Seven Recipes to Become a Top Researcher

Jüri Allik
Young people entertain the illusion they will live forever and therefore time has no particular value to them. But success in scientific research presupposes the ability to travel in time. Unlike a dilettante, the professional scientist needs to think about how his or her ideas will be received in 10 years' time.For example, to be in the top 1% of researchers most cited in the field of psychiatry and psychology today, articles you have published in the last 11 years need to have received at least 533 citations, according to ISI Essential Science Indicators. At present there are only 15 scientists in Estonia who have crossed the 1% mark in their respective fields of research, two of them psychologists Risto Näätänen and Jüri Allik. There is also Estonian-born professor emeritus at the University of Toronto Endel Tulving, a pioneer in memory research, but credit for his work goes to Canada.So achieving success is not that difficult. The fundamental rule has been nicely worded by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers (2008). The key to success in any field is a matter of practising a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours (The Ten-Thousand-Hours Rule). This rule, as Gladwell convincingly demonstrates, holds true both for Mozart and for Bill Gates.It is easy to see that it therefore requires you to focus on your favourite activity for approximately three hours a day, including all Saturdays and Sundays, for 10 continuous years.When applied to the discipline of psychology, this rule means that during these 10,000 hours you need to write and publish as many articles as possible that are good enough for other researchers to find it necessary to cite them nearly 600 times.I have a couple of very good recipes à la 'Nigella Express' on how to achieve at least 600 citations in 10 years. Actually, I have even more recipes, but as a psychologist I am aware of the magical number 7, which represents the limit of human capacity to process information. This is why in the following passages I will confine myself to seven of them.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0128, 13 June 2010