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Careers

Better and faster

Physicist gives tips on blog to help researchers cope with academic demands

096_carreiras_208-2Personal Archive In 2011, ten years after arriving for a postdoctoral position and seven years after being hired as a professor at Oklahoma State University, physicist Eduardo Yukihara decided to create a blog, Ciência Prática (Practical Science), to gather practical tips and discuss problems related to the preparation and publication of scientific articles, and to academic careers. “There was also a personal motivation, which was to force myself to write in Portuguese and keep in touch with the scientific community in Brazil,” says Yukihara, who is 39 years old.

“How to Choose a Master’s or PhD advisor” and “Should you avoid using the first person in scientific language?” were some of the recent hot topics on the blog (cienciapratica.wordpress.com), written together with Emico Okuno, his former advisor at the University of São Paulo (USP). “We’ve had more than 6000 hits per week, and in the last two months we have had over 20,000 hits per month,” he said. “We have a growing number of collaborators, such as André Sawakuchi, from USP, and Alejandro Frank, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. They are writing excellent posts that will be published soon.”

The post about the first steps in writing a scientific article, published in March, has been shared 239 times on Facebook, while the one on changing careers, written by Emico Okuno, was one of the most discussed. Yukihara also receives valuable information. “It was through a reader that I learned about the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and decided to submit a proposal for research to be carried out in Germany.” He is awaiting the decision.

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