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