If you’re interested in pursing a tenure-track job, there’s this thing you need to know about: the research pipeline. I never heard the phrase “research pipeline” in graduate school, but this is the concept behind advice like “always be publishing,” which I certainly did hear. It was only after graduate school as I got deep …
Whether you are getting feedback from an advisor or mentor, a colleague or friend, or from a peer review, you are likely to end up with some piece of feedback that doesn’t make sense to you. I’m talking about the feedback to which you think “But I did that on page 10!” or “Why would …
As I worked on the first article I submitted for peer review, I was given the advice to submit my draft article to a journal to get more feedback. The logic was that I had workshopped the paper with several experts and it would be helpful to get fresh eyes on the paper. Submitting it …
If you’ve been reading Practical PhD for a while, you know that one theme is that there is no ONE way to do things in this academic life. In the spirit of this, I want to share something that people are often shocked by about my publications. I am five years out of grad school …
Drafting an article for peer-review means writing, revising, and editing, but also making the decision about when it is “done” and ready for submission to peer review. So when do you know when it’s ready to submit? When should you stop wordsmithing and click that button? I recently saw these questions asked on Twitter, in …
I’ve been learning as much as I can about academic book publishing since I graduated in 2018. While most of the committee members had published books, I didn’t get much information about the process as a graduate student. So when I decided that I wanted to transform my dissertation into a book, I sought out …
One of frequently given piece of advice I’ve heard about academic publishing is to avoid book chapters. The logic is that they’re not given the same weight as a peer-review journal article, but it’s often phrased as “no one cares about book chapters” or “book chapters don’t count for anything.” While I know this to …
These days, graduate students learn early that to get and keep an academic job they need to publish, publish, publish. In fact, many programs have turned requirements like a Master’s thesis into a paper so that students have something early on to place before they hit the job market. What’s not as often communicated is …
Putting your research out into the world is an emotional act. Pretend all you like that science is devoid of feeling, but the only way this is true is if your research is just a job. Most of us care about our work to the point that a manuscript submission can feel like sending your …
Most Sociology PhD programs include a paper requirement such as a “second year paper” or a “Master’s paper.” This paper serves, in part, a practical purpose of making sure PhD students have an empirical manuscript drafted early in their program that they can mould into a sole-authored journal publication before they go on the job …
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