Bryan CoadResearch Fellow

Ian Wark Research InstituteUniversity of South Australia

18th July 2013

Publishing during your PhD and during your post-doc

UniSA

Post-docs

PhD

IntroductionPublishing in the Natural Sciences

MawsonInstitute

My Background

Research• Physical chemistry• Materials science

UniSA

• A qualitative story about your research interests.

•What a publication record should be...

• A quantitative measure • Number of publications• Impact factor of journal• Number of citations• Authorship position• “Currency” of Academia

• How your publication record tends to be viewed

• Why Publish? When to publish? Where to publish? How to develop your style.

• Tips

• Key issues

Publication Metrics

UniSA

• Get your results out there

• Ask yourself: Why do you do experiments?

• Establish yourself in the field

• In science, publications are still the best way to do this (compared to conferences etc.)

• Currency of academia: key performance indicators, grant writing

•Why publish?

UniSA

• Writing starts with reading so read every day

• Academic writing is a learned skill, therefore you must practice

• Time management: make time to read and to write

• Write every day (practice)•G

et into the habit of writing

Developing as an author

UniSA

Post Doc

• Should always be writing or thinking about writing

• Start the “paper” before starting the experiment

• Gets you thinking of the potential pitfalls before you start experiments

• Think as a referee: “What is the weakest part of the proposed research”

• Pitfalls: “Does it rely heavily on assumptions?”

PhD Student

• Start Now! Even if you are still collecting data / conducting experiments

• Early PhD: Write a review paper (chapter 1 of your thesis)

• Mid PhD: Write your methods section, chapter introductions – a little bit every day

• Late PhD: Put together journal publications

•When to publish?

UniSA

• Open access journals?

• Best strategy is to find inspiration from leaders or mentors in your field. Publish in the journals where they publish.

•Where to publish?

• Engineering – more focussed on presenting at conferences – conference abstracts

• Applied science: may be more important to publish in a journal with high peer readership – not necessarily high impact

• In natural sciences: tend to publish in the best (highest impact) journal relevant to the topic

UniSA

•Publication style

• Authorship role

• Collaborations

• Find the best / your favourite paper in your field and analyse what makes it good

• Publishing strategies

• quality vs. quantity? “Salami” publications?

UniSA

• Ask you supervisor if there is anything you can write up

•Top 5 Tips for Authors

• Read with a pen in your hand (or PDF mark-up tools) and assess critically

• Become a journal peer-reviewer

• Archive read publications in your reference management software

• See if you can negotiate time at the end of your post-doc to finish papers – otherwise, they might never get written