Email: miriam.ganczakowski@biologists.com

Telephone: 01223 632858

The Company of Biologists (www.biologists.com) is a not-for-profit organisation and publishes the three internationally renowned, established journals Journal of Cell Science, Development and Journal of Experimental Biology, as well as the two fully Open Access journals Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM) and Biology Open (BiO). The organisation has an active programme of charitable giving for the further advancement of biological research, including travelling fellowships for junior scientists and contributions to academic societies and conferences.

A return to in-person internships – The Company of Biologists

We offer professional internships for PhD students. Each internship is carefully defined, both with the institute and the individual, and usually involves projects with our journal teams.

Each year we recruit an intern (usually through the PIPS programme) to work on a project in Citation Metrics.

This involves assessing  the citation patterns for our journal articles e.g. whether particular subject areas or article types are more highly cited than others.  Information about citation patterns for our content can be useful in assessing the success of our publishing programme. We also ask the student to document the analysis in detail so that it could be repeated at a future date to highlight changing patterns. Many of our publishing discussions focus on the interface with the scientific community and it is useful to gain fresh insight from someone working within the academic framework.

Gaining an understanding of the publishing process could benefit the student when they come to submitting their own research for publication – or could provide insight into an alternative career path.

An insight into the ‘success’ criteria for different research areas could guide future research directions.

We hold discussion groups looking at different areas of publishing (e.g. open access, use of social media, networking at scientific meetings) that would benefit the student.

It is also useful to experience prioritisation from a business point of view and real-life applications from project findings.

There is no specific deadline for project completion. We believe that two data analysis projects can be easily completed within a 3-month internship and we have other smaller projects that the student could move on to,time permitting. We always have several ideas for projects but also welcome suggestions from our interns themselves (of course the output should be useful in some way!).

• Confidence in handling data in Excel spreadsheets
• The ability to devise approaches to data analysis that address relevant questions.
• Sufficient scientific knowledge to e.g. categorise articles by broad subject area.
• The ability to absorb information about the publishing arena in order to present data findings in an appropriate context.

The student should be genuinely interested in the project and the nature of the work, interact collaboratively with publishing contacts and be receptive to constructive feedback.