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Career vs. beer?

If you get a position where promotion (or even continued employment) depends on how much research you publish, how hard should you work? Morgan Giddings writes in PLoS Computational Biology that:

Enough work is exactly the amount at which one can maintain enjoyment of the process of work, without burning out (which is not enjoyable) or becoming socially isolated (which is not enjoyable). If that amount of work is not enough to maintain a scientific career, then a different career may need to be considered, where such enjoyment can be found.

But there may be a negative correlation between drinking beer and publishing.

Comments

I think the beer / publishing results might have been skewed by people drinking large amounts of beer to drown their sorrows when their papers are rejected.

Sounds like a plausible hypothesis to me, and probably testable. And my grad student Will insists he's "building collaborations" over beer.

I definitely think it to be testable...

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