Editing Citation Competition (section)

===The Correct Attitude===
* So when you leave, make sure everything is set up for someone else to easily continue where you left off. Stay in email contact, and help a new PhD student who has questions about your stuff. Be patient with them as you were once a PhD too. You may even find yourself co-authoring with new PhD students via email collaboration, after you have left. That also builds your future citation rate.
* Remember: '''"You can hold more sand in an open palm than a clenched fist."''' Some supervisors are into keeping results secret, patenting things, and not openly sharing ideas, code, and data. As you can see this is not my philosophy at all. I am into the "open palm" approach, as I believe in keeping everything flowing. If you do not share this philosophy, then you are free to leave now and find another supervisor.
* Research knowledge is like manure. If manure is widely distributed is feeds the plants that grow. If the manure is locked up in a shed it smells.
* Some graduated PhD students do not pass on their stuff to new PhD students because they are 'embarrassed' that a mistake might be later found in their work. This is not the correct attitude. A famous case is that of Claude Shannon: half his thesis was totally wrong and half of it was brilliant, creating the field of information theory. It is the good parts we remember him for. If we find a significant mistake in your work in the future, we will turn it into a positive and write a paper that corrects the result and invite you to coauthor (provided we know how to contact you).
* Finally, the biggest secret is to treat the whole thing like a game. Don't take yourself too seriously. Foremost, you should be having fun with it all. Hang loose. If you are stiff and take yourself too seriously, it makes your papers boring and no one will read them.
* It is possible you may be lucky to enough get a great citation rate by ignoring my above advice. But if you had followed the above advice, your rate would have been even larger.