Professor vs Doctor

When I was an undergraduate I worked with someone who wasn't technically a "professor", but who had a permanent position. It caused me great anxiety - I had no idea what to call him. As a young undergraduate, I didn't feel ready to call a faculty-type by the first name. I think I went with Dr. Lastname.

I've been surprised to hear undergraduates refer to faculty as Dr. Lastname. I realized that in my mind, Prof > Dr. I hadn't understood why undergraduates would only use the PhD title, and not the Professor title - in my mind, postdocs are Dr. Lastname.

Recently I realized that my viewpoint is skewed from (1) physics and (2) not attending college with many adjunct faculty. At places where some faculty-types only have a master's degree, Dr > Prof. As an undergraduate I did have some classes (in humanities) that were taught by "lecturers", rather than faculty. I didn't understand the distinction and called them Prof anyways. But in physics, all faculty (at MIT) had PhD's and I knew plenty of people with PhD's who weren't faculty.

Now I know better. Right now, I could be adjuncting as a "professor" at a local college. The set of "people with PhD's" does not fully enclose the set of "people who are faculty" so it is problematic to say/assume "prof > dr". It truly boils down to institutional culture: some places most undergrads use Prof, other places Dr is normal, and some are even comfortable with first-names. I'm glad I learned this before I was faculty and become highly offended of an undergraduate calling me Dr. Ackerman (-:

Publication Goal #2

After my paper was accepted I knew I still hadn't cleared the "real" scientist bar... the paper needed to actually be cited. I hope that I someday have enough papers/citations to not know/worry/care when they get cited; but right now I only have one paper. So I am going to know how many times it has been cited.

And it has been cited once! This is the bar I wanted to clear. Shortly after my paper came out, another paper was published in a "better" journal (by some standards) that had some similar results. I was somewhat nervous that the other paper would be cited and that my paper would disappear into obscurity. Now that my paper has been cited in a review paper, I can be optimistic that it might be cited in future papers - when the appropriate results are being discussed.

Citations are - in a way - proof that one has contributed to the overall progress of science. Or, that is how I choose to think about them. It is not that every important paper has many citations or that every paper that has many citations is important. But if I want my work to matter - to be medically or otherwise relevant - the only way to know it is happening is through evidence that other researchers are reading and using it. That is what citations are (in my naive mind).