Sometimes you get invited to give a talk by a fellow postdoc, and it’s great until you realize that you really have no idea what exactly the PI of you friend is known for. Presumably the PI is a world leader in something, a leader of the pack. Trouble is, you don’t even know what kind of pack.

This could set you up for an embarrassing situation. Here you are, sitting back in repose, chatting away about science and then a faux pas slips inadvertently out of your mouth. All you see is the PI grimacing. You’ll find out later that you were revealed for the amateur that you were always afraid that you were.

Never fear, a quick solution is here.

Just go to scholar.google.com, type in the name of the PI. Scholar.google.com has one thing over Web Of Science and that is, scholar.google.com organizes the results of a search in a meaningful way. By typing in the name of a researcher, scholar.google.com will find the articles of a researcher and rank them in order of citations. Therefore, you will get the most popular article of said PI in the top few hits. It’s an instant top-ten list, a cliff-notes of a scientific oeuvre. And unlike the “Selected Publications” on most lab web-sites, you get to see the really old papers, and by looking at the last author of the papers where the PI is first author, you’ll quickly work out where the PI came from.

With this in hand, you’re set. The results of a 10 minute google search will help you fake deep knowledge. Still, a few handy rules are suggested in actual conversation. Always defer to said PI if an area of their expertise comes up. Draw links between the work of their greatest paper to your own work (but be careful to leave out specifics otherwise you’ll get caught out on not having read actually read the paper).

Now you can fake it until you make it.