Top 10 tips for increasing your citations

by Deborah Lupton, This Sociological Life:  https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2020/12/11/top-10-tips-for-increasing-your-citations/

Image: manuscriptedit.com

Who doesn’t want more people to read and cite their work? Here’s some tips I have learnt along the way about what kind of publications attract attention and citations. They are most relevant for postgraduate students and academics in the humanities and social sciences.

1. Make sure you have a Google Scholar profile set up. People can then easily find your work all in one place. Google Scholar is much more inclusive of humanities and social sciences publications and citations than are the science-oriented citation databases such as Scopus or Web of Science.

2. Write books. My top-most cited publications are nine of my books. Some of these were published more than two decades ago and are still regularly cited.

3. Write about a diverse range of topics. This means a much wider readership for your work. It will also help keep you and your writing fresh and interesting, which in turn, will make you more interesting to your readers.

4. Publish in a wide range of journals. Ditto.

5. Be one of the first to write about a new topic or concept or apply a social theory in a new way. Get in early and you will become the ‘go to’ reference to cite.

6. Write ‘how to’ pieces. Here again, introductory publications that clearly outline how to apply a particular method or a new social theory will attract interest and attention.

7. Make your writing easily accessible: Use open access repositories such as your university’s e-repository or ResearchGate to publise your outputs and make them readily available to people. You can upload preprints or postprints of articles and book chapters, and ResearchGate makes it very easy for people to request a PDF of the published version and for you to supply it.

8. Use social media to spread the word about your new publications. Tweet, blog, notify Facebook special interest groups, make an introductory YouTube video.

9. If you write book chapters, make them readily available open access as soon as they are finalised. Book chapters can take ages to be published, but you can share preprints once they are ready and people can start citing them.

10. Be bold and take risks in your writing. Readers are attracted to new shiny things and will be more interested if you are trying to do something different or innovative.

The PhD: Article publication, grant applications, promotion requests, and dealing with rejection

by Pat Thomson, Patter: https://patthomson.net/2020/08/31/dealing-with-rejection/

This is a guest post from Dan Cleather. Dan is a strength coach, educator, scientist and anarchist. His latest book,  “Subvert! A philosophical guide for the 21st century scientist”, was published in May.

Being an academic requires a thick skin. Very thick. Part of the job is dealing with a constant stream of rejections – on journal articles, grant applications, speaker applications, promotion requests … Rejection is always disappointing. However, over time we grow to understand that rejections often have little to do with the quality of the work. This helps us to protect our self-esteem – at least most of the time.

Experience is an important teacher in developing your thick skin. Once you have shepherded a few papers through a series of rejections and then ultimately into print, you can have confidence that your work is good, and put rejections down to editorial considerations or the vagaries of the peer review process.

But what if you are a student or an early career researcher? In this case you don’t have this experience, and each rejection can badly rock your self-confidence. I believe that rejections are a key factor in the growth of imposter syndrome in academia.

When one of my students first submits their work to an academic journal I always walk a weird tightrope in giving encouragement and managing expectations. On the one hand, I want to tell the student how good their work is. On the other, I need to prepare them for the fact that rejection is a very possible, and often likely, outcome. This post is the blog form of that conversation.

1. Appreciate The Statistics (Listen To The Horror Stories)

It is normal for excellent articles to get rejected. Some of the reasons for this are described later in this post. Everyone will have their own horror stories. Mine is that the first article from my PhD was rejected from 5 journals before I managed to get it accepted. It now has 41 citations.

It is also normal (but not right) for the peer review process to be a long, frustrating and unpredictable affair. One of the best students I ever worked with had to wait for 2 years to get her  first article into print – it broke my heart, as the work was fantastic. One of my favourite articles took 16 months to get through peer review (at the same journal), and despite the fact that I think it is some of my best work it never gets cited.

Applying for grants is even worse. The process is highly competitive, and so a lot of good proposals don’t get funded. The image here is a summary of my own grant applications over the last 10 years. Weeks of work went into each of these failed applications. It is a story with a happy ending, but this is only because of a recent success.

The take home message here is that, in academia, everyone gets rejected, all the time. When you are starting out you need to fight hard to believe this. Rejections are always disappointing, but at least if you appreciate the statistics you can reassure yourself that they are normal. 

2. Understand Editorial Considerations

A key part of an editor’s role is to ensure that the content in their journal is of interest to their readers. Often, if you experience a desk rejection – that is your work is rejected without being sent out for review – it is because the editor has decided that your article is not appropriate for their journal, or they have other articles that they think their readers will find more interesting. Again, it needs to be emphasised that this has nothing to do with the quality of the work – you are unlikely to get an article about lung disease into a cardiac journal, no matter how good it is. Of course, you might disagree with the editor – you probably sent the article to the journal because you wanted to reach that specific audience. However, it is up to the editor to steer the direction of a journal – ultimately the articles published in a journal will largely reflect the editor’s tastes. If they don’t favour your work it is important to bear in mind that this is just one person’s opinion.

Another part of an editor’s role is to act as custodian of the journal’s status. Many editors will be interested in the impact factor of their journal – i.e. how many times the articles in the journal are cited by external sources. This is a pretty awful way of judging a journal’s quality, but unfortunately is part of the current academic environment. For this reason, some editors will also reject articles that they don’t think will garner lots of citations. Again, just because an article doesn’t get cited does not mean it is not a good piece of work. Similarly, it is pretty difficult to predict this (even if you wanted to), and editors get it wrong all the time. Of the articles I have been involved with,  the most highly cited one with 59 citations, was rejected from at least two journals (as I remember) before it was accepted.

The point here is that the quality of the work is only one of a number of competing factors that are used in decision making – and sometimes not even the most important one. Many excellent articles are rejected (rightly or wrongly) based upon the editor’s prerogative. Often, success is predicated on getting your work in front of the right person, someone who knows enough about it to appreciate its importance.

3. Be Critical Of The Peer Review Process

Peer review is a notoriously fickle process, and it is helpful to a have a healthy scepticism as to its efficacy. However, many academics don’t, viewing peer review as a sacred cow that protects the integrity of the academic literature. This is demonstrably false – there are plenty of high profile examples that show that peer review often doesn’t even detect cases of academic misconduct.

There is evidence that supports the contention that peer review is a fickle process. For instance, one study showed that the rate of agreement between reviewers at the Journal of General Internal Medicine was little better than would be produced by chance. Similar findings have been found in the peer review of grant applications (e.g. in Australia and the  US). Every reasonably experienced academic will be able to relate examples of conflicting peer reviews that they have received.

What is the point of peer review if it is such a random process? Well, in many cases, peer review will improve the quality of an article, and it does provide some (imperfect) form of quality control. However, from the point of view of this blog post, you should recognise that a positive or negative recommendation is to some degree a matter of chance, and that you shouldn’t invest too much of your self-esteem in an academic flip of the coin.

4. Recognise Reviewer 2

Reviewer 2 is the person who sticks their hand up at the end of a presentation and asks the presenter why they didn’t do the study in an entirely different way.

Peer review is supposed to be a critical evaluation of your work. Ironically, sometimes peer reviewers are horribly uncritical. In particular, when performing a peer review, you should judge the article on its own merits – not list a plethora of alternative things that could have been done.

Peer reviewers are human too. You are often dealing with competitors, who have their own egos, and may have conflicting ideas as to how research should be done. If it seems to you that a reviewer is being unreasonable, then they probably are – and that sucks. It may even result in a rejection. To protect your self-esteem you need to recognise when your work is being rejected by Reviewer 2, and again, not take it is a reflection of your ability.

5. Back Yourself

Peer review is a process that will tend to reward work that conforms with the status quo, but that will tend to penalise potentially transformative research that breaks the mould. Peer review processes that improve the overall standard of research also result in more exceptional work being rejected, and papers that challenge the status quo undergo more changes during peer review. This is possibly best illustrated by the number of Nobel prize winning studies that were initially  rejected for publication.

Of course, if you receive a rejection you should consider the feedback carefully and try to learn from it. However, rejections should not make you feel that your ideas don’t have merit. The history of science is one of new ideas replacing old ones. Yes, we should expose our ideas to outside tests, and we should have the intellectual honesty to properly weigh up counter-arguments and consider that we might be wrong. However, if we believe that our ideas stand up to these tests, we need to have the confidence to back ourselves.

Where does this all leave us?

There is no doubt that rejection sucks. However, it is part and parcel of academic life. It is important that you are critical of the evaluative processes that are a part of academia, and that you don’t buy into them too fully. Celebrate the successes, but don’t pay too much attention to the rejections.

The Paper-in-a-Day Approach

by Jennifer L. Tackett, Bishop Blog: http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-paper-in-day-approach.html

The PiaD approach was borne of a desire to figure out a way, some way, any way, to tackle that ever-growing project list of studies-that-should-get-done-but-never-do. I’m guessing we all have these lists. These are the projects that come up when you’re sitting in a conference talk and lean over to your grad student and whisper (“You know, we actually have the data to test that thing they can’t test, we should do that!”), and your grad student sort of nods a little but also kind of looks like she wants to kill you. Or, you’re sitting in lab meeting talking about ideas, and suddenly shout, “Hey, we totally have data to test that! We should do that! Someone, add it to the list!” and people’s initial look of enthusiasm is quickly replaced by a somewhat sinister side-eye (or perhaps a look of desperation and panic; apparently it depends on who you ask). Essentially, anytime you come up with a project idea and think – Hey, that would be cool, we already have the data, and it wouldn’t be too onerous/lengthy, maybe someone wants to just write that up! – you may have a good PiaD paper.

In other words, the PiaD approach was apparently borne out of a desire to finally get these papers written without my grad students killing me. Seems as reasonable a motivation as any.

The initial idea was simple.

-       You have a project idea that is circumscribed and straightforward.

-       You have data to test the idea.

-       The analyses to do so are not overly complex or novel.

-       The project topic is in an area that everyone in the lab¹ is at least somewhat (to very) familiar with.

What would happen if we all locked ourselves in the same room, with no other distractions, for a full day, and worked our tails off? Surely we could write this paper, right?

The answer was: somewhat, and at least sometimes, yes. But even better were all the things we learned along the way.

We have been scheduling an annual PiaD since 2013. Our process has evolved a LOT along the way. Rather than giving a historical recounting, I thought I would summarize where we are at now – the current working process we have arrived at, and some of the unanticipated benefits and challenges that have come up for us over the years.

Our Current PiaD Approach

Front-End Work:

We write our PiaD papers in the late spring/early summer. Sometime in the fall, we decide as a group what the focus of the PiaD paper will be and who will be first author (see also: benefits and challenges). Then, in the months leading up to PiaD, the first author (and senior author, if not one-and-the-same), take care of some front-end tasks.² Accomplishing the front-end tasks is essential for making sure we can all hit the ground running on the day of. So, here are the things we do in advance:

1. Write the present study paragraph: what exactly do we want to do, and why/how? (Now, we write this as a pre/registration! But in the olden days, a thorough present study paragraph would do.)

2. Run a first pass of the analyses (again, remember – data are already available and analyses are straightforward and familiar).

3. Populate a literature review folder. We now use a shared reference manager library (Zotero) to facilitate this step and later populating references.

4. Create a game plan – a list of the target outlet with journal submission guidelines, a list of all the tasks that must be accomplished on the actual DAY, a list of all the people on the team and preliminary assignments. The planning stage of PiaD is key – it can make or break the success of the approach. One aspect of this is being really thoughtful about task assignments. Someone used other data from that sample for a recent study? Put them on the Methods section. Someone used similar analyses in a recent project? Put them on re-running and checking analyses (first pass is always done by the first author in advance; another team member checks syntax and runs a fresh pass on the day. We also have multiple checks built in for examining final output). Someone has expertise in a related literature? Assign them appropriate sections of the Intro/Discussion. You get the idea. Leverage people’s strengths and expertise in the task assignments.

5. Email a link to a Dropbox folder with all of the above, and attach 2-3 key references, to everyone on the team, a couple of weeks before the DAY. All team members are expected to read the key papers and familiarize themselves with the Dropbox folder ahead of time.

The DAY:

Because this process is pretty intense, and every paper is different, our PiaD DAYs always evolve a bit differently. Here are some key components for us:

1. Start with coffee.

2. Then start with the Game Plan. Make sure everyone understands the goal of the paper, the nature of the analyses, and their assigned tasks. Talk through the structure of the Introduction section at a broad level for feedback/discussion.

3. WORK LIKE THE WIND.

4. Take a lunch break. Leave where you are. Turn your computers off. Eat some food. For the most part, we tend to talk about the paper. It’s nice for us to have this opportunity to process more openly mid-day, see where people are at, how the paper is shaping up, what else we should be thinking about, etc. The chance for free and open discussion is really important, after being in such a narrow task-focused state.

5. WORK LIKE THE WIND.

6. Throughout the working chunks, we are constantly renegotiating the task list. Someone finishes their task more quickly, crosses it off the Game Plan (we use this as an active collaborative document to track our work in real time), and claims the next task they plan to move to.

7. Although we have a “no distraction” work space³ for PiaD, we absolutely talk to one another throughout the day. This is one of the biggest benefits of PiaD – the ability to ask questions and get immediate answers, to have all the group minds tackling challenges as they arise. It’s a huge time efficiency to work in this way, and absolutely makes end decisions of much higher quality than the typical fragmented writing approach.

8. Similarly, we have group check-ins about every 1-1.5 hours – where is everyone on their task? What will they move to work on next?

9. Over the years, some PiaD members have found walks helpful, too. Feeling stuck? Peel someone off to go walk through your stuck-ness with you. Come back fresher and clearer.

10. About an hour before end time, we take stock – how close are we to meeting our goals? How are things looking when we piece them all together? What tasks are we prioritizing in the final hour, and which will need to go unfinished and added to the back-end work for the first author? Some years, we are wrapping up the submission cover letter at this stage. Other years, we’re realizing we still have tasks to complete after PiaD. Just depends on the nature of the project.

11. Celebrate. Ideally with some sort of shared beverage of choice. To each their own, but for us, this has often involved bubbles. And an early bedtime.

Jennifer celebrating with Kathleen, Cassie, Avanté, and bubbles

Back-End Work:

This will be different from year-to-year. Obviously, the goal with PiaD is to be done with the manuscript by the end of the day. EVEN WHEN THIS HAPPENS, we never, EVER do final-proofing the same day. We are just way too exhausted. So we usually give ourselves a couple of weeks to freshen up, then do our final proofing before submission. Other years, for a variety of reasons, various tasks remain. That’s just how it goes with manuscript writing. Even in this case, it is fair to say that the overwhelming majority of the work gets done on the DAY. So either way, it’s still a really productive mechanism (for us).

Some Benefits and Challenges

There are many of both. But overall, we have found this to be a really great experience for many reasons beyond actually getting some of these papers out in the world (which we have! Which is so cool!). Some of these benefits for us are:

1. Bonding as a team. It’s a really great way to strengthen your community, come together in an informal space on a hard but shared problem, and struggle through it together.

2. A chance to see one another work. This can be incredibly powerful, for example, for junior scholars to observe scientific writing approaches “in the wild”. It never occurred to me before my grad students pointed this out at our first PiaD, but they rarely get to see faculty actually work in this way. And vice versa!

3. Accuracy, clarity, and error reduction. So many of our smaller errors could likely be avoided if we’re able to ask our whole team of experts our questions WHILE WE’RE WRITING THE PAPER. Real-time answers, group answers, a chance for one group member to correct another, etc. Good stuff.

4. Enhancing ethical and rigorous practices. The level of accountability when you are all working in the same space at the same time on the same files is probably as good as you can get. How many of our problematic practices might be extinguished if we were always working with others like this?

5. One of the goals I had with PiaD was to have the first author status rotate across the team – i.e., grad students would “take turns” being first author. I still think this is a great idea, as it’s a great learning experience for advanced grad students to learn how to manage team papers in this way. But, of course, it’s also HARD. So, be more thoughtful about scope of the project depending on seniority of the first author, and anticipate more front- and back-end work, accordingly.

Bottom Line

PiaD has been a really cool mechanism for my lab to work with and learn from over the years. It has brought us many benefits as a team, far beyond increased productivity. But the way it works best for each team is likely different, and tweaking it over time is the way to make it work best for you. I would love to hear more from others who have been trying something similar in their groups, and also want to acknowledge the working team on the approach outlined here: Kat Herzhoff, Kathleen Reardon, Avanté Smack, Cassie Brandes, and Allison Shields.

Footnotes

¹ For PiaD purposes, I am defining the lab as PI + graduate students.

² Some critics like to counter, well then it’s not really Paper IN A DAY, now is it??? (Nanny-nanny-boo-boo!) Umm ... I guess not? Or maybe we can all remember that time demarcations are arbitrary and just chill out a bit? In all seriousness, if we all lived in the world where our data were perfectly cleaned and organized, all our literature folders were populated and labeled, etc. – maybe the tasks could all be accomplished in a single day. But unfortunately, my lab isn’t that perfect. YET (Grad students sending me murderous side-eye over the internet).

³ The question of music or no-music is fraught conversational territory. You may need to set these parameters in advance to avoid PiaD turmoil and potential derailment. You may also need your team members to provide definition of current terminology in advance, in order to even have the conversation at all. Whatever you do, DON’T start having conversations about things like “What is Norm-core?” and everyone googling “norm-core”, and then trying to figure out if there is “norm-core music”, and what that might be. It’s a total PiaD break-down at that point.

Academic Journal Publishing: How to Respond to Reviewers

by CJA Bradshaw, Conservation Bytes: https://conservationbytes.com/2017/06/30/how-to-respond-to-reviewers/

Just like there are many styles to writing scientific manuscripts, there are also many ways to respond to a set of criticisms and suggestions from reviewers. Likewise, many people and organisations have compiled lists of what to do, and what not to do, in a response to reviews of your manuscript (just type ‘response to reviewer comments’ or similar phrase into your favourite search engine and behold the reams of available advice).

It clearly is a personal choice, but from my own experience as an author, reviewer, editor, and the myriad suggestions available online, there are a few golden rules about how to respond:

• After you have calmed down a little, it is essential that you remain polite throughout the process. Irrespective of how stupid, unfair, mean-spirited, or just plain lazy the reviewers might appear to you, do not stoop to their level and fire back with defensive, snarky comments. Neither must you ever blame the editor for even the worst types of reviews, because you will do yourself no favours at all by offending the main person who will decide your manuscript’s fate.

• If the decision requires substantive changes, then it is often a good idea to summarise in a paragraph or two (or using point form) the major ways you have listened to your reviewersand improved your manuscript. You can place this brief summary just before your point-by-point responses, or in a separate ‘letter’ to the editor as per specific journal guidelines.
• Make the editor’s job as easy as possible. By this I mean that you should address each reviewer’s critique or suggestion in order, whether that be the order in which you received them, or in grouped thematically if several reviewers highlight the same issues. I recommend copying the entire set of comments into a separate document, and then culling them to their bare-bones, basic message; there is no need to repeat every single word the reviewers wrote. After the cull, address each point immediately after it appears, differentiating the reviewer’s comment and your response by font (e.g., italicised comments, normal-font response), colour (but this not recommended for colour-blind scientists like me), or by a leading ‘RESPONSE:’ or something similar in each response. As an editor, I want to be able to understand the essence of the reviewer’s issue at a glance, and then concentrate on your concise, yet comprehensive response to it.
• Unless the reviewers recommend only superficial or minor changes, do not automatically do everything they suggest needs to be done. Reviewers are not omniscient, so they will often suggest inappropriate things, or request unreasonable new analyses or experiments. If you can defend your approach, or clearly identify why a particular suggestion is unwarranted, then by all means, do so. However, do not use this advice as an excuse to be lazy; if you cannot honestly demonstrate why the reviewer’s suggestion is inferior or unsupported, then just follow the recommendation.
• For every remaining critique or suggestion, demonstrate to the editor that you have changed at least something in the manuscript, and identify where the change now resides (either by new line numbers or some other navigational pointer). If you are required to rephrase important parts of the text, you can simply copy the revised sentence, paragraph, or (brief) section into the response letter to show the editor what a well-behaved and conscientious scientist you are. On the other hand, if a particular comment requires little change (e.g., adding a reference, re-wording a sentence, changing terminology, et cetera), you can probably get away with something like ‘we have now made this change’, or even ‘done’.
• There are no page limits on response letters, so feel free to add as much detail as is necessary without fatiguing the editor. It is a balancing act to be sure — insufficient detail or failing to respond to a particular concern will result in either another round of reviews or an outright rejection, whereas too much verbiage can bore the editor and distract her from the important business of accepting your manuscript. It is not that rare to have response letters that exceed the length of the manuscript itself, especially for the magazine-style, high-impact journals.
• This advice differs from that of others, but as an editor I am not typically overjoyed by reading copious ‘thank you’ statements or gratuitous repetition of the reviewer’s compliments to the authors. Instead, stick to addressing the main critiques and do not ingratiate yourself.

In summary, the overall impression that the editors and reviewers must have after reading your revision and response letter is that you have taken their advice seriously and made a substantial effort to accommodate their expert suggestions into the revised version. If they experience any other emotion than this, chances are that your manuscript will be rejected.

CJA Bradshaw