Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming

Abstract

This editorial can be considered the preface to the “Ten Simple Rules” series [1–7]. The rules presented here are somewhat philosophical and behavioural rather than concrete suggestions for how to tackle a particular scientific professional activity such as writing a paper or a grant. The thoughts presented are not our own; rather, we condense and annotate some excellent and timeless suggestions made by the mathematician Richard Hamming two decades ago on how to do “first-class research” [8]. As far as we know, the transcript of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar provided by Dr. Kaiser [8] was never formally published, so that Dr. Hamming's thoughts are not as widely known as they deserve to be. By distilling these thoughts into something that can be thought of as “Ten Simple Rules,” we hope to bring these ideas to broader attention. Hamming's 1986 talk was remarkable. In “You and Your Research,” he addressed the question: How can scientists do great research, i.e., Nobel-Prize-type work? His insights were based on more than forty years of research as a pioneer of computer science and telecommunications who had the privilege of interacting with such luminaries as the physicists Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Walter Brattain, with Claude Shannon, “the father of information theory,” and with the statistician John Tukey. Hamming “became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done,” and he offered a number of answers to the question “why . . . so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” We have condensed Hamming's talk into the ten rules listed below: