Having a publishing strategy is a crucial component of a PhD student’s research journey. A researcher should always consider the outlets for sharing his research findings, means of networking with people and build their research presence. These aspects can only be successfully achieved if there is a strategy in place. This workshop was an opportunity to enlighten the researchers on how to maximise their research impact; the traditional and open access publishing options; and methods for promoting the research and developing your research profile. The session was facilitated by Linda Kalejs & Katrina Tepper (Research and Learning Coordinator, Monash University Library) and Winifred Hirst & Romney Adams ( Librarian, Monash University Library).
Date: Tuesday 10 May 2016
Time: 10am – 1pm
Location: Seminar Rm 2, Graduate Student Hub, Campbell Hall, 21 Sports Walk, Clayton
One of the most effective ways to maximize the research impact is by identifying key journals and conferences in one’s discipline for publication. A dialogue with the supervisor or a consultation with the subject librarian could be a good place to start with. There are also several online sources such as the publishers website (to see impact factors & theme), the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), Incites Journal Citation Reports, UlrichsWeb (where is the journal indexed) or in my case the faculty or research group website(CERG).
The next strategy to take into consideration is whether to use traditional and open-access publishing outlet. Each has its own benefits and drawback. While traditional publishing does not require a payment to publish an article, its drawback is the length of time it takes to get an article published (between 2-4 years sometimes). Online publishing, on the other hand, is a faster process (takes 3-6months) but the author has to pay a fee for publishing the article and making it open access. Open access also increases the visibility of the article and thus increasing the citation counts. One has to be, however, very careful of the predatory publishers (see https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/).
A modern trend that has also emerged is to publish the dataset, code or a short audio/slideshow presentation together with the research article. A number of journals are providing this option and it increases the appeal to the article, and encourages wider collaboration,validation and further enhancements to the research . Monash University is allowing its researchers to use monash.figshare which hosts the dataset, figures, images and spreadsheets of data. This platform is indexed by google, thus making the dataset globally searchable and citable.
Finally, as a researcher it is important to promote one’s research work through formal and informal channels. This may include making presentations during conferences, school/department seminars, media interviews, on social media (LinkedIn) and though publications. In this internet age, a common approach to promoting one’s research is via developing a research profile. This can be on sites such as academia.edu, Scopus Author Identifier, Researchgate, University webpages, Google Scholar profiles and ORCID.
ORCID is gaining momentum in the research environment as it maintains a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. This addresses the problem of accurately linking author’s contributions as most personal names are not unique, or they change (such as with marriage), sometimes have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems. It also provides a persistent identity for humans, similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs).
Overall, the workshop was very enlightening and had a lot of “take-home” ideas for an early career researcher.
