Browsing the archives for the Top Tips category
WHEN WRITING THE NTH PAPER, MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE ISSUE CLEAR. It may be a carefully done experiment or an elaboration of the theory or a synthesis and interpretation of previous work. Whatever it is, be explicit in claiming it in the paper. The reviewers need to be convinced that the manuscript contains something new that merits publishing.
Today’s post is written by our resident Science Correspondant Katherine Reekie (@katreekie). She has written interesting posts for PhD2Published on adapting to scientific writing and Publishing in the Sciences. Here she shares her Top 5 choices of Genetics journals
Recently on Twitter, PhD2Published posed the question “What is your academic discipline and what are your top 5 recommended high impact journals?” Well, I am a geneticist, and for my top 5 I picked, in no particular order:
1) Nature Genetics
2) Human Molecular Genetics
3) American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG)
4) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
5) Nucleic Acids Research
This is a somewhat arbitrary list, which was drawn up on the spur of the moment. Other journals which could well have made the list are Genome Research, Trends in Genetics, Human Mutation…I could go on. So how did I come up with my list? For me, it was down to journals in which I (and my colleagues) either hope to publish, regularly find interesting articles, or regularly cite. I excluded a number of excellent review journals, as for this purpose I was thinking in terms of original research only.
Subsequent to coming up with this list, I did a bit of research on the impact factors of my chosen journals, and was not surprised to find that all five were towards the top of the scale for genetics, with Nature Genetics at the very top with an astounding 2010 impact factor of 36.3 (according to the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports) – but then the Nature journals are always very highly ranked (to put this into perspective, the others titles on my list had impact factors ranging from 7.8 – 11.6, all of which are considered high). The “Impact Factor” is the system most commonly used to rank journals. This figure is calculated annually, by taking into account the number of times papers from the journal have been cited in the two previous years, and dividing this number by the number of articles and reviews which were published in the journal in those same two years. So the 2011 impact factor = (number of 2010 & 2009 citations)/(number of 2010 & 2009 articles & reviews).
It is important to note that the “impact” of a journal is not always the most important factor to bear in mind when considering publication. It is certainly worth researching the impact factors of journals in your discipline, and thinking about where your research might fit in. However, you must also take into account which journal is most appropriate for your work in terms of its “novelty value” (groundbreaking research will always be of interest to the very top journals), strength of the findings (how robust are your data and conclusions) and also your target audience (who you are hoping will read your paper). For example, Nature has a very high impact factor, but it covers a broad subject area and focuses on cutting edge research. Therefore it is unlikely to be the best fit for a paper which describes an association study which considers a single region of the genome. Compare this with Human Molecular Genetics, which has a specific section dedicated to reporting the results of association studies – clearly a much better fit for this research. Typically, authors aim high with the first submission of a journal article. However, the higher the impact of the journal, the more submissions they are likely to receive and therefore the more competition there will be for publication. Subsequent submission to a good journal with a slightly lower (but still high) impact factor is a perfectly respectable option!
Brief note from Anna: What are the Top 5 journals in your discipline? Tell us on Twitter (@PhD2Published) and DM us if you wish to contribute a blog.
Julio E. Peironcely is a PhD student in Metabolomics and Chemoinformatics at Leiden University, The Netherlands. In his free time he writes for his site juliopeironcely.com about his research, academic life, social media, and lifestyle design. You can follow him on twitter @peyron.
This is the second part of two that reviews the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, providing academic advice for PhD students and post-docs. To view the first article and the helpful tips it provides, follow the link here.
Interdependence
Now that you control yourself, start working with other people and get the most of it. How can we collaborate? How can we convince them to join us?
Habit 4: Think Win-Win
This sounds a bit business-like. You should seek for partnerships that are mutually beneficial, where both parties benefit after the interaction.
If no win/win can be achieved, realize that a no-deal is a perfect compromise.
For PhD students and academics: Are you a theoretician? Seek for an experimentalist and propose to collaborate on a project (and agree on the other of authorship in related publications). See it as a project that without the other person could not be performed.
Does somebody want you to process a lot of data and do some statistics? And they don’t plan to add you as co-author? This is a win/lose situation that should be answered with a “no-deal”.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
This chapter is not only about listening, but to listen using empathy. Do not rush into offering solutions when somebody is presenting a problem. Let them finish, make the effort to understand the problem at hand. If you do so, they will reciprocate with you.
Using empathy means putting ourselves in the perspective of the other person. Do not try to filter what they say with your own assumptions and way of thinking.
For PhD students and academics: Coming again to collaborations between theoreticians and experimentalists. Try to understand how the other person’s thoughts compare to yours in key topics.
Your approach to science might be different. Your timing as well. Maybe you care more about interpretation of results while another person cares more about describing a solid methodology. You might be data-driven and the other person hypothesis-driven. In any case, see what are the other person’s fears and hopes before exposing yours.
Habit 6: Synergize
Use trust and understanding to maximize the output of a group. With careful communication, leverage the differences of the individuals in the group, so the product is much larger than the sum of the individuals.
Identify in others what’s in them that is beneficial for the group. As well, you should detect what it is about them that sets you back so you can work on adapting yourself to that.
For PhD students and academics: In a large collaborative project you might find young motivated PhDs, busy supervisors, retired experts, and other people. Instead of getting frustrated, try to maximize what they have to offer: like the energy of the PhD students, the network amplification the supervisors, or the experience of the retired guru.
Next, use your empathy skills to minimize the effect on the team of what you don’t like: the chaos of the graduate student, the busyness of the supervisor, and the same old stories by the retired expert.
Self Renewal
It is not enough to work once on each habit and forget about them, in fact, it is a lifetime effort. Think of it as an iterative process, that you should evaluate and repeat every now and then.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Here, the author makes reference to habit 3 and encourages you to identify those things that might be keeping us from our goals. Step back, take a break, and decide what to do to renew yourself. It might be getting healthier by doing some exercise, meditating to clear your thoughts, or even re-write your mission statement.
In any case, schedule time to perform those activities that will keep your whole system running in the right direction.
For PhD students and academics: Senior scientists the sabbaticals. Since you are a PhD it might still be early for this. What you can do is to join a short side project, in order to try something new, recharge your motivation batteries, and collect new ideas.
You might want to allocate some minutes a day to just think. What? Yeah, thinking, aren’t you paid to think? Spend time generating (and writing) ideas for future projects, grant applications, daydreaming, or simply to help others.
Conclusion
The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People is a bit of a philosophical book; sometimes even religious. Despite this, it can be applied in many areas of life and it can definitely help PhD students and academics to organize themselves better. If used correctly, the learning’s in this book can help you to be more effective and motivated. At the end, you will create new habits, in a natural way.
Julio E. Peironcely is a PhD student in Metabolomics and Chemoinformatics at Leiden University, The Netherlands. In his free time he writes for his site juliopeironcely.com about his research, academic life, social media, and lifestyle design. You can follow him on twitter @peyron.
This is the first part of two that reviews 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book that provides advice relevant to PhD students and post-docs.
I have lost a lot of time during my PhD. On the one hand I waste time as everybody does; on the other hand, I waste time searching for the best tool to organize my time.
Initially I thought that I was not using the right tools to manage my projects, tasks, and time. Therefore, I tried all sorts of analog and digital tools, like a Moleskine, the GTD methodology, the pomodoro technique, Wunderlist, Remember The Milk, Google Tasks, Evernote … you name it. So much wasted time searching for the tools, implementing them in my workflow, and testing them. Can you imagine all I could have achieved if I had instead just, well, worked?
But something did not feel right. Once the new system was implemented I would not stick to it, by not creating the habit of using the tool and using it effectively. I would move on the next tool and start all over again.
I had to change myself.
I came to realize there was something deeper that needed to be changed, something within me. But all those time management books were talking about externalities that after hard experimentation were far from my control. This was when the 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People came my way. This book goes further than time management. It is about defining who you are and who you want to be. It presents the tools you need to define the rules you want your life to be based on. Although it is not aimed at PhD students and academics, it should be included in the Top 42 Books For PhD and Graduate Students.
I found out that these 7 general principles, outlined in these two posts could help me to be more effective during my PhD and in any writing projects I undertake.
PROTECT YOUR INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL WHILE TRAVELING. You can publish your research findings in a journal after you presented a paper about them at a conference. Be careful, however, not to present creative initial speculations and hypotheses, that you are not yet ready to publish. They can be stolen by unscrupulous members of your audience.
BACK UP, BAC
K UP, BACK UP YOUR RESEARCH. Don’t be victimized by unexpected electronic failures that could destroy your files. Always back up important electronic files, including your raw data and draft text for your research. If you have questionnaires or computer output, keep the originals at least until the dissertation is handed in. After editing or modifying a draft chapter, resave it on removable media. Print out a copy from time to time. Back up text material frequently. Similarly, keep all valuable devices (including computers and removable media) that hold important, valuable information secure from theft. Do not assume that theft won’t occur in the ivory tower or when you travel.
In this post, regular contributor Claire Warden offers her top tips for giving excellent conference presentations. She is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln where she has been working since 2010. She blogs at www.clairewarden.net and tweets as @cs_warden.
Here in the University of Lincoln’s drama department we are approaching our first performance fortnight of the year: a chance for students to showcase their talents and explore new methods. Currently I spend Thursday mornings amid a sea of robots, fake blood and apocalyptic visions as we rehearse a version of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. In recent days I have been thinking a little about the way we ‘perform’ as academics. Our performance ability is particularly tested at conferences and, in this my third short meditation for PhD2Published, I want to consider the way we perform at these events.
For as a postgraduate I remember being taught about archives and writing journal articles and the need to develop a workable bibliographic system, but I cannot recollect ever really learning about conference presentation. The assumption, I imagine, is that it must come naturally to anyone considering an academic career or passionate about their research. Anybody who has sat through long days of conference proceedings will know that this is far from the case and, though I do not claim any real expertise in this area (I am the presenter whose Powerpoint didn’t work at my first major international conference as well as the panel chair who introduced a colleague with the wrong university affiliation), I have been considering what help us ‘performing arts types’ could provide to colleagues in different departments. So, below are my top tips for excellent conference presentation and, for those of you balking already at the thought of a drama scholar at the helm, I can promise that there will be no exuberant jazz hands, no actorly hissy fits and I will not call you ‘darling’ at any stage…
PREPARE AN “ELEVATOR SPEECH”. Throughout your PhD studies, your professors grounded you in your discipline and taught you all the caveats and disclaimers that must accompany your scholarly research. Then, in the dissertation defense, and afterwards, for example when you seek a job, you will be asked to succinctly summarize your work and what it means. Imagine that you are attending a national conference. You step into an express elevator on the 45th floor of the building, and push “lobby”. the only other person in the elevator is, say the senior Federal policy maker in your area of interest, for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities or the President’s Science Advisor, or the chair of the department you really want to interview for a job. He or she says that they heard that you completed an important dissertation study. S/he explains that s/he would like to know about your research, but,given a packed schedule, only has this elevator ride to learn about your work. What do you tell them?
PUBLISH EARLY AND OFTEN as they say in Chicago. Begin writing for publication while you are still in graduate school. Data shows that people who publish while still in graduate school usually continue to publish at a faster rate after they graduate than those who didn’t publish while still a student. Furthermore, published papers and monographs help you get your first job.
Today’s guest post comes from Agata Mrva-Montoya. Agata is an archaeologist turned editor, currently at Sydney University Press and interested in books, publishing and social media. Here she gives tips on turning your thesis into a book.
Congratulations! After years of doing research and writing, you finally joined the ranks of freshly minted PhDs. You even have an endorsement from your examiners – ‘this work is brilliant and should be published’. So you send it in to a publisher, then another one or two. And your proposal gets knocked back, time after time. Why?
Publishers rarely consider unrevised PhD theses. A dissertation in social science and the humanities is written with a different intent and structure to a book, and for a different audience. Your thesis may be brilliant – well researched, well referenced and well organized – but what the publisher sees is a manuscript that is too long, with tedious and predictable structure, full of jargon and repetitious announcements of intent, and so many quotes and references that it reads like compilations of facts and regurgitated opinions.
So before you send your dissertation to another publisher, you need to revise it, rewrite it and turn it into something that someone, apart from your long-suffering supervisors and briefly accosted examiners, might actually want to read. Continue Reading »
This weeks Top Tips are from Sarah Cook co-author of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media
Publishing can be a waiting game, while you wait to hear if a publisher is going to accept a proposal or not, and then, hopefully, while your manuscript is being peer-reviewed.. Here are some tips (noted with the benefit of hindsight) for how to manage that waiting game.
1. When your dissertation is finished, don’t immediately publish all the best bits in the first invitation you get to contribute a chapter to another book, in case you later get the chance to write your own book! You don’t want to have contractually signed away the first-publishing-rights to that researched material and then have your own book proposal accepted at another publisher. This happened to me. If you do get asked to contribute a chapter to someone else’s edited anthology or journal of course do it, but pick a single idea from your thesis, or a single chapter (not the conclusion!) and rework it accordingly. Continue Reading »
This week, Dr Kelli Fuery, author of New Media: Culture and Image, has given us her top tips for getting published organized around the theme of interdisciplinarity:
1. Interdisciplinarity: on Publishing
Previous tips in PhD2Published have emphasized the importance of learning the process of academic publishing. In my experience, I have divorced the world of academic publishing and Academia. Publishers, all publishers, have one main goal – to make money. So in very dry terms, you need to present them with a product that they can sell and the more people that they can sell that product to, the better. Academics rarely think about their research in that way but it is a great start when you begin to write monograph proposals. A PhD uncut needs reworking in order to become a product that can be sold.
Identifying the core claims of your Doctoral dissertation and connecting them to specific fields of publishers will also help you identify target market which publishers can pitch to. Learning which publishers sell textbooks and which don’t is a great asset.
Interdisciplinarity in publishing means presenting your product and making it appealing for more than one target audience. The subject, the methodology, the level of writing – all these things can be presented in such a way that offer variety, diversity and depth to publishers so that they become aware of how your research can be ‘sold’ to more than one market. How you present that and persuade them is up to you. Continue Reading »
Weekly Wisdom #25Line up a well-known and relevant academic to write a foreword for your book!
Welcome to this week’s Top Tips, which come from I.B.Tauris
– and include a bonus tip!
1. Research potential publishers thoroughly. Make sure you’re aware of the subject areas that each publisher covers and ensure that your manuscript fits well with a publisher’s existing list before submitting. You are likely to be more successful if you can demonstrate clearly that your manuscript complements a publisher’s current books. Continue Reading »
