The career route for any scientist seems to blossom in the post-doc period at which point, according to Luyben, `It's sort of a trail period where you decide whether or not you're suited to be a scientist.' He says, `I compare doing science and publishing with top sport. And I don't see that it is possible that you drive Formula One in .2 percent of your time. It's not going to work.'
Addressing, in particular, the females in the audience, he said, `The statement is too harsh on its own, saying you cannot be a good scientist if you only work part-time. But you have to be devoted to science. Otherwise, it's not going to work.'
Luyben says that the best groups in his faculty have a worldwide network of contacts, including PhDs, Post-docs and other individual who are actively working in the same subject area. He says that his scientist may not know all the details of a recent discovery, but they do know when a breakthrough in science has taken place somewhere in the world.
`You have to be in constant touch with the other top groups, if you want to do top science. You have to know what the competition does. Look at Formula One. If you wait for the next conference, you're way to slow,' says Luyben.
Following a career path in science is not staying in the bubble of the university environment. It means, if you want to be successful then you must be seen. He says, `It helps to go to conferences. If you only write papers and sit in a secluded room, and never show your face, you are not going to get as many citations on scientific papers then if you stand up on the podium and give presentations about your work. People see you and remember you and tend to cite your work.'
He advises academics to pay attention to the growing data base of Thompson Scientific that has 7,000 journals and about one million papers per year listed in its citation index. He says, `If you are going to publish, see to it that you publish your articles in journals, which are in this index.'
Luyben closed his lecture by sharing the initial results of a 3TU study of citation results, which indicated that the three technical universities in the Netherlands (Twente, Delft and Eindhoven) ranked high compared with other top universities. The benchmark study showed the following results for the three technical universities: Twente 1.42, Delft 1.41 and Eindhoven 1.46. All Dutch universities ranked a 1.31, while Europe as a whole ranked 1.02. The highest number for any university in the world was for MIT that ranked 2.42. He concluded, `So, we didn't take an easy benchmark. We had a tough benchmark. The average of all the universities together was 1.48, about the same as our technical universities, which is clearly a sign of quality for the three technical universities.'
