Planning your assault on publication

Yesterday afternoon, I found myself advocating a publication strategy to a friend and PGR.  The conversation quickly moved away, but I now find myself thinking about the process of putting together a publication strategy, and how PGRs who have yet to publish can find the answers to many of the questions that creating their personal publication strategy will raise.

A publication strategy is a plan (or campaign!) which sets out the content, target outlets and timescales for research publications by an individual or research team.  A clear publication strategy is crucial to maximise research impact and support academic/research career development and can also be extremely helpful in clarifying questions around authorship and research strategy in group situations.  Since a publication strategy is highly specific to individual circumstances, there’s no one way to approach this, but this post sets out some key questions to get you started.

Feedback’s coming home!

Our helpful and honest panel of PGRs at the PGR Writing Summer School 2018. L-R: Martine, Sian, Anna, Farhan, Frankie, Tom

This week, we’ve had the annual PGR Writing Summer School, with a range of insightful workshops on various aspects of academic and thesis writing.  And, of course, we’ve had national excitement around England’s place in the semi-finals of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.  I’d been wondering how to tie these together for this blog, when this article on football psychology caught my eye, and chimed with a couple of comments made during the Writing Summer School.  How can we build our resilience to tackle a fear of failure and deal with difficult feedback constructively?