Monday, June 8, 2009

Just in case you like to be bored....

My dad asked me the other day about my publications. I often say I don't have any scientific publications, but that's not quite true. I just don't have any first author publications. In the scientific community when a paper is published, the order of the names on the publication is pretty important. The first author listed probably did all the work. The last author listed is the boss. He/she oversees the project but most likely didn't do a single experiment themselves. The people in the middle all did something, but not necessarily very much. In the case of my two publications I must admit that I probably did about the least amount of work one can do and still be considered an author. I think the experiments I did are both explained and then listed as "data not shown." Oh well, at least I did something, right? I'm still waiting for the day where I get that first author publication, where the article will be cited as "Winsor et al....." It will happen sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.
In case you really want to bore yourselves, the articles were published in an open-access scientific journal:
Yeast Screens Identify the RNA Polymerase II CTD and...
Comparative Genome Wide Screening Identifies....

That second article was actually published today, which is probably why I was thinking about it...