My most-cited paper so far (although not really the most-cited when you take years of publication into account) is an entomological field methods paper. It was also an unplanned paper. It came out of my PhD data, but wasn’t one of my research questions.

Methods papers are great contributions to the literature, and I highly recommend PhD students consider writing one, especially if they are working on understudied systems, or find some interesting patterns during data collection. Methods papers have much broader application to diverse fields and sub-disciplines than the PhD results themselves might. Continue reading →