Well, I want to avoid insulting, e.g., my former co-author, a neurosurgeon who also does oncological research... but I don't think your analogy is bad at all.
It's generally true that the skills, the approach, and the techniques of surgeons and researchers are completely different. Surgery is a specialty. For example, I've had the head of surgical oncology at a very prestigious hospital tell me that he doesn't know much about chemotherapy -- there are other experts for that. And none of those clinical guys are necessarily experts in the causes of cancer, nor in its rate of incidence.
The stereotype, of course, is that every surgeon thinks that being a surgeon makes you an expert in everything. Sometimes that mold fits: Tremendous self-confidence is almost a requirement for being a great surgeon, and the side effect can be... an excess of confidence. And sometimes the mold is unfair. The field I briefly worked in -- antiangiogenesis -- was founded by the late Judah Folkman, a famous surgeon who did his even-more-famous research as his second job. Folkman had to spend a lot of years gathering data before other researchers were convinced that he wasn't just another surgeon with delusions of grandeur. But, as it happens, he wasn't.
In the end, you've got to show the data, and it has got to survive real criticism. That's the metric.
It's generally true that the skills, the approach, and the techniques of surgeons and researchers are completely different. Surgery is a specialty. For example, I've had the head of surgical oncology at a very prestigious hospital tell me that he doesn't know much about chemotherapy -- there are other experts for that. And none of those clinical guys are necessarily experts in the causes of cancer, nor in its rate of incidence.
The stereotype, of course, is that every surgeon thinks that being a surgeon makes you an expert in everything. Sometimes that mold fits: Tremendous self-confidence is almost a requirement for being a great surgeon, and the side effect can be... an excess of confidence. And sometimes the mold is unfair. The field I briefly worked in -- antiangiogenesis -- was founded by the late Judah Folkman, a famous surgeon who did his even-more-famous research as his second job. Folkman had to spend a lot of years gathering data before other researchers were convinced that he wasn't just another surgeon with delusions of grandeur. But, as it happens, he wasn't.
In the end, you've got to show the data, and it has got to survive real criticism. That's the metric.