Willem van Riemsdijk was surely one of the best scientists I ever worked with. Most of his career, he was professor of soil chemistry at the University in Wagenigen, Netherlands. He is now retired, wisely stopped doing science, and turned towards other things, such as enjoying life in a historic house, low energy society, botany, and art. You find him on Twitter.
His way of doing science was somewhat unusual, since he focused most of his energy on one question, namely the adsorption of ions on the water-oxide interface. His pet mineral was goethite. Early in his career, he wrote with his colleague Tjisse Hiemstra two landmark articles on the subject [1]. With his research group, he continued working on the topic ever since. Not surprisingly, he became one of the world experts in the area. I have also studied this topic somewhat, and in my view, there was (and still is) no other group, which ever came close to the level of understanding of ion adsorption to water-oxide interfaces as they had.
Nowadays, a typical research group functions differently. The topics are widespread, and every graduate student works on a different question. This situation is mainly caused by the substantial proportion of external funding, which is nowadays indispensable to run a research group. A normal research grant typically funds one student during a few years. Every research grant has to be on a different topic, since funding agencies do not want to fund the same research twice. They do not like if you continue to work on the same topic either, since such research obviously lacks originality. Larger, long-term research grants, which would allow in depth focus on one topic, are rare and difficult to obtain. One should thus not be surprised that current research becomes more superficial and more prone to mistakes. These trends are surely partly responsible for the reproducibility problems in medical sciences [2], but other branches of science seem not to be immune to these either [3].
I vividly remember a discussion with Willem on the question how to do research. This discussion probably took place around 1998 during a visit of Willem in Zurich, where I was working at that time. Willem was probably trying to convince me to do more research on ion adsorption on water-oxide interfaces. However, I disagreed: "Willem, you killed the field." Willem was obviously surprised, and I explained: "After all the fantastic results you have presented, who would dare to enter this area? One cannot succeed. Any sensible mind will stay out of it." Willem became thoughtful, and I added. "I discussed this issue already with others. We refer to the van Riemsdijk effect." I probably sounded bit accusing, and Willem asked therefore: "Should it be avoided?"
Back then my tendency was to say, yes, one should work in research areas where sufficient number of other researchers is involved. The topic should be timely, necessarily bit superficial, and one should leave space for others. This kind of practice will lead to citations, the modern mantra of a successful researcher. The funding agencies also like to see function the community in this way, and they will reward you for that.
I was probably wrong. The van Riemsdijk effect should not be avoided. If you are in the position to make an original contribution to research, do focus all available energy on it. Do not worry about the rest of the community and funding agencies. Keep working on the same question for years, better decades. You will then also easily circumvent the reproducibility problem, since you will have to redo what you did before, again, and again. You may even kill the field, which will then hardly give you any citations. But if your findings were important, they'll be rediscovered, maybe even decades later.
Michal Borkovec, February 7, 2016
References
[1] Hiemstra T., de Wit J. C. M., van Riemsdijk W. H., J. Colloid Interface Sci. 1989, 133, 105-117, 10.1016/0021-9797(89)90284-1; Hiemstra T., van Riemsdijk W. H., Bolt G. H., J. Colloid Interface Sci. 1989, 133, 91-104, 10.1016/0021-9797(89)90285-3;
[2] Ioannidis, J. P. A. PLoS Medicine 2, e124, 2005, 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124. 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124; Aarts A. A. et al., Science , 349, 943, 2015, 10.1126/science.aac4716.
[3] Drahl C. Chem,. Eng. News 92, 7, 2014, link; Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Communiqué de presse, July 10, 2015, link.
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