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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The time has come. You are an Earth scientist. You’ve spent weeks, months, years working on this project – now is the time to pull it together for publication. You might be writing an undergraduate or graduate thesis, a research paper for a leading journal, a note for the newsletter of the local amateur scientific society, a book review or an abstract for a specialist geological conference. How do you make the transition from promising unpublished researcher to established academic author? Of course, the phrase ‘academic publishing’ covers a multitude of sins; monographs, research papers, book reviews, conference abstracts or whatever each requires a different approach. You have to decide what it is you are going to write and where to publish it. There are co-authors, supervisors of your degree, peer reviewers and editors to deal with on the way. But the only way to write like an academic is to write like an academic. . . where do you start? You could do much worse than start here.
There are many books on how to write and be published aimed at research students and other aspiring academics. Many of these are readable, comprehensive and provide good advice. This book is composed of numerous short chapters on this subject, all directly relevant to one or more aspects of academic publishing and aimed particularly at the Earth scientists in the broadest sense. Geologists will be encouraged to use the book as much as a reference as a reader, ‘dipping in’ to the chapters that contain relevant tips, hints and comments to enable them to improve the paper that they are currently writing. The book is intended to be informative, readable and, above all, of practical application for all readers. In summary, the volume will be a readable compilation investigating many facets of academic publishing relevant to the Earth sciences. It will be of particular interest to postgraduate students, postdocs and new academics
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Seitenzahl: 318
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction to Writing
References
2 Publication Diversity
References
3 Theses
Reference
4 Books and Monographs
References
5 Invited Chapters for Books
6 Peer‐Reviewed Research Papers
References
7 Short Notes
References
8 Discussions of and Replies to Published Papers
References
9 Book Reviews and Book Reviewing
References
10 Conference Abstracts
References
11 Papers for Non‐Peer‐Reviewed Publications
References
12 Field Guides
References
13 Title
References
14 Abstract
References
15 Key Words
References
16 Introduction
References
17 Materials and Methods/Localities and Horizons
Reference
18 Results
References
19 Discussion and Conclusions
References
20 Acknowledgements
21 References
Reference
22 Why Write? (1)
References
23 Line Drawings
References
24 Maps
References
25 Photographic Plates
References
26 Tables
References
27 Co‐authors and Others
References
28 Cover Letters
References
29 Submission
30 Editors
References
31 Reviewers
References
32 Why Write? (2)
References
33 Reviews
References
34 Revision: Corrections and Resubmission
34.1 Publish ‘As Is’
34.2 Minor Revision
34.3 Major Revision
35 Acceptance
Reference
36 Rejection
References
37 Copyright
References
38 Open Access
References
39 Offprints and Pdfs
References
40 Reading
References
41 Reviewing
References
42 Why Write? (3)
References
43 Productivity
43.1 Write a Conference Abstract
43.2 Write a Book Review
43.3 Write a Short Research Paper
43.4 Write a Big Research Paper
References
44 Space and Time
References
45 Writer’s Block
References
46 Plain English
References
47 The Native English Speaker
48 Why Write? (4)
References
49 Editing Journals
49.1 Small Journal Editor: One‐Man Band
49.2 Big Journal Editor: Big Commitment
49.3 Book Review Editor
References
50 A Space of Your Own
References
51 Contracts, Agents, Publishers and Your First Book
References
52 How Did I Write This Book?
References
Appendix Book Proposal
Book Proposal: ‘Writing for Geologists’
Full Working Title
Synopsis: A Reference Work
Completion
Author’s Qualifications
Market for the Book
Comparison with Competing Books
Proposed Chapter Headings
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 26
Table 26.1 ‘Presence/absence chart of key sedimentological features and taxa considered indicative of terrestrial (#), shallow (+) and deeper‐water (*) conditions in the Lower to Middle Miocene sedimentary record of Carriacou. The true focus of this table is the Grand Bay Formation, variously interpreted as deep or shallow water in origin. Our interpretation based on multiple lines of evidence, summarized in this table, is that it is a deep water deposit including shallow water and even terrestrial fossils that were washed down slope at the time of deposition.
Chapter 41
Table 41.1 The principal features of a research paper that is sent for review.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 The Recent bourgueticrinid crinoid
Democrinus chuni
(Döderlein). This figure illustrates seven specimens or parts of specimens of different shapes, linear, rounded and an inverted Y. They have been grouped together to fill a rectangular space. If you do examine the original, you will notice that not all figures were as successful in filling the rectangle as this one; 20 years later, I would put more effort into attaining my rectangular ideal.
Figure 23.2 A measured section of the north‐east point of Half Moon Bay, parish of Saint Philip, south‐east Antigua; Antigua Formation (Upper Oligocene)). Note the section is entirely in limestones; terms such as sandstone and mudrock refer to grain size. Crinoid columnals and a brachiopod were collected from bed 4; crinoid columnals are present, but rare, higher in the section. This diagram was prepared to fit the width of a page in the research journal
Lethaia
.
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1 (A) Outline map for a field trip to eastern Jamaica showing the circular route taken (arrows) by road from Kingston, with stops 1–3 indicated; (B) Detailed map of the Fellowship area, parish of Portland, showing the position of stop 2*. This more detailed map is provided to locate a stop that is difficult to find. Note that neither of the locality maps is cluttered with geological information; rather, it is the positions of the sites that are of importance. These maps are supplemented by further details of geology and how to find the sites in the text (Donovan
et al
., 1990, 1995, pp. 23–6).
Figure 24.2 Sketch map of the (closed) railway east of Riversdale, parish of St Catherine, Jamaica, showing details of the contacts between the White Limestone Group (= Troy Formation) and the Above Rocks granodiorite. Information on this map has been kept to the minimum necessary to demonstrate these contacts, not shown on Green (1972).
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 ‘Echinoderm plates from the Protolenus Limestone’ (A) Scanned from the original plate. Not too bad considering the constraints of the time; another day in the darkroom would have produced a better fill of the open white spaces, but it was not worth a day to do so. The yellowing of the white between images is a long‐term interaction of remnant Cow Gum with the card over 34 years. (B) An improved version made using Photoshop – this took about 30 minutes to develop from the original.
Figure 25.2 ‘Bored oysters
Aetostreon latissimum
(Lamarck) from the Ferruginous Sands Formation (Aptian), Isle of Wight, collected from float’. After digital photography, this plate took less than two hours to construct in Photoshop.
Figure 25.3 ‘Moydart Formation, Arisaig Group, at Moydart Point, Nova Scotia’. This figure fitted neatly in the width of two columns on a page with a three‐column format, with sufficient space below for the figure caption.
Chapter 39
Figure 39.1 Printed cover of an offprint of Trechmann (1925), sent ‘With the author’s compliments’ to Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, FRS, at the British Museum (Natural History).
Guide
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Writing for Earth Scientists
52 Lessons in Academic Publishing
Stephen K. Donovan
This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data applied for
ISBN: 9781119216773 (paperback)
Cover Image: (Hand) © simarik/Gettyimages; (Earth) © 1xpert/GettyimagesCover Design: Wiley
For Trevor Jackson (1941–2016), head of department, co‐author and friend, who never, ever failed to be anything but an enthusiast for all and any of my publications.
Foreword
Given the vital importance of clear, accurate and comprehensible communication to the advancement of science, it is remarkable how cavalier, even disdainful, most scientists are to the processes of writing and publishing. There seems to be an implicit assumption that real science is done in the lab or in the field and that writing up is at best an annoyance or worst a hateful imposition to be done as quickly and with as little grace as possible. The merest reflection shows this to be nonsense and dangerous nonsense. Without clearly written, well‐structured and thoughtful papers, monographs and text and reference books, the most important scientific discoveries are worthless. After all, even the double helical structure of DNA would have remained a topic for bar discussion in the Cambridge pub, the Eagle, had Crick and Watson not written their elegant and lucid paper for Nature and thereby changed the world. Until that paper was communicated and circulated, the science contained in it did not exist. Scientists should embrace and celebrate good writing and rejoice when the quality of their written work is recognized. It should be the fundamental basis of what they do but sadly and all too often it is slipshod, obscure, portentous, pretentious and downright incomprehensible. This book will show you how to avoid the pitfalls of bad scientific writing and produce sparkling and readable text that will gain you the reputation of being a discipline leader. What else could you possibly aspire to?
Steve Donovan and I first met when he was a young researcher at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and I was dreaming of setting up a new scientific and academic imprint, called Belhaven Press, almost 30 years ago. The greatest challenge for a new publisher is to find willing authors. By definition, you have no track record and nothing to show. My own academic background was in the Earth sciences (geography actually. My PhD is on viticulture in France. Well, why not? Someone has to.) so that seemed the obvious place to start. I had just left a drudge job at Macmillan but still had a free subscription to Nature which they had founded over a century before and still publish. Leafing through a copy one hot and tedious afternoon (we had seemingly glamorous but in reality stuffy offices in Covent Garden), I noticed a short but elegantly written article on fossils (ostracods, I think, but it was a long time ago) by a young author who clearly knew how to write well. I wrote to the author to ask if he'd ever thought of writing or editing a book on mass extinctions. He responded weeks later (due to snail mail; this was long before e‐mail) enthusiastically and the result was the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership that has produced several books which we both like to think have changed the field positively, and we have even jointly authored a couple of papers. It also produced a lifelong friendship which we both treasure. The young author was of course Steve Donovan.
Since then, Steve has written dozens of papers and tens of books and monographs for a variety of audiences The publishing world has changed out of all recognition since we first collaborated in 1986. Then it was primarily print on paper and offprints of journal articles were the common currency. (There must be enormous mountains of them, mouldering in university offices and libraries in Africa, China, India and South America.) Now there are digital platforms galore, blogs, preprints, postprints, database data and much else. Yet one thing remains unchanged. If you do not write well and clearly, you will not be read and you may as well not have done the research. Good writing is the most essential thing in science. Nothing else matters so much.
In Writing for Earth Scientists, Steve provides a step‐by‐step guide on how to achieve good clear scientific authorship. If you are browsing this book in a bookshop, your library, on‐screen or on your mobile device courtesy of Mr Amazon, my advice is devour it, memorize and keep it at your side at all times when writing. It will remind you of the what, how and why of your research and you will become a better scientist, more widely read and the envy of your friends and colleagues. It will not make you more beautiful or attractive but you didn’t really expect that, did you? Now, I must get back to my own writing. I have a publisher’s deadline to meet!
Iain StevensonEmeritus Professor of PublishingUniversity College LondonSenior Research Fellow,School of Advanced StudyUniversity of London.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to all the colleagues, reviewers and editors of the past 35 years, many of which I am proud to call friend, who helped turn each of my papers into something worth publishing. Iain Stevenson, recently retired from University College London, commissioned my first edited book for the late‐lamented Belhaven Press and has also written the Foreword for the present volume – thank you, Iain. Ian Francis, formerly of Wiley‐Blackwell, fed me, tempted me with the idea for this book, but I had to think it through myself before I bit the hook; I am glad that I did. Ramya Raghavan at Wiley‐Blackwell was afflicted by my original typescript, complete with one chapter written twice in different parts of the book (!), and has calmly and enthusiastically guided my scribble through the early stages of the publication process. My children, Hannah and Pelham, have put up with their Dad, always reading, always writing, without complaint; now H. is starting her own course of university study, I hope the writing ‘bug’ bites her, too. My partner, Karen, has provided so much support for this project in so many ways from her lofty eyrie across the North Sea – thank you, Kitten.
Special thanks must be given to places, apart from home, where I wrote this guide in my (now) stained and battered brown notebook. Vascobelo Café in Scheltema bookstore in Amsterdam was a regular haunt for breakfast on Saturdays, providing peace, tranquillity and a soft boiled egg while I wrote a paragraph or two. Subway at Leiden station was my writing place on weekday lunchtimes, where I must have written at least a third of Writing for Geologists. Subway in Hoofddorp fed me and let me scribble mainly at dinnertime, and, if I took the family for a burger at McDonald’s in Hoofddorp, I wrote there, too. If this was a research paper, I would list any sources of grants in the acknowledgements. None of these cafés sponsored me per se, but each was indispensable, providing a table and coffee to encourage my pencil. Thank you, you were all essential to this book.
Thank you to those journals who gave permission for me to reproduce illustrations from some of my earlier publications. These are Figures 23.1 (originally in Bulletin of the Mizunami Fossil Museum, edited by Dr Hiroaki Karasawa), Figures 24.1 and 24.2 (Caribbean Journal of Earth Science, edited by Dr Sherene James‐Williamson), Figure 25.2 (Proceedings of the Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society, editor Dr. Paul Bingham), Figure 25.3 (Palaios, managing editor Dr Kathleen Huber) and Figure 39.1 (Geological Magazine, Ms Georgia Stratton, Cambridge University Press).
About a quarter of the chapters in this book have been adapted or have evolved from articles published originally on one or other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I thank the publishers for their graciousness in granting permission for their reproduction, each in a more or less changed form, herein. The publishers are, in no particular order, University of Toronto Press, Toronto (publishers of Journal of Scholarly Publishing); Tribune Content Agency on behalf of New Scientist; SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), Tulsa, Oklahoma (Palaios); European Federation of Geologists, Brussels (European Geologist); and the Palaeontological Association, London (Newsletter). Bibliographic details as follows:
Chapter 2, ‘Publication Diversity’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2008,
39
: 294–300).
Chapter 7, ‘Short Notes’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2012,
43
: 440–3).
Chapter 8, ‘Discussions and Replies to Published Papers’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2016,
47
: 213–16).
Chapter 9, ‘Book Reviews’,
New Scientist
(1993,
140
(1900): 55) and
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2006,
38
: 36–40).
Chapter 22, ‘Why Write (1)?’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2011,
42
: 262–7).
Chapter 27, ‘Co‐authors and Others’, adapted from
New Scientist
(1995,
147
(1990): 46–7).
Chapter 30, ‘Editors’, adapted from
European Geologist
(2004,
17
: 16).
Chapter 32, ‘Why Write (2)?’, adapted from
Palaeontological Association Newsletter
(2006,
61
: 62–4).
Chapter 33, ‘Reviews’, adapted from
Palaios
(2005,
20
: 99–100).
Chapter 36, ‘Rejection’, adapted from
European Geologist
(2003,
16
: 41).
Chapter 39, ‘Offprints and Pdfs’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2009,
40
: 201–5).
Chapter 41, ‘Reviewing’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2014,
46
: 89–95).
Chapter 43, ‘Productivity’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2011,
42
: 382–6).
Chapter 46, ‘Plain English’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2012,
44
: 105–6).
Chapter 48, ‘Why Write (4)?’, adapted from
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
(2005,
36
: 238–42).
Stephen K. DonovanThursday, 8 December 2016
1Introduction to Writing
‘“A discovery dates only from the time of the record of it, and not from the time of its being found in the soil.” This classic sentence of [General Augustus Henry Lane‐Fox] Pitt Rivers [1827–1900] proclaims fairly and squarely the ultimate moral and scientific duty of the field‐archaeologist’ (Wheeler, 2004, p. 182) and, needless to say, also the Earth scientist.
Speech … is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking.
(Christie, 1958, p. 162)
To speak to many academics, you would be mistaken to think that their sole purpose for writing research papers and conference abstracts is to keep their job. Their university, museum, laboratory or head of department instigate annual publication targets which must be met – or else. But is pressure from above the sole reason to record your latest ideas and discoveries in print?
There has to be some element of a desire to get it recorded in the psyche of each and every academic author. As expounded in the quotation in the epigraph, scientific ideas only enter the true playing field of science by being published. I have heard many talks and seen many posters at meetings that never got further than a conference abstract. And an unpublished thesis is just that, unpublished.
So, are you a writer? At secondary school, I was poor at spelling and had little understanding of the rules of English, but I read widely. This is not necessarily the worst way forward for a writer. My style of writing has been influenced and guided by authors who are masters of the language. My own foibles and idiosyncrasies have been found out and corrected by an army of editors and reviewers over the past 35 years. Spelling has never been simpler; not only has my own vocabulary and accuracy improved with time, but, unlike my old typewriter, word processing programs will actively argue with you if they disagree with your spelling.
The time has come. You are an Earth scientist – geomorphologist, tectonicist, palaeontologist, geochemist, Earth systems scientist or whatever. You’ve spent weeks, months, years working on a project – now is the time to pull it together for publication. You might be writing an undergraduate or graduate thesis, a research paper for a leading journal, a note for the newsletter of the local amateur scientific society, a book review or an abstract for a specialist geological conference. How do you make the transition from promising unpublished researcher to established academic author? And how do you maintain momentum once published? Of course, the phrase ‘academic publishing’ covers a multitude of sins; monographs, research papers, book reviews, conference abstracts or whatever, and each requires a different approach. You have to decide what it is you are going to write and where to publish it. There are co‐authors, supervisors and examiners of your degree, peer reviewers and editors to deal with on the way. But the only way to write like an academic is to write like an academic … where do you start? You could do much worse than start here.
There are many books on how to write and be published, aimed mainly at research students and other aspiring academics. Many of these are readable, comprehensive and provide good advice. Although I am no longer aspiring – I have about 1000 assorted publications to my name and I have, if anything, become more productive as I have got older – I enjoy buying and reading (and, not uncommonly, reviewing) such volumes as each and every one contains something that is new and useful to me. Over the years they have helped me increase my productivity, as well as improving my style of writing, the organization of my papers and their content. Further, they have inspired me to compose my own essays on academic publishing, written from my perspective as an author and editor.
Writing for Earth Scientists is comprised of numerous short chapters on this subject, all directly relevant to one or more aspects of academic publishing and aimed particularly at Earth scientists in the broadest sense. As a palaeontologist, I am an Earth scientist with strong leanings towards biology, but I also have active research interests in Caribbean geology and the history of geology. But any book on writing can provide useful ideas to any writer. Earth scientists are encouraged to use the book as much as a reference as a reader, ‘dipping in’ to the chapters that contain relevant tips, hints and comments to enable them to improve the paper that they are currently writing. This book is intended to be informative, readable and, above all, of practical application for all readers.
My aim has been to make this book a clear reference that readers will be able to read from cover to cover, but also to make it more akin to an owner’s manual for a car than a textbook. If you have a book review to write or are having trouble formatting the tables for a paper, then turn to the relevant chapter(s). That there are 52 chapters in Writing for Earth Scientists is more than a coincidence; there is one for every week of the year. I rarely see other academics reading volumes aimed at improving their communication skills, yet many should aim to advance their writing, which is often poor even in senior academics. So, I have made Writing for Earth Scientists accessible at various levels, including as a ‘one chapter per week’ dipper, which may encourage at least some to read a chapter every week. That is, I want Writing for Earth Scientists to be a readable compilation investigating the many facets of academic publishing relevant to the Earth sciences from which anyone can benefit. While I anticipate that postgraduate students, postdocs and new academics will be my core readers, do not hesitate to point out relevant comments to your lecturers and supervisors. It is not just young authors who struggle to write; many established authors would benefit from examining their own style of writing and their approach to publication. Fringe readership will include ambitious undergraduates who want to ‘break in’ to academic publishing early, amateurs in various fields of natural history who want to write up their own findings, and authors in academic fields outside the target audience, all of which I welcome; geology and geologists can never be too diverse.
I also emphasize that there are many other worthy books on academic publishing. It may seem eccentric that I am praising, even advertising my ‘competition’, but who would write a research paper with only one reference? This list is personal and I apologize to authors of those excellent books that I do not include; either I, sadly, have not read your book or you do not appear on my bookshelf. Some of these books have now gone into new editions; I merely list those that I actually use. Thus, some particularly valued examples include Day (1998), Luey (2002), Kitchin and Fuller (2005), Thody (2006), Silva (2007), Germano (2008), Connah (2010), Greene (2013) and, probably my favourite, Hartley (2008). (Although some of these volumes are available in newer editions, but these are the ones that I actually use.) Some pairs of books can provide a contrast, none more so than Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing (2012) and Billig’s Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences (2013). (Do not be concerned if a book, like Billig’s, is aimed at a specific and non‐geological academic niche; academic writing is academic writing, whatever the field.) I also mention, quietly, my own slender collection of essays on academic writing (Donovan, 2014). These books are either comprehensive introductions to all aspects of the academic publishing process or, in the examples of Silvia (2007), Sword (2012) or Billig (2013), focus rather differently on the requirements of the writing process.
Writing for Earth Scientists is a rare beast, a specialist book on how to publish in geology and related fields, although I admit that there are other guides to writing papers in the Earth sciences (such as Cochran et al., 1984; AIPG, 1986; Irvine and Rumble, 1992; US Geological Survey, 1995). I propose to take a structured textbook approach, which cynically might be described as buy a word processing package on page 1, publish your paper/monograph on the last page. I trust that Writing for Earth Scientists will be much better than this, however. It is intended that it will be as readable as any of the distinguished competition listed above and will focus on most aspects of the academic publishing process that are important in the Earth sciences. It is thus intended to be comprehensive for the Earth scientist, while providing commentary on specific things that are of common concern to all academic authors, such as co‐authorship, peer review, book reviewing and choice of type of publication.
At this point, it is relevant to briefly admit to those areas of publishing that I do not consider in Writing for Earth Scientists. I do not consider writing grant proposals. We all apply for grant support, but in this book I concentrate on writing for publication; there are a number of fine volumes on composing proposals to which you can refer. Blogs and social media are definitely forms of publication, but represent as much personal memoir as anything else. I do not consider ‘blogging’ (ghastly word), but many of the ideas discussed herein may be broadly applicable. What the author of a blog should always consider is, is it worthwhile publishing or is it just what I cannot get accepted elsewhere?
References
AIPG (1986)
Organization and Content of a Typical Geological Report
. American Institute of Professional Geologists, Arvada, CO.
Billig, M. (2013)
Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences
. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Christie, A. (1958 [1936])
The ABC Murders
. Pan, London.
Cochran, W., Fenner, P. and Hill, M. (1984)
Geowriting: A Guide to Writing Editing, and Printing in Earth Science
. American Geological Institute, Alexandria, VA.
Connah, G. (2010)
Writing about Archaeology
. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Day, R.A. (1998)
How to Write & Publish a Scientific Paper
. 5th edn. Oryx Press, Phoenix, AZ.
Donovan, S.K. (2014)
How Not to Alienate Your Editor: Some Everyday Aspects of Academic Publishing
. Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken.
Germano, W. (2008)
Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books
. 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Greene, A.E. (2013)
Writing Science in Plain English
. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hartley, J. (2008)
Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Handbook
. Routledge, London.
Irvine, T.M. and Rumble, D.R. III. (1992) A writing guide for petrological (and other geological) manuscripts.
Journal of Petrology
, 1–46.
Kitchin, R. and Fuller, D. (2005)
The Academic’s Guide to Publishing
. SAGE, London.
Luey, B. (2002)
Handbook for Academic Authors
.4th edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Silvia, P.J. (2007)
How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing
. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.
Sword, H. (2012)
Stylish Academic Writing
. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Thody, A. (2006)
Writing and Presenting Research
. SAGE, London.
US Geological Survey (1995) Guidelines for writing hydrologic reports.
Fact Sheet
, FS‐0217‐95.
Wheeler, Sir M. (2004 [1954])
Archaeology from the Earth
. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi.
2Publication Diversity
Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer … into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against his fate, he gets no help from his own side: that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he is in the right.
(Orwell, cited in Davison, 1998, p. 371)
January is the time to write my annual report for my institution. As an academic, I know what is most important to emphasize in my report, including such details as publications and awards of research grants during the past year. The principle with grants is easy – the bigger, the better – but the same general rule does not apply to publications. Like real estate, the important parameter is location. There are league tables which rank the relative importance of peer‐reviewed journals, based on metrics of citations, impact factors and their ilk, and thus purport to indicate whether a particular research publication is good or not so good. (Note that this is a measure of where you might publish rather than what you intend to publish.) The following classification scheme, based in part on those I have seen at several institutions, gives a broad feel for the relative importance of different types of publications:
Scientific article in journal with Science Citation Index (SCI) impact factor.
Scientific article in non‐SCI journal, but with external peer review policy.
Scientific article in other journal, but lacking peer review policy.
Book or monograph.
Chapter or scientific article in book or conference proceedings.
Electronic publication: website/database/CD, etc.
Published abstract in conference programme apart from regular research journals.
Other publications, such as popular science article, book review, conference report or obituary.
This classification is similar to schemes adapted by universities, museums, geological surveys and other research institutes all over the world. No two classification schemes are likely to be identical, yet all organize similar data in similar ways. A wise institution devises its scheme and persists with it, rather than trying to improve a classification process that must inevitably struggle to be comprehensive. An important feature of the list that I have quoted is its recognition of the diversity of worthwhile places to publish, which includes much more than peer‐reviewed journals with high impact factors, the manager’s favourite (although these are mentioned first).
It is now time to ask the most basic of questions – what are you writing and where might you publish it? There are many reasons why researchers publish (see, e.g. Shorland, 1994; Pearn and Chalmers, 1996; Stevenson and Donovan, 2002). While it is necessary to produce annual reports for our parent institutions, thus providing documentary evidence of our productivity for any and all who may be interested, it is not the principal reason for academic publishing. Yet many academics are disorganized when publishing; this essential part of their employment leaves them befuddled. In science in general, Coblans (1964, p. 93) considered that “the average scientist [was] still anarchic as ever in his methods of publishing and barely conscious of his obligations in the communication of science and in maintaining the record”. I suspect that this problem is less pronounced in the present day in a more competitive academic environment. The diversity of potential outlets for academic publishing has never been greater and, indeed, may be too much, as the widely disseminated literature of even a narrow field taxes the experts’ desire to ‘keep up’ with the literature.
Commonly, the author of an academic research paper is free to choose where it is submitted for publication; whether it is accepted or not is, of course, a different matter. But there is a not invalid view that many academics choose to submit where they are comfortable, to publications in which they have always had their papers accepted before or where they know the editor, rather than pushing their best work into the most prestigious journal possible. These authors might argue, not without some justification, that the important thing is to publish in the right place, which may not be the same as the most prestigious. And there is a misconception by administrators that the impact factor of the target journal is in some way an indicator of the value of an included paper; that is, it is not necessary to read a paper or understand its content when its relative worth is indicated by a number, the journal’s impact factor, which does not derive directly from any single paper (see, e.g., Yaalon, 1995; Adam, 2002; Anon., 2002; Moed, 2002; Krell, 2002; Haeffner‐Cavaillon et al., 2005; Döring, 2007). As academics, I hope that our use of numerical data is superior to this and we recognize that, for the time being, ‘we shall have to continue to do things the old‐fashioned way and actually read the papers’ (Lehmann et al., 2006, p. 1004) to determine their value.
