EL CURSO AVANZADO. PUBLICAR EN REVISTAS DE ALTO IMPACTO (PARTE II)

The second part of this course has three blocks:
1) Assessing research and publications choices and tips for academic collaborations
2) The best articles
3) Communicating and impact of your research

We start by assessing research and publications choices and tips for academic collaborations, where we complete the presentation in this block reading the extract by Patrick Dunleavy @Write4Research:

"Assessing the components of your portfolio effectively means bearing in mind the difficulties of predicting which article or publications will be successful or not; the general difficulties of attracting citations; and the need if possible to avoid adding to the ‘tail’ of relatively unsuccessful or uncited publications that most of us have. 

In the STEM disciplines the prevailing ‘mono-culture’ of journal articles means that there is often no great need to consider what to write, although where to send papers is more difficult. Rather rarely perhaps, more senior academics in STEM subjects may consider writing a textbook, a research or intermediate-text book for professionals, or even a ‘pop science’ book in their area. For STEm scientists the key decisions will mostly tend to revolve around involvements in different research projects, mostly with co-researchers or teams — where the prospects for research to be successful may be correspondingly harder to assess, and a lot will rest on colleagues.

By contrast, in many social sciences, and all the humanities, academics will need to consider how to best distribute their efforts across a more varied palette of journal articles, chapters in books, research books, intermediate texts and textbooks. A few especially talented or lucky authors may also consider if they can achieve ‘mass public’ books within their mix of outputs."

As Patrick Dunleavy @Write4Research pin points in Assesing your Research and Publication Choices, how you implement the academic version of the ‘business model canvass’ framework will depend a lot on what stage our career you/we are at, what critical masses of publications we need to assure livelihood and position, and what constitute the ‘right’ publications in our discipline. These considerations make any generic advice-giving complex.

However, for an individual researcher, choosing at a defined point in their career, the canvas model offers simplifying factors. You know your own competences and your field well already — in fact you know more about your competencies than anyone else in the world.

• But ‘knowing yourself’ without self-deception 
• ‘knowing your field’ without ‘optimism bias’ and other obstructions to clear vision; 
• locating this knowledge in a constantly moving (sometimes disruptively changing) intellectual landscape; so as to undertake specific actions to realize optimal (‘best that can be done from here’) results, 
• in a robust or sustainable way are all psychologically difficult things to grapple with --however we may adapt at. Here’s where the relatively simple but systematic frame of organizing ideas and considerations is of help.

Enough material to be interested in specialized workshops on impact for you research?
Please write olga at olgagil at olgagil dot es, and let her know!