Optimizing Research Productivity

[polly_mer]

Research is hard and is harder if you also have a heavy teaching and service load.  Advice that has been cited as extremely useful is

You have a special challenge in that you need to keep up a publication record as if you were at an R1 while coping with a heavy teaching load.  The model I was taught to aim for was 2-2-4: two articles and two smaller pieces every year, and a book every four years.  Now, I actually think most people fall short of that.  But if you want to move, you'd want to aim for an equivalent of that, in the most streamlined and efficient way.  The first advice I'd give is to drop the second "2" -- the smaller pieces (generally book reviews, can also be encyclopedia entries or whatnot).  Those are a luxury.  The articles and books are the most important.  So here are the rules as I see them:

1. Piggyback your current research on your last research.  Use the same kind of materials, but viewed from a different angle or expanded.  You can see the prolific scholars doing this already.  For instance, the first book will be about Lincoln's White House staff, using the appropriate archives.  The second book will be about women in Lincoln's White House, using the same archives.  The third book will be about Lincoln's ideas of hierarchy, using the same archives. In every case, pick only an idea that's interesting to you, but pick strategically.  Also pick something in which you don't have to embark on a whole new set of secondary reading.

2. Don't put every single thing you learn and think on the subject in the book.  Save self-contained nuggets of findings for separate articles.  For my last book, I finished the book and then wrote a spin-off article in three days. I had all the quotations right in front of me and knew the material so thoroughly that it just flew onto the page. If you can get four or five extra articles out of your book, that would be excellent.  Don't feel the need to jam it all in; use this to plant articles in good journals.

3. Make every piece of writing earn its keep.  Don't publish in edited collections; they count for less on the CV. Submit every article to a top-tier journal and work your way down the food chain. Position your book for the top presses.  Don't make my mistake and give your book to lower-tier presses just because they ask for it and you think, "Phew! Someone will publish this!"  Try all the top-tier presses first.

4. Find the CVs of the top people in your field and keep tabs on them. Keep track of how you measure up.

5. Minimize the busywork your job asks for as much as possible.  Where possible, give assignments that are swift to grade; streamline teaching prep; keep extensive records so you don't have to redesign your classes every year.
Then try to get in 90 minutes of academic writing every workday; 45 minutes should be your minimum.  Don't save it all up for a long weekend stint, which may or may not be possible when the time comes.  The research shows that the most prolific people write for shorter periods and often.

6. Take Sundays off; ideally Saturdays too.  Do not stay up working till midnight.  Burning yourself out won't get the job done and also makes the job not worth doing.  Your goal is to work smart, not exhaustively.

Best of luck!

A thread that then discussed that advice is https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,77090.0.html.  Add your experiences and tips here.

[mamselle]

Thanks for posting that, Polly. I think I'm going to be reading, marking, and inwardly digesting the whole thing for some time.

The only thing I can think to say is, "Trust your instincts."

I received an unexpected 4-month grant to start my research in France many, many years ago.

My advisor was not very supportive (at one point he said something that seemed almost grumpy, like, "I've never been very good at getting grants..." which I decided to take as a "good for you" statement, but was always aware it might have been something else.)

So I really, really hoped he'd offer some guidance or advice, either before I left, or afterwards.

He never really did. I wrote 5 emails asking for guidance over the space of that 4 months and he never returned one of them.

I was upset one evening in my hotel room, sitting on the bed, thinking, "I have this great opportunity, and what if I'm going about it all wrong?"

The one thing that consoled me was recalling my MA advisor's oft-repeated belief that "You'll never make a really terrible mistake in something if it's your true calling."

So I kept doing what I was doing.

I'm still working from the materials I found that year, and all the years since.

So I guess my instincts were at least good enough.

M.

[polly_mer]

My advisor was not very supportive (at one point he said something that seemed almost grumpy, like, "I've never been very good at getting grants..." which I decided to take as a "good for you" statement, but was always aware it might have been something else.)

So I really, really hoped he'd offer some guidance or advice, either before I left, or afterwards.

He never really did. I wrote 5 emails asking for guidance over the space of that 4 months and he never returned one of them.

I was upset one evening in my hotel room, sitting on the bed, thinking, "I have this great opportunity, and what if I'm going about it all wrong?"

The one thing that consoled me was recalling my MA advisor's oft-repeated belief that "You'll never make a really terrible mistake in something if it's your true calling."

I don't know that I've ever had a "true calling", but I've never regretted taking research tangents where I was doing a lot of work and satisfying my curiosity, even if those tangents were not popular with various mentors at the time.

The advice I received and have followed is summarized more like: consult your mentors/experts/friends, listen carefully to what they each say, think carefully about the various perspectives and where they conflict, and then go forward with what you want to do.

The one caveat is "and have the discussion with your funders regarding deliverables because he who pays the piper gets to call the tune".  Sometimes, following my curiosity means finding different funders or working the additional hours for me after the funded hours in the week are done.

[and no, I'm not here.  I'm still at the office working on that deliverable for my current funder instead of satisfying my curiosity with a new toy in these fora.  Why do you ask?]

[mamselle]

Ha! Yes, been there, done that, too.

In that case, good point, the grantmaker apparently was satisfied enough that they funded a return/wrap-up grant for a month more, the next year.

That, in fact, was the validation that kept me going forward.

Deliverables are a good focus.

M.

[pedanticromantic]

Good advice there. I would add find research collaborations. I'm seeing an increasing number of collaborations in the humanities where it used to be a solo endeavour. Also, there are more grant opportunities in my experience when you are working with someone else. I find it faster to get more papers out because when you feel "stuck" you can pass it on to the partner and get going on something else, then come back to it after they've had a go.

[risenanew]

Thanks for the great tips, everyone!

And yes, I love great collaborations as well. I'm a psychologist who is currently working with several people in health professions (one in food studies and another in urban health) to do an ambitious multi-site study on urban food deserts. They're providing more of the content information, while I'm carrying out most of the research design and analysis. It's a fun project and one I wouldn't have gotten into (or published as much from) without them!

However, I'd also add that many (maybe most?) scholars on the tenure-track will also be asked to produce some solo work. I suspect this depends highly on the field any given scholar is in... but I know my chair has asked me to produce some solo journal articles to show that I can "stand on my own feet." So too many collaborations can actually detract from showing you can work independently. (Though again, this "requirement" must vary by field and institution).

Also, one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten -- one that really changed my life -- is to keep track of my billable hours. Basically, after putting together my to-do list for the day, keep track of complete times in which I'm working -- not lazing about looking at random Youtube videos or checking my email.

Once I actually started keeping track of start- and stop-times (as well as total minutes worked), I realized I was often working far less than I thought I was... and that I could accomplish far more in a short amount of time if I just concentrated on my work. So now I've trained myself to track the time in which I actually work with no distractions and try to hit a certain marker every-day. (During the summer, that can range anywhere from 3 to 6 total hours of concentrated work). I'm more productive and engaged with my work than ever!

[phattangent]

Also, one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten -- one that really changed my life -- is to keep track of my billable hours.  [...] Once I actually started keeping track of start- and stop-times (as well as total minutes worked), I realized I was often working far less than I thought I was... and that I could accomplish far more in a short amount of time if I just concentrated on my work.

Same. It's amazing how much time we spend on email, reading an unrelated RFP, browsing the for, etc. — all of which are perfectly fine to do. However, when we sprinkle them throughout our work activities, then it often makes work seem like more work. To mitigate this, I try to have times that I devote to email, RFP reading, and other aspects of "professional practice" — including just thinking and walking time.

[Kron3007]

I'm sure that is useful information, but very humanities oriented.  I would argue that in my field the keys to research productivity have more to do with attracting funding (industry and grant), building a good team, managing them well, having good ideas (of course), and organizing projects into bite sized, publishable units.  In my field there are a lot of low hanging fruit that can lead to quick publications as well as longer projects that sap resources while still only leading to one paper.  That is fine if you are not under pressure to maximize output, but if you are in a position where you need to for whatever reason, project choice is important.

I guess my point is that many stem fields are very much team efforts and if you want to be productive it becomes more about management than a solo persuite.  I could see this being difficult in smaller schools that lack research support and facilities, but it would be very difficult to be highly productive in many STEM fields as a lone wolf.

[polly_mer]

I guess my point is that many stem fields are very much team efforts and if you want to be productive it becomes more about management than a solo persuite.  I could see this being difficult in smaller schools that lack research support and facilities, but it would be very difficult to be highly productive in many STEM fields as a lone wolf.

One of the ways people fail to get or fail to keep R1 science and engineering positions is not paying attention to the funding aspects and not converting to being project manager supporting a group of grad students, postdocs, and technicians.  My current employer gets a fair number of refugees from academia who dearly love the science, but didn't realize that being a successful research-productive professor generally means one is doing project management, grant writing, and people wrangling, not doing the day-to-day benchwork/coding/simulation/analysis.  It's somewhat disconcerting for those folks to realize that they will do more science either outside of academia or as a TT professor at a carefully chosen place where the teaching load is about 2/2, research is expected, and the research expectations are in line with the amount of time and energy one professor and a combination of about 5 students (graduate and undergraduate) can invest.

A frequent call in STEM fields adjacent to mine is for a place for the folks who have graduate degrees and are good at the day-to-day science, but have no interest in being PI, which often means going on soft money where someone else is PI and TT/T who needs that help only a very experienced other PhD can give.

[fast_and_bulbous]

I guess my point is that many stem fields are very much team efforts and if you want to be productive it becomes more about management than a solo persuit.  I could see this being difficult in smaller schools that lack research support and facilities, but it would be very difficult to be highly productive in many STEM fields as a lone wolf.

One of the ways people fail to get or fail to keep R1 science and engineering positions is not paying attention to the funding aspects and not converting to being project manager supporting a group of grad students, postdocs, and technicians.

I have found this to be true in my own career, and it's somewhat of a cold splash of water to the face to realize that your main job isn't to do science any more, it's to maximize scientific output - via the acquisition of funding and the mentoring and support of students/postdocs and, most importantly at least for me, the forging of strong collaborations with other successful scientists who are in the same boat as I am. So many of my days are spent wishing I was doing "the fun stuff" but instead writing reports and proposals. But since I barely do any teaching or service (because I'm no longer faculty) I still spend more time doing research than I did before. But yeah - whether you like it or not, it seems you pretty much have to build and manage your own research group to be successful in top-R1 academia. I have no private industry experience but I would imagine it has its own pluses and minuses; at least in my current position I have complete control over what research I choose to pursue - probably the biggest selling point of being a soft funded researcher/academic.

[Faith786]

Research is hard and is harder if you also have a heavy teaching and service load.  Advice that has been cited as extremely useful is

You have a special challenge in that you need to keep up a publication record as if you were at an R1 while coping with a heavy teaching load.  The model I was taught to aim for was 2-2-4: two articles and two smaller pieces every year, and a book every four years.  Now, I actually think most people fall short of that.  But if you want to move, you'd want to aim for an equivalent of that, in the most streamlined and efficient way.  The first advice I'd give is to drop the second "2" -- the smaller pieces (generally book reviews, can also be encyclopedia entries or whatnot).  Those are a luxury.  The articles and books are the most important.  So here are the rules as I see them:

1. Piggyback your current research on your last research.  Use the same kind of materials, but viewed from a different angle or expanded.  You can see the prolific scholars doing this already.  For instance, the first book will be about Lincoln's White House staff, using the appropriate archives.  The second book will be about women in Lincoln's White House, using the same archives.  The third book will be about Lincoln's ideas of hierarchy, using the same archives. In every case, pick only an idea that's interesting to you, but pick strategically.  Also pick something in which you don't have to embark on a whole new set of secondary reading.

2. Don't put every single thing you learn and think on the subject in the book.  Save self-contained nuggets of findings for separate articles.  For my last book, I finished the book and then wrote a spin-off article in three days. I had all the quotations right in front of me and knew the material so thoroughly that it just flew onto the page. If you can get four or five extra articles out of your book, that would be excellent.  Don't feel the need to jam it all in; use this to plant articles in good journals.

3. Make every piece of writing earn its keep.  Don't publish in edited collections; they count for less on the CV. Submit every article to a top-tier journal and work your way down the food chain. Position your book for the top presses.  Don't make my mistake and give your book to lower-tier presses just because they ask for it and you think, "Phew! Someone will publish this!"  Try all the top-tier presses first.

4. Find the CVs of the top people in your field and keep tabs on them. Keep track of how you measure up.

5. Minimize the busywork your job asks for as much as possible.  Where possible, give assignments that are swift to grade; streamline teaching prep; keep extensive records so you don't have to redesign your classes every year.
Then try to get in 90 minutes of academic writing every workday; 45 minutes should be your minimum.  Don't save it all up for a long weekend stint, which may or may not be possible when the time comes.  The research shows that the most prolific people write for shorter periods and often.

6. Take Sundays off; ideally Saturdays too.  Do not stay up working till midnight.  Burning yourself out won't get the job done and also makes the job not worth doing.  Your goal is to work smart, not exhaustively.

Best of luck!

A thread that then discussed that advice is https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,77090.0.html.  Add your experiences and tips here.

RE: first paragraph
Agreed, articles are most important to my field...if we can do 2 at a minimum, great, otherwise the more the merrier!! One year I had 5 of my papers published in good quality journals, plus an encyclopedia entry (what a great year!)...nostalgia taking over....

RE: 1. Piggyback your current research on your last research.
I received this advice as well, but for those who just started their careers as TT, tenure and promotion committees often say never to touch your old doctoral/phd research after your second year on the TT...it's done and you need to move on and create a new pipeline of work...reuse the latter in new ways? Yes, of course...

RE: 5. 90 minutes of academic writing every workday; 45 minutes should be your minimum.
Um, maybe although that's harder with grant-writing deadlines and a high teaching load...but most of the time, yes, 45 minutes does happen...or 90 every two days...or 135 every three days...

RE: 6. Take Sundays off; ideally Saturdays too.
God, I WISH...not happening yet...maybe in the fall/winter when there are no more new preps and some new papers finally get accepted.

[mamselle]

Writing the argument for a grant 'counts,' at least to some, as academic writing....you're doing a sort of preparatory  lit-review/methods draft in some cases, that can help conflate ideas and identify keyword phrases for later use.

M.