Some tips for being a productive scholar
- Decide if you want to be
- Take advantage of collaborations, in-person and virtual
- Get money
- Make time
- Choose target journal and audience early in process
- Start a manuscript document with a skeletal structure early on in the process
- Force yourself to do small tasks regularly (don’t wait for big chunks of time)
- Finish things — don’t keeping new projects on when others are unfinished
- Don’t let students control how you spend your research time
- Make strategic decisions about where to publish
- Be persistent, and don’t give up when you have research blocks
- Realize when you have a nice narrative and then publish it — you don’t have to write a book
- Don’t be afraid to push back on unfair/unreasonable referee reports
- Write well so that people can understand your work
- Network at conferences, workshops
- Get your work out there so it gets publicized and cited
- Cite yourself
- Some thoughts on where to publish student work, from Chad
PLOS journals, especially PLOS One, are my favorite. They are very speedy and have reasonable review criteria (referees are not supposed to comment on significance of the work). These journals are open access, but there is a spendy publication fee. However, at some institutions, the institution/library will be very happy to pay the publication fee, so it is worth inquiring.