Science

Science is all about sorting the wheat from the chaff, says John Kirwan.

Subject terms: Careers Lab life
Pauling's principle of electroneutrality states that each atom in a stable substance has a charge close to zero. But the physicist Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel prizewinner, also gave us another important, if less well-known, dictum: that if you want to have good ideas, you must have lots of ideas and learn to throw away the bad ones.

This dictum (quoted by Francis Crick in his 1995 presentation, 'The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology' at Oregon State University in Corvallis) implies at least two corollaries: that you must be willing to generate many ideas, and that some will be bad. It might be useful to see whether this applies to you. Are you generating lots of ideas? What proportion of your ideas turn out to be good ones? Do they lead to publications? Are you discarding the ones that don't work out?

Adapted from Getty
I decided to see whether this particular principle applied to my own academic-research activities. I have an h-index of 55 (meaning that 55 of my papers have been cited at least 55 times each) and an e-index of 82, meaning that these 55 papers have collectively accumulated nearly 10,000 citations. Those indices suggest that I've been reasonably successful as an academic rheumatologist at the University of Bristol, UK, where I'm an emeritus faculty member. Here's what I wanted to find out: