Scholarship

As a followup to yesterday's post on Art Carden's writing advice, here's an article from the great Thomas Sowell on the same topic:

From time to time, I get a letter from some aspiring young writer, asking about how to write or how to get published. My usual response is that the only way I know to become a good writer is to be a bad writer and keep on improving. However, even after you reach the point where you are writing well—and that can take many years—the battle is not over. There are still publishers to contend with. Then there are editors and, worst of all, copy-editors.

Finally, the last hurdle are the book reviewers, only some of whom actually review the book. These people are all part of the gauntlet that the writer has to run, in order to reach the person for whom his writing was intended from the outset—the reader. All too often, you never know if your book has reached the reader in any sense other than the fact that it was bought. It could be gathering dust on a table or a shelf. In some cases, however, heartfelt letters come in, telling you that your book has reached readers in the sense in which you wanted it to reach them. That makes all the struggle seem worthwhile.

Read the whole thing here.

By signing up for “Contents Alerts” from journal distributors you can select journals that you like to follow and receive an emailed table-of-contents when each new issue comes out.  This shortcut will help you keep abreast of research in your own field or related interdisciplinary areas.   Often e-journals are available even before the hard copies are mailed out.  Anyone can register and get the free table of contents.

Last week Professor Kevin Vallier wrote about "Using Google Scholar To Your Advantage." Now everyone can track citations on the service:

Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.

Your citation metrics will update automatically as we find new citations to your articles on the web. You can also set up automated updates for the list of your articles, or you can choose to review the suggested updates. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.

Read the whole thing here. And click here to get started tracking your citations.  How useful do you find this kind of service?

Professor Art Carden talks about marketing your work once it's been accepted by an academic journal.

Dr. Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to Forbes.com and Mises.org.

Filmed at the Institute for Humane Studies' HSF-RC weekend seminar on November 5, 2011.

Transcript:

One of the most exciting things that is going to happen in a career as a scholar is when a paper gets accepted. An editor is going to say this paper is good enough to be published in a professional journal. So what do you do with that? They are probably going to make some editing marks and say we need to fix this, you need to fix that, you need to fix the other thing and then you’ll get page proofs eventually that you have to correct, whatever typesetting mistakes might be out there.

What are you going to want to do with accepted papers? First of all turn around any requested revisions or any requested edits as quickly as possible because you don’t want to delay the appearance of your paper either online or actually in the journal. A second thing that you are going to want to do is let people know that your paper has been accepted, let your friends know, let your family know, let your advisor know, let your colleagues know that your paper is now forthcoming in whatever journal it happens to be forthcoming in and then also let the people in your bibliography know the people you cite let them know that your papers has been accepted that your papers is forthcoming and indeed if you have a pre-print copy of it go ahead and send it to the people in your bibliography.

There might be a very long lag between when your paper is accepted and when it finally appears in print. Fortunately you’re probably going to get an electronic copy early or it might be a online early and you want to go and let people know that this contribution you have made to scholarship now appears and can be used as they try to further the conversation.