Eldan Goldenberg's lab notebook

Maturing field

In a lot of ways my field is really not very mature. We have too many studies that are best described as cute but pointless, too many studies that are statistically naïve or just avoid mentioning that they report the one successful run out of 1000 failures, and too few universities that really expose undergrads to what we do. At the same time there are some signs that this is changing.

One of the main signs of the field maturing is that we are starting to see some commercial products that actually use our ideas in their underlying technology. This is something I've been noticing for a few years, and it's quite gratifying to me. However, today I noticed another sign of change in this direction, from the academic literature.

For a side project, I'm doing some work that picks up from an old set of experiments by my advisor and one of my predecessors. The original papers I'm using as source material are 11 years old—a long time in this field—and I'm re-reading them to make sure my starting point is as close as possible to an exact replication. In the process I've been comparing the nuts and bolts of the paper with the one I co-authored last year. To some extent things like introductions are common within our lab. It's not that we keep recycling them, but there are common themes that will always be talked about. What I found interesting was that in comparing the introductions of the two papers, the old one had to explain various things that the new one took for granted the audience would have encountered before. Meanwhile, the newer paper goes into considerable detail about just one set of experiments, while the older one reports three in less detail. I think this is all a sign that the field is less of a baby now than it was then.