The advice given to academics, at any stage of their career, on how to be productive is often contradictory. Drawing on the findings of his previous post and a new survey of 593 academics, Chris Smith presents 6 key insights into productive academic behaviours and suggests the key to productivity lies in developing a system of writing that is tailored to […]
Category: productivity
Six academic writing habits that will boost productivity
What’s the secret to a productive spell of writing? Chris Smith shares insights gleaned from interviews with a diverse group of academics, from which a number of common academic writing habits stood out. These range from the simple acts of scheduling and setting self-imposed deadlines, to both formal and informal accountability partnerships and the use of “freewriting” techniques which help […]
Quantity does matter as citation impact increases with productivity
Many scholars are encouraged to focus on the quality not the quantity of their publications, the rationale being that becoming too focused on productivity risks reducing the quality of one’s work. But is this, in fact, the case? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström have studied a large sample of researchers and found that, while results vary by field, […]