A number of us in lab have papers in manuscript that hopefully will be submitted/published soon. In the interim we were talking about the current competition in science -- how it's changed from the past and how it might change once we all graduate and (maybe) have our own labs.
The topic of housekeeping genes was brought up at lab meeting recently. Housekeeping genes are always expressed and we use it as a marker for (c)DNA quality. Usually we run a reaction with just one housekeeping gene, but my advisor stated at the meeting that some journals request that authors run their experiments with two or more, just to double-check, because sometimes these genes are not expressed at a constant level, even though we expect them to. While this seems like a minor change, many times reviewers will send a paper back with a list of control experiments that need to be done, which may take anywhere from a week or two to a couple months.
In my senior year of undergrad, I took a class called "Evolution, Development, and Genetics" (i.e. "evo-devo"); it was a discussion-based class where we read papers every week and then talked about trends in the field. One of the first things we read was a Science paper that was considered the founder of evo-devo. Our assignment for this paper was to rewrite the abstract because the original one was only a sentence long, and in today's standards, is unacceptable. The paper itself proposed some really new ideas, but in today's standards, was lacking in terms of data. The authors basically ran a series of proteins on a gel. Which makes me wonder -- do we need to do more work today to get published...compared to, say, 40 years ago?
Science has advanced rapidly in the past few years, which I think is the main reason why it takes "more" work to publish in a good journal. One of the best examples is PCR, which used to take (literally) all day. At that time, the researcher would sit in front of multiple hot-water baths, and drop the tubes in, wait a minute or two, and go on to the next water bath. Oh, and they had to add fresh reagent after each cycle... for about 30 cycles. Now, we just stick all the tubes in a machine and have the machine do it while we go work on something else. People are coming up with new ideas and new techniques all the time, and everything points to increased efficiency.
I have a feeling that 30 years from now, I'll look back at my thesis and say "is that all I did??"
