Higher Education

Abstract

Aysha Divan has written a practical and solid guide for students intending to pursue a degree in the biosciences. There are other books out there, like The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology, but these are more for the Ph.D. candidate looking for a bridge between student and faculty member. Communication Skills is intended for the graduate student practitioner, although an undergraduate would not go wrong in reading and rereading it.Divan is a faculty member and program coordinator at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Leeds University. Her research and program management background give her deep insight into what students need to do in order to become effective bioscientists: success with written, oral, and visual forms of communication. While the author presents checklists, strategies, and annotated examples to help avoid pitfalls, it quickly becomes obvious in reading this book that a career choice in the academic world of biosciences is not going to be pain-free. As higher-education science departments struggle to retain their science majors, having this book available to incoming students (undergraduate and graduate) might well serve both students and universities.Divan attempts to heighten the growing awareness among bioscientists that communication is crucial for funding and promotion success. Chapters 1 through 6 cover different kinds of scientific literature, how to search and retrieve literature, and how to read for understanding. All these are things that you would think graduate students can successfully do, but to our amazement, sometimes they cannot. The author makes it clear that graduate work is most often driven by group research and that “it is important that you learn the ground rules.” One of these rules is maintaining an experimental notebook. While there are many good web-based links given in each chapter, I did not find the experimental notebook link to the Genentech Center for the History of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology to be that useful. The Web site is clunky, and after 30 minutes of searching for James Watson's experimental notebook, I gave up.Chapter 3 is devoted to the idea of ethics in communication and includes copyrighting, proper sharing of data, and that subject of every professor's disdain, plagiarism. I feel that the section on plagiarism is the only part of the book that is noticeably weak. It assumes that students know what plagiarism looks like, in all of its forms, but many do not.Chapter 4 gives an excellent introduction to Web-based resources and how to use PubMed and the Web of Science. The author stresses how important it is to keep records of library searches and, more importantly, how to do it. Divan discusses using the SQR3 reading method to help provide focus for students who read scientific literature like a novel. By taking a reading and breaking it down into manageable questions, it improves how students read and review research.Chapters 7 through 12 discuss the different types of writing that graduate students are expected to do: prospectus, literature reviews, abstracts, and the thesis. As with other chapters, Divan offers detailed checklists that can be photocopied and used by students. For example, there is an extensive checklist for writing a research paper. If students were to actually review their work, making sure that all of the items on this particular checklist were checked off before turning in their research papers, there would be far less need for rewrites (and fewer rereads required of the instructor). There is also a link to Oxford University Publishing's Online Resource Centre to download checklists, figures from the book, and PowerPoint slides that can be adapted for a student's own use.Chapters 13 through 15 focus on why oral and poster presentations are important, how to design presentations for audience involvement, and networking face-to-face and online. I would only suggest providing more examples of good and bad PowerPoint slides. Saying “do not overload your slides with too much text or too many graphics, or both” is not as effective as showing. One other minor complaint is that the book is intended for British students. Some of the language is specific to British university students, but this is a minor quibble; much of what the author writes about applies to American university students as well.Overall, Divan has clearly used her experience working with bioscience students to write an organized strategy for communication success. The author's own communication skills, as evidenced by this guide, are exemplary. Communication Skills serves up a no-nonsense approach to bioscience research with the aim of conveying that graduate work in the biosciences is important, and it is important that it be done right.