Paper submission checklist

It's getting to be CogSci submission time, and this year I am thinking more about trying to set uniform standards for submission. Following my previous post on onboarding, here's a pre-submission checklist that I'm encouraging folks in my lab to follow. Note that, as described in that post, all our papers are written in RStudio using R Markdown, so the paper should be a single document that compiles all analyses and figures into a single PDF. This process helps deal with much of the error-checking of results that used to be the bulk of my presubmission checking.

Paper writing*

• Is the first paragraph engaging and clear to an outsider who doesn't know this subfield?
• Are multiple alternative hypotheses stated clearly in the introduction and linked to supporting prior literature?
• Does the paragraph before the first model/experiment clearly lay out the plan of the paper?
• Does the abstract describe the main contribution of the paper in terms that are accessible to a broad audience?
• Does the first paragraph of the general discussion clearly describe the contributions of the paper to someone who hasn't read the results in detail? 
• Is there a statement of limitations on the work (even a few lines) in the general discussion?

How do you argue for diversity?

During the last couple of months I have been serving as a member of my department's diversity committee, charged with examining policies relating to diversity in graduate and faculty recruitment. I have always put a value on the personal diversity of the people I worked with. But until this experience, I hadn't thought about how unexamined my thinking on this topic was, and I hadn't explicitly tried to make the case for diversity in our student population. So I was unprepared for the complexity of this issue.* As it turns out, different people have tremendously different intuitions on how to – and whether you should – argue for diversity in an educational setting.

In this post, I want to enumerate some of the arguments for diversity I've collected. I also want to lay out some of the conflicting intuitions about these arguments that I have encountered. But since diversity is an incredibly polarizing issue, I also want to be sure to give a number of caveats. First, this blogpost is about the topic of other people’s responses to arguments for diversity; I’m not myself making any of these arguments here. I do personally care about diversity and personally find some of these arguments more and less compelling, but that’s not what I’m writing about. Second, all of this discussion is grounded in the particular case of understanding diversity in the student body of educational institutions (especially in graduate education). I don’t know enough about workplace issues to comment. Third, and somewhat obviously, I don’t speak for anyone but myself. This post doesn’t represent the views of Stanford, the Stanford psych department, or even the Stanford Psych diversity committee.

Onboarding

Reading twitter this morning I saw a nice tweet by Page Piccinini, on the topic of organizing project folders:

@chbergma @JeffRouder @fusaroli TL;DR For any analysis in R I have the following folders: 1) data, 2) scripts, 3) figures, 4) write_up.

— Page Piccinini (@pageinini) January 3, 2017

This is exactly what I do and ask my students to do, and I said so. I got the following thoughtful reply from my old friend Adam Abeles:

@mcxfrank what's your onboarding process? You should have creating that structure then on the checklist to save the pain later.

— Adam Abeles (@aabeles) January 3, 2017

He's exactly right. I need some kind of onboarding guide. Since I'm going to have some new folks joining my lab soon, no time like the present. Here's a brief checklist for what to expect from a new project.