc testing and then try to replicate it with some new data.

The “open source” movement in science provides tools that help us to do good scientific work. This includes pre-registration of our experiments, and making our data and analysis code publicly available.

Record Keeping

The primary action that distinguishes good science from bad is proper documentation. I am extremely picky about the quality and quantity of documentation of our work. There are two primary tools that we use to document everything that we do:

  1. Software – Whenever possible, use an automated, scripted process to do a task. A script is inherently a documentation of the actions you took to produce a stimulus or analyze some data. Because CPU cycles are cheap compared to the cost of our time and labor, it is almost always preferable to tweak a script and re-process the data from scratch rather than make some adjustment to the data by hand. The principle is that you should at all times be able to re-create the current state of your data and analyses using only the raw-data and a set of scripts. All code relevant to your project should be stored in the lab GitHub repository: https://github.com/gkaguirrelab
  2. DropBox – We maintain a shared lab DropBox with permissions and sharing set to automatically store data in write protected directories and subject information in password protected files. More flexible directories are available for you to store the results of analyses and for other project files. A critical responsibility is to ensure that every file that you have on your computer that is related to laboratory business be stored in the DropBox.

DropBox Files and Privacy

If you use DropBox, I suggest that you maintain a separate PERSONAL and WORK DropBox account. Each will be linked to a different email address. The WORK DropBox account will be linked to your UPenn email address, and is a DropBox for Business account.

The documents that you store in your PERSONAL DropBox cannot be accessed by any member or administrator of the laboratory team ever (unless you explicitly share these files).

For documents that are stored in the WORK DropBox, there is privacy in only a limited sense. Basically, everything that goes in the WORK DropBox (even if not explicitly shared) is stored forever (even if deleted from your account). Additionally, while no one else on the team can access unshared WORK files now, these files will revert to be accessible (and thus readable) by the lab administrators at the time you leave the lab. Therefore, you should only store work-related documents in the WORK DropBox.

Work Hours

No one punches a clock in the lab and I don’t monitor your total hours at a desk. Productivity matters far more than time sitting in a particular chair. We make use of Slack for most lab communication. I have a habit of posting Slack messages at all sorts of odd hours. Please know that a Slack message from me is not a request for you to drop everything and reply. Feel free to silence messages when you are not working. If I think something is urgent and I want you to reply right away, I will explicitly say so.

Dress Code and Hygiene

The laboratory is an academic environment and has relaxed—but not non-existent—grooming and dress standards. Here are a few principles:

  • If you are meeting with participants in our studies, especially if those participants are drawn from a clinical population, please give a bit of thought to what you are wearing. These examples of “start-up casual” outfits are not a bad place to start.
  • Please attend to basic matters of hygiene when coming into work. The lab is a collegial place, and we don’t want to create any barriers to people working with one another. I like the principle that you should avoid having a scent that is exceptional in either direction!

Authorship and Affiliation

The main reward of research work is your name on a paper. Figuring out who goes on the author list of a paper and in what order can be a tricky business. Here are some thoughts:

  • Initiate discussions regarding authorship. Let’s have these conversations early and often in the development of the ideas behind a project.
  • Tools (such as tenzing) are available to assist in discussing and documenting contributions to a research project.
  • Generally, I will go in the last author position for work from my lab. I will almost always be the communicating author; one exception being when a post-doc is developing their own area of study just prior to leaving the lab.
  • My standard is that an author should have made an intellectual contribution and be able to give a 5-10 minute talk on the general idea of the paper and their particular contribution. Different authors might emphasize different aspects, but they should have some idea of the scientific purpose and content of the work.
  • If you have developed a new method for the laboratory, you can generally expect to be an author on the first paper that uses that method, but not on subsequent papers.

A related topic is author affiliation. It is quite common for students to conduct work in the laboratory, and then move to another position or return to their home institution by the time the manuscript is submitted. Author affiliation is determined not by where you are now but by the location at which the majority of research was conducted. Here is the policy at Nature:

The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was done.

Nature submission policy

The guideline here is to ask which institution is responsible for overseeing the responsible use of funds, ensuring the safety of subjects, and being ultimately responsible for certifying the conduct of the researchers.

Therefore, unless you are a collaborator that is based at another institution at the time the work was conducted, the institutional affiliation for work conducted in my laboratory will be the University of Pennsylvania. The one exception is if you are a late-stage post-doc, and submitting the work as communicating author. It is then appropriate for you to list your current address for communication.

Letters of Recommendation

I follow Brian Wandell’s policy:

If you would like a letter of recommendation, first ask me: “Can you write me a very positive letter?” I will reply honestly.

If you don’t ask, I may write a letter that (a) indicates I don’t know you very well or (b) has a very neutral tone. I will refuse to write a negative letter. I will only write confidential letters.

Brian Wandell

Philosophy

It seems that many (perhaps a majority) of published studies in medicine and psychology are false and not reproducible.

We are not immune to the biases that produce these sorts of errors. It thus pays to be skeptical regarding both your own studies and those of others.

Also, be aware that the public part of a scientific career is a record of success, but the actual path is littered with failure. Try not to be discouraged by the inevitable rejections, setbacks, and negative results.