Lab Guidelines
A living document, updated as new points, or troubles:), come up.
I don’t have a team of my own yet, not even a small one. But over years of collaborating with others, certain problems have come up again and again. I want to write down the most important lessons, many of them learned the hard way, as shared guidelines. I believe they are essential to keeping a team healthy and protecting scientific integrity. Better to set them down now, before the team grows and before the same problems have a chance to repeat.
Authorship is earned, not given as a favor.
Never use a paper to do someone a favor. Do not list people as authors if they contributed little or nothing to the work, or have not even read the paper. I know this practice is far from rare around the world, but as researchers we should regard it as something to be ashamed of, both for those who offer authorship and for those who accept it. It is not a norm to follow simply because everyone else does it and has benefited from it. Gift authorship may pay off in the short term, but in the long run it does real harm.
Be clear about the difference between authorship and acknowledgment. Authors contribute scientific content and are expected to stay involved in the project from start to finish. People who helped in more limited or peripheral ways, or who only provided funding/food/love, belong in the acknowledgments.
Keep a running draft throughout the project.
Keep a written draft and update it as the project evolves. Writing is, of course, slower than talking face to face, but experience has taught me that it is ultimately the most efficient way to collaborate. The devil is in the details. A forty-minute meeting naturally focuses on visible progress, and with everyone arriving from a different context, there is little chance to get on the same page about the finer points. As a result, a small but critical detail can slip past meeting after meeting, leaving a gap that goes unnoticed until a week before the deadline, by which point it is often too late. Writing things down brings those details into the open and spares everyone such “surprises”.
A running draft is also a chance to practice writing, a skill whose importance in research is hard to overstate. LLMs can now help anyone write a grammatically correct paper, but not necessarily a great one. What such papers often lack is a continuous line of reasoning. If ideas are the bones that hold a paper upright, reasoning is its blood vessels: it carries oxygen to every part so each can function, and it brings the whole paper to life. Writing things down, then repeatedly restructuring and revising, is what keeps that circulation flowing.
Take responsibility for your code.
Every project should aim to release all of its code, ideally enough to reproduce every figure in the paper, even if that is not always necessary in practice. Whatever code you do release, you are responsible for it. Triple-check that it compiles, runs, and produces the expected results, and provide clear, easy-to-use scripts for running the experiments. Most of us have struggled at some point with code that does something different from what the paper describes. Don’t let your work be one of those cases. Be precise, and be careful.