GRAY’S THEOREM OF N + 2. The number of papers required for tenure is N + 2, where N is the number you published. (Corollary: Gray’s Theorem is independent of N.)
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Posted in Academic Life, Tips, Top Tips, Weekly Wisdom
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, Weekly Wisdom, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, Weekly Wisdom, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Posted by atarrant
SPECIALIZE. GET KNOWN FOR SOMETHING. It helps visibility. Sadly, brilliant, restless people who work on several topics simultaneously usually do not achieve as much visibility as those who plod along in the same area for many years.
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Posted in Academic Life, Tips, Top Tips, Weekly Wisdom
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, Weekly Wisdom, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, Weekly Wisdom, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Posted by atarrant
COMPLETION TIME. No matter how long you think it will take to write a paper based on your research, see the paper you just submitted in print, complete a research project, prepare a new course,or prepare for a session of a course you gave previously it will take longer. The wide-eyed optimists always think the task will be completed on time. The mildly realistic optimists think the task will take their estimated time plus 10%. The pessimists understand that the delay is at least 50% on average.
(Corollary: Even if you add the above delay times to your estimate, it will still take longer than that.)
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Posted in Academic Life, Top Tips, Weekly Wisdom
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Posted by atarrant
LEARN TIME MANAGEMENT. Determine your work priorities and try as best you can to match your time commitments to those priorities. The model of an academic having large blocks of time at work to think deeply about a problem is not valid, and may never have been. Your time on campus is fragmented. You are interrupted for teaching, office hours, supervising dissertations, phone calls, keeping up with e-mail, research, writing, publication, and more. Each activity is important and/or mandatory. You barely have time to be collegial. If you are overloaded, use time management tools. The simplest is the calendar that comes with e-mail software. Keep a record not only of your appointments and your teaching commitment but also your interruptions. Analysis will show times when you can combine repetitive interruptions and when you can undertake reading, research, and professional activities. Learn to say no! One of our colleagues, who published well over 30 books in his career, advised: “If you write only a page a day, that’s a book a year.
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Posted in Academic Life, Tips, Weekly Wisdom
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Tagged Academic Life, Tips, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School
Posted by atarrant
GET TO KNOW THE MAJOR EDITORS of the book publishers in your field. The best place to meet them is at the book exhibits associated with your annual professional conference. You will find that some of them know absolutely nothing about your field, not to mention your subject. Avoid working with such editors because they will treat your work as a commodity, like pork bellies.
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SELECTING A PUBLISHER INVOLVES TRADE-OFFS. With a large publisher that issues many books in your field in a year you gain the advantage of mass marketing and advertising. Large publishers employ reps who visit campuses. However, these reps are given many books to push and their commissions depend on the number of books sold. As a result, they concentrate on freshman and sophomore texts for required courses. Furthermore, since they receive the same commission no matter which book is adopted, they have little incentive to sell a particular book. Thus, you run the risk that promotion of your book will be lost among the many others with similar titles being offered by that publisher. Small and specialty commercial publishers and university presses give you much more individual attention. You can judge whether they are a good fit for your book by looking at their publications list on their Web site, themailings you receive from them, the advertisements in your professional journals, and the experience and recommendations of your peers. If a publisher looks reasonable based on these probes, go to your school’s library and look at their books they have published. Before signing a contract, make sure that (a) your publisher will have your manuscript peer reviewed, and (b) the publisher you chose “counts” with your field’s tenure committee. Under no circumstances publish with a vanity press, that is, a publisher that charges you for publishing your book.
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PAY ATTENTION TO THE BOOK PUBLISHERS’ REPRESENTATIVES WHO COME INTO YOUR OFFICE. They are a valuable source of information. These reps have two missions: (a) to flog the books their company issues and (b) to send intelligence back to the home office. They will be pleased to send you complimentary copies of the latest mass market elementary textbooks in your field. If your field is French, you can obtain many shelves of freshman- and sophomore-level French books. You can alsoobtain copies of books directly linked to specific courses you teach. It is a little more difficult (but not impossible) to obtain complimentary copies of books in your research area. There’s always the chance that you will adopt. Don’t, however, simply look at the reps as a source of freebies. Use them to find out what is going on in the book market. Sound them out on whether their firm is interested in a book manuscript you have under way. Their response will usually be positive. Ignore that. Just make sure that they get the wordabout your forthcoming manuscript back to the editors at the publisher’s headquarters.
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DO SERVE AS A REVIEWER for journals, particularly top journals. Treat this job seriously. You will see much junk being submitted and appreciate why some journals reject 80% or more of their submissions. You will develop an aesthetic for what is good and what is not. You will correspond with some powerful people. When you do get a good paper to review, you will receive much earlier knowledge of an important new development. The information gained is worth more than the time you take reviewing.
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COAUTHORING A PAPER WITH A SUPERSTAR increases your visibility and associates you with his or her reputation. However, becareful which papers you coauthor. If the idea is yours, the superstar will likely get most of the credit
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REWARDS FOR ACADEMIC PUBLISHING. The old saw “virtue is its own reward” applies to most of your academic publications. There are exceptions. If you write a scholarly monograph in the humanities or the social sciences you receive a small royalty. Journals invariably do not pay you. Your annual review to determine whether you should receive a raise, however, tends to reward you for publishing, particularly in high-repute journals. Of course, if you work abroad in a school such as one we know about in South Korea, you may be awarded a bonus every time you publish, with the size of the bonus depending on the journal.
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RECOGNIZE THE DELAYS IN PUBLISHING. You face long, long delays. In this hint we estimate the delays in journal publication. For books, the total time is usually much longer. Let’s assume you’ve written your first article and printed out a copy that is ready to send off to the top journal in the field. If you expect that this brilliant piece will appear in the next issue or, at the latest, the one after that, we have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Let’s assume that your paper is so good it is accepted without a request for even minor revisions. Even in this unusual case, the pace of publication is extremely slow.
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INCLUDE SINGLE-AUTHOR PAPERS IN YOUR PORTFOLIO. Review committees wonder about people who always publish with someone else. Did they do the work or did they ride the coauthor’s coattails? Were they the first author? If you must coauthor, pick people whose names follow yours alphabetically and then suggest that your name really belongs first. (Choosing the order by drawing lots, as was done for this book, is not recommended.) If you are unfortunate enough to be named Zyzygy, go to court and get it changed.
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THE LITERATURE SEARCH YOU PERFORMED FOR YOUR DISSERTATION IS A TREASURE TROVE of information. It should be the foundation of a survey article on the field. And the world desperately needs more survey articles. Unfortunately, although only a few journals (e.g., Computer Surveys) accept such articles, you receive little credit for them in tenure and promotion reviews. You will be rewarded more for adding one little new data point to the literature than for a brilliant synthesis of that literature (unless your name is Arnold J.Toynbee). You can, however, transform a literature review into a meta-analysis, which is a systematic, statistical aggregation of previously published research findings. Such a paper carries more cachet with tenure committees, and the statistics are not difficult.
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YOUR DISSERTATION IS A PUBLISHING ASSET. You should receive a return on your investment for the time spent on your dissertation. Avoid advisers who insist on joint authorship on all papers that result. They are exploiting you.
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SUBMIT YOUR PAPERS (other than those you know are stinkers) first TO THE BEST JOURNALS IN THE FIELD. Work your way down the list if a paper is rejected. Many articles rejected by a poor journal were later accepted by a leading journal, so you might as well start with the best. It is easier to follow this rule if you are thick skinned. Two additional factors should affect where you place a journal on your “go-to”list (not all journals make this information public): (a) the percentage of submitted papers the journal accepts, and (b) the length of time the journal takes to review a submission.
