Thinking back in this post to my days as an insecure graduate student, constantly certain that I was going to be exposed as an impostor with worthless research, had me thinking for a moment.
I started by googling the name of the person that MrsDarwin called "Mr. Put-Down Eminent Scientist" (properly, I guess, "Put-Down-Eminent-Scientist-san") to see if I could find out whether he suffered in his home life or not, as she hoped, but I came up empty-handed of evidence either way. He appears to be doing well professionally. (Nope, I'm not naming names, and I expect the set of people who could possibly figure out who I'm talking about is small and unlikely to intersect the set of my blog readers.)
But then I decided to do something else, and I googled some search terms from my thesis. Hm.
Despite the fact that I never published the papers I wrote that described my research — my advisor passed away before we got them into publication, and I let them slide away — my 2004 PhD thesis has continued to be cited in ongoing research, not just from my own department.
I didn't expect this. It's a pain and a half to extract information that's only available in a PhD thesis not at your own institution. They're not yet universally easily searchable the way that journal article abstracts are. It makes me wonder if maybe it would have been a good idea, and actually useful to people, to try to publish my two measly papers.
Here's an interesting story. I once got named as co-author on a paper I didn't write, back when I was finishing up my thesis. It was a tip of the hat to me, n0thing more. My thesis was really a hypothesis. I raised a question, and then I ran out of time and had to leave it for others to answer. The other named authors were people who were beginning to look for the answer to the question. My research was the "Background" section of their paper.
Anyway, the professor who was the principal author of the paper sent me a pre-print as a courtesy. I was literally packing up the contents of my desk when I got a copy of the pre-print. It was the first I'd heard that my research was being published by anyone, AND it was the first I'd heard that my name was going to be on somebody's paper as a co-author. Nobody'd even mentioned it to me, let alone asked me for input. I suppose that their putting my name on the paper — as second of five authors — was an honorary, an afterthought.
I opened the pre-print and read it straight through (standing there in the office surrounded by cardboard boxes of photocopied documents and scribbled notes, a carefully curated archive that I would later carry upstairs to my attic and never open again), and I found a terrible, glaring mistake. I can summarize the nature of the error for the non-technical very easily: my years-long-in-the-formulating hypothesis predicted that, in a certain situation, Outcome A was such-and-such-percent more likely to happen than Outcome B. And the preprint in my hand, which had my name on it and was just about to be published, had got it backwards, mangling several technical details and in the end announcing that Outcome B was more likely than Outcome A.
I read it over three times to be sure it wasn't me who was wrong.
It was late in the evening. I walked out the door and down the hall, walked without knocking right into the office of the professor who was responsible for this happening (fortunately he was alone), and explained as clearly as I could that the paper was completely backwards and needed to be fixed immediately before it went to publication.
That was, I think, the only time that I spoke with conviction about the work that I'd done, to an audience of exactly one. I may have felt like a fraud most of the time, but I knew I was right about this. I also was acutely aware that if the paper went to publication as is, I'd have documentation of having been a fraud.
The error was corrected and the paper went to print with the technical details correct. I admit that I wish my research could have been described in my own words instead of somebody else's, but that is a minor quibble.
A postscript? The research group is still working on the question I posed, and intermediate computational results appear to confirm my hypothesis. That's kind of reassuring to hear, even though having read the papers, I'm not entirely sure that the computational results given are independent confirmation of the ones I produced — I suspect they're more like fancier-looking versions of the same computations I did.
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