The road to a first-author paper often isn't short or direct.Credit: Grant Ordelheide/Aurora Photos/Getty
As a fifth-year PhD candidate, I have a degree in not getting enough sleep and an unhealthy habit of scrolling through LinkedIn. My feed is a relentless highlight of everyone else’s successes: papers, major grants, coveted fellowships. And then there’s me, in a five-year-long, committed relationship with a massive project, in the field of neuroscience.
It’s not that I haven’t published anything. My name appears on co-authored papers that I’m proud of, collaborations in which I contributed data, analyses and expertise. But my own project was structured as a comprehensive story that kept expanding in scope, rather than as a series of publishable segments. This choice meant a longer road to first authorship compared with some of my peers, who were finishing projects and seeing their work published sooner. However, graduate students know that there’s a different gravity to first authorship. Co-authorship says ‘You were part of the story’, but first authorship says ‘This was your story to tell’.
It’s treated like the holy grail of the PhD journey, the golden ticket to a good postdoc, the milestone of independence and, in many programmes, the key to graduating. In a mid-sized laboratory such as mine, at Texas A&M University in College Station, landing a high-impact first-author paper isn’t just a personal win — it can be career-defining for the student and is a huge event for the lab. But it can also be a long, long wait.
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My project began with a simple, elegant question: how does a little-known protein — a receptor that helps neurons to communicate — regulate flexibility in the brain’s learning circuits? The work quickly expanded, demanding new techniques and complex analyses. The results weren’t what we expected — and instead of answers, they led to more questions that had to be tested and untangled. Every new result came with the same question: do we publish a paper now, or do we hold off and build a single, ambitious story? The academic in me understood the power of the big narrative. The graduate student in me desperately wanted something to show for the years of work.
The tension between the desire to make the project as meaningful as possible and my own professional clock has been one of the hardest lessons of my PhD. Along the way, I’ve discovered three truths that reshaped how I think about progress.
Playing the long game
The hardest part of chasing a big paper isn’t the failed experiments or broken equipment. It’s the waiting. Without having something accepted or published, it often felt like my progress didn’t count.
Eventually, I realized that if I measured success only by a first-author paper, I’d buckle under the weight of waiting. I had to find other ways to recognize progress.
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