When I was a graduate student, I completely misunderstood the reason publishers come to conferences. I thought the primary purpose of the Book Fair was to sell books. Then I discovered that people that staff those booths are not (usually) people from sales and marketing. They are editors. And they don’t just stand there at […]
Read More »Scholarly Publishing: a category in transition
Communicating your research knowledge to scholarly audiences. Books, journals, edited collections, etc. Selecting a journal or publisher. How publishing is used in evaluation processes.
Posts in this category will be edited and/or recategorized beginning in July 2015 as we move to a library of useful information.
Fear is in the eye of the beholder (PhD2Published)
I have a post on publishing and fear up at PhD2Published. It starts like this: The biggest barrier to publishing is fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of criticism. Fear that you really don’t have anything to contribute. And then I talk about how to move forward anyway under the following headings Look for the contribution to […]
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Publishing from your dissertation
It is a fact of life that if you want an academic job you need to publish. For most early career academics, or PhD students contemplating academic careers, this means thinking about your dissertation. This post looks at the options: book or articles; and what kind of articles.
Read More »Over at the Careers Café…
As you know, I also blog for University Affairs Careers Café. This month’s post is about the need to publish to get an academic job.
Read More »Validation, communication, & academic blogging: some links
A linky post for those who are interested. There are some interesting things to be found on this topic. Michael Cholbi at In Socrates Wake drew my attention to a few in his post inviting thoughts on whether humanists are avoiding exposure (responding to Alex Reid, see below). Which led me to James Stanescu (aka […]
Read More »Collaboration, co-authoring, and such
If you are in the humanities or some social science disciplines, co-authorship is much less common and may even be frowned upon. Some humanities researchers have been heard to doubt the existence of co-authorship, “Two people cannot hold the pen.”*
If you are in this kind of discipline, writing with others can feel odd. And it raises some interesting issues about how it will be evaluated.
Why co-author? … get more written … share expertise … mentor students
How will peers view it? … separating you from your co-authors … getting collaborative grants
Read More »Validation vs communication: another example
How is it that just as I write that post about validation and how stuck it can get you, I find another relevant link: Why Lists are a Flawed Approach to Assessing Excellence
Read More »Validation vs. communication: an example
Bon Stewart made a very prescient point in the comments of my post on how scholarship is evaluated. “the notion of validity by process became more important than the idea of contribution TO the process”. This morning I was catching up on blog reading and read a very thought provoking article that I think makes excellent background to such a discussion. It’s about scientific publishing, which is the model that humanities and social science researchers are being compared to implicitly or explicitly. And it illustrates some very serious issues in relation to this question of validation.
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Peer reviewed journal articles and monographs in the academic evaluation process
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Journals and monographs in academic evaluation processes This is the 2nd post in a series on how your scholarship is evaluated in various academic evaluation processes. I was inspired by the comments on a blog post on Melville and the knowledge that some of my readers do blog and […]
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How scholarship is evaluated
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · How scholarship is evaluated The quality and impact/significance of your research is usually evaluated based on where you publish. The advent of new outlets for your scholarly work has raised some interesting issues about how this is done. A blog exchange about Melville scholarship (read the comments, and also […]
Read More »Ever wonder about publishing for a broader audience?
One of the people I’ve met on Twitter is Holly Tucker, a historian at Vanderbilt University. She’s written a history of blood transfusion called Blood Work. In the run up to it’s release she is writing about the process of promoting the book. But there is something about the transition between a manuscript to a real […]
Read More »On advice about publishing before securing an academic job
Your doctoral supervisor (and indeed the entire department) has an interest in you getting a tenure-track job. It is in their interests to give you good advice.
That said, sometimes their knowledge of the labour market is limited. Assume that they have good intentions, but don’t treat their advice as gospel. Things have been changing fast.
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