Olle Inganäs and the wow factor.

He succeeds time after time in getting scientific articles published in the giants among journals - Science and Nature. Olle Inganäs, professor of Organic Electronics, is there a secret? (14-10-2012)

Olle Inganäs is the researcher at LiU who is most often found in the most prestigious journals. This is despite the fierce competition to get published in Science or in Nature. The major American universities have strong brands and the Chinese are pushing hard.  To get an article published in one of the science giants guarantees work, and sometimes material benefits.

But when Olle Inganäs last counted, almost half what he has submitted to Science or Nature had been published.

How does he do it?

“There’s no particular secret, but you have to be first and it’s good to have a new concept. It should also be something a bit noteworthy, with the wow factor,” says Inganäs, a man who seldom has any trouble coming up with new ideas.

His latest article published in Science dealt with batteries made of lignin, a waste product from the boiling of wood pulp; cheap batteries that should be able to store energy from solar cells and wind turbines.

He got the idea several years ago, but after mulling it over for a while, he looked for and found the perfect collaborative partner in Poland, an electrochemist who was actually studying lignin, Grzegorz Milczarek.

“I lured him here and our collaboration has worked out perfectly.”

But your work has to appear at the right time:

“15 years ago no one would have been interested in battery technology, it would have just been seen as some loony university research.”

Another factor which is becoming increasingly important is presentation, good pictures are worth their weight in gold.

“Sadly, presentation skills are valued more highly nowadays than profundity and originality. Some of the most cited researchers have at some point in their careers been science journalists,” he points out.

Also a bit of a problem is increased faith in authority in the world of science. For example, in China and Japan what is written by an established researcher is always true – a way of thinking that is beginning to spread.

“You see this particularly when you look at the number of citations. This holds back productivity – confrontation and criticism are an important part of science,” he says.

And he does not like it when he gets cited in fields he was active in 10 or 15 years ago.

“I try to tell them that there are people today who know more about these things than I do.

Wooden electrodes and the possibility of storing energy are the research areas that occupy him now. Plastic solar cells are now reaching scientific maturity and the big challenges are more technical in nature, such as scaling up and stability. The actuators were hived off to a private company and he also left off light emission in LEDs after he got an article published in Nature.

“The intellectual curiosity has to be there still and energy supply feels more important than developing information technology”.

But which is more important, getting into Nature or Science or getting published?

“Getting published.” The reply comes fast and without hesitation.

“It’s my responsibility to help young people, doctoral students, end up in the right place. Science should be a choir, with as many interesting voices as possible".

The important thing is that it is a journal at the right level and with the right readership. It’s something he thinks is simpler to find in science and technology, but a little harder in medicine.

“But if you stay too long at the lowest level of journals, you probably shouldn’t continue in research.”

Text: Monica Westman Svenselius
Photo: Göran Billeson

LiU Magasin no. 3 2012