Getting Started as a Researcher

Ah..research life

Ah..research life

Motivation and Mission Statement

  • To become a scientist is to dive into the unknown on behalf of the human-kind, it is never an easy job but can be very rewarding as well. It is good idea to always check your motivation, think about your mission statement, and confront your career and personal choices sincerely.
  • Choose Your Own Adventure: Developing A Values-Oriented Framework for Your Career by Lucianne Walkowicz
    • I think you should read this, every word of it, before you read anything else. This is probably the best career advice I have ever read. I worked on my mission statement right after I read this.

Inclusiveness and Community Building

ORCID and Google Scholar

  • ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.
    • It is a very good idea to register an ORCID and maintaine it from time to time.
  • It is also a good idead to start a Google scholar page

Choosing a Programing Language

  • It has become clear that Python has become the new Lingua franca in astrophysics and cosmology research and it is probably the language you want to learn first. We also prepare a series of lists to collect Python related resources and tools, including basic learning materials for Python ,resources on improving the performace of Python, on model fitting or optimization in Python, on statistical analysis and model in Python, on data visualization in Python, on getting started with your own Python project.
  • C and C++ are still at the core of many important astrophysical applications, e.g. numerical simulations, data reduction or analysis that requires high efficiency or good performance. Many important astrophysical softwares use C or C++ as the core and then wrap it up using Python. Here we also provide some basic resources for using C and C++ in research. Fortran is another historically important language known for its excellent numerical performance. Its influence in astronomy is decreasing right now, but you will still see it in scenarios that rely on high-performance computing.
  • Julia is another intersting high-level programming language on the rising. There are several key advantages over Python but it is still a young language. Right now, Julia tools for astronomy and astrophysics are still limited, but we decide to start to collect relevant resoures and tools
  • At the same time, R statistical language also has some interesting applications in astronomy; IDL was yesterday’s language for astronomical data reduction, but for historical reasons, many projects/instruments are still using it. If you just start your research in astronomy, we no longer recommend you to learn it. But in case you have to face it in research, it is not difficult if you have a background in Python
  • Although their applications in astrophysics are limited, MATLAB is widely used for data reduction and numerical simulation, and Mathematica is a very popular tool for symbolic analysis and theoretical research. Neither of them is free, so please make sure you have the correct license to use them.
  • And it never hurts if you can learn some basic programming skills related to webpage making, e.g. HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
  • It is also important to remember: never tool-shaming others!. There are excellent scientists who still rely on IDL, IRAF, Fortran for research, and using SuperMongo or gnuplot for data visualization. There are plenty of personal and practical reasons to do so and they can still do great science. Use your energy for something more positive and productive.

Misc

Organizing Your Research Project

Organizing a Programming Environment

Backing-up Your Research

  • This is as important as you can possibly imagine.
  • Off-line Backup:
    • You should constantly back-up your harddrive using external harddrive. Both MacOSX (e.g. TimeMachine) and Linux (TimeVault and Duplicity) have systems that help you backup data.
    • You can also easily backup your entire system or certain directory using a command line tool rsync: rsync -av –delete /Directory1/ /Directory2/
      • On Linux, you can also use Cron to automatically backup files at any given time. For example, you can follow the instruction here
  • Online Backup:
    • It is encouraged to use service like the Dropbox to constantly backup important research-related files (e.g. draft, code, and figures). In mainland China, jianguoyun (坚果云) is an alternative.

Keeping Research Notes and Documents

  • Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. It is very easy to learn and can help you make well-organize notes and documents that can be easily converted into other format (HTML or LaTeX).
    • Mastering Markdown by GitHub Guides is a very good start.
    • If you want to learn more details, use the Markdown Guide.
    • Most of the editors and IDEs support the .md or .markdown format documents through extensions. They can help you check the syntax. There are also a lot of markdown editors on all platforms.
  • Whatever notes or documents you are keeping for your research, make sure it can be backed-up and is searchable. Using software like the OneNote from Microsoft, or on-line service like evernote would be a good idea. If your project is already on Github, you can just use git to version control and back-up your documents. GitHub wiki pages are another great way to keep notes.

Publishing Your Science

Sharing Your Science

Talking about Your Science

Making a Scientific Poster

Reading Paper

  • It is important to read as much as you can. It is important to follow arXiv regularly.
    • You can check if your institute is using voxCharta, a on-line platform to vote on papers and organize arXiv discussion.
    • It is good idea to have a routine that keeps record of interesting papers. Here is an examply by me
  • Astrobites is a very good website to follow recent interesting papers from the perspective of a graduate student.

Communicating with Others

  • Slack has become the most common way to organize a small collaboration. Even the free version can be very useful.
  • Telecon becomes more and more frequently used to communicate among collaborators in different institutes and timezones. Commonly used telecon tools including Skype, zoom, GoToMeetings
    • All of these tools are free and cross-platform, and easy to use. You can share screen using them for remote presentation too.
  • Doodle is the most commonly used tool to create a poll to decide the time slot for a meeting or telecon.

Personal Website

Conference and Talks

Scientific Conference

On-line Colloquium