Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS
What David said:
That makes a lot of sense.
I agree with helping them to fill in the survey gaps !
Even if it is a little boring .
Cheers & Rgds
|
That's one area that amateurs will definitely be good at....filling in gaps in the data. But it's going to require money and effort to do so. Your average amateur can't do it, because they don't have the equipment, time or knowledge (necessarily) to accomplish the task. Some can...David can. Greg, Anthony, Ken and Martin could. They have the equipment and some of them have enough knowledge to help out without too much extra work. Others would have to be brought up to speed. But it's not something that can be done overnight. Not only that, but the professionals also need to realise that this effort by the amateurs can't go unrewarded. If they make a major contribution to a paper or whatever, then they deserve the credit for it as well...not just mentioned in passing, like "with contributions by........". That's condescending in the extreme. Despite their amateur status, they should have equal billing on the front of the paper being submitted for publishing. If they've contributed to a major survey by filling in gaps in that survey's coverage, then they have done as much work as the professionals have. Fair's fair. I've been in that position myself, as a newly graduate student doing further study and having seen my work and the work of others subsumed by more qualified and experienced researchers (namely our supervisors). If it wasn't for the actual work we did, they'd have had nothing to write about and in any case much of the writing was already done by us. All we got was an honourable mention, they took the credit. Nothing we could really do about it at the time as we didn't know until it was too late, so we just had to put up with it. But this sort of thing does happen.