Maximizing the Impacts of Academic Research

Patrick Dunleavy, Jane Tinkler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780230377608
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350315280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

This is an invaluable guide to better research communication within and beyond academia. With many years of research experience, the authors provide scholars and scientists with systematic advice on how to ensure their research reaches its potential, and grows the recognition, influence, practical application and public understanding of science and scholarship. It begins by examining how citations work and evaluating the different measures of academic influence, from legacy bibliometric systems to altmetrics and digital metrics. Subsequent chapters show readers how to craft impactful journal articles, work effectively with co-authors, create a portfolio of publications and build a digital strategy that promotes knowledge exchange. Checklists help readers decide how and in what format to publish, enabling them to get their research in front of the right people. Throughout, the authors illustrate impact with data drawn from a wide range of disciplines. Maximizing the Impacts of Academic Research is ideal for PhD students and early career researchers taking their first steps into academic research, experienced researchers mentoring the next generation of scholars and scientists and established academics looking to systematically review and upgrade their existing impact practices.

Part One

Academic Impacts

The life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away, and is very little diversified by events. To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He [or she] wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men [or women] like himself [or herself].

Samuel Johnson¹

Academics and scientists are often quite diffident people, as Johnson suggests. They can be the opposite personality type from self-promoters or self-publicists. Gather such folk together into faculties and universities and an exaggerated culture of ‘under-selling’ work may develop, in which people make disparaging remarks about those who seem too keen to ‘blow their own trumpet’. The traditional academic ideal is one of ‘effortless superiority’, where the brilliance of someone’s ideas, the thoroughness of their methods and the quality of their data shine through a modestly phrased, technically heavy, neutrally written, obscurely titled and off-puttingly esoteric journal article or monograph book. An academic’s or scientist’s role should be confined to ‘putting stuff out there’ in the appropriate journals and then waiting patiently for a response from colleagues and fellow researchers in their field.

Of course, someone with new results or arguments can give seminars at other universities, expound them in conference panels or even undertake a small ‘book tour’ (if their publisher thinks it worthwhile). Some scientific or academic ‘stars’ may give interviews to journalists or bloggers once their community has already begun to signal appreciation or notice of their ideas. But on this conception, nothing that smacks of ‘cheap advertising’ or ‘plugging’ ideas or results can be contemplated. In public, most academics cultivate an ironic disregard for citations in their conversation, lest they should be thought ‘narcissistic’ or over-attentive to the currents of ‘mere’ popularity. If citations are achieved, they must be referred to only in a self-deprecating manner, ‘for what they’re worth’.

As a flipside, this stance suggests that it does not matter much if there is only a very weak, lagged or even non-existent reaction to one’s publications from the rest of the profession. The author has produced a text in the appropriately stylized and peer-reviewed form, and it either works with others or does not. If citations are not achieved, that does not reflect any failing on the author’s part. Perhaps some researchers are indeed genuinely indifferent to their work being publicly recognized by their peers. Another group is simply phlegmatic that there is little they can do to improve this form of recognition for their work, and so they just try to ignore what seems to be beyond their influence. Many academics also legitimately feel that citations are defective metrics of research quality – for indeed all such metrics are defective to some degree. Because a great deal of worthwhile work often goes unrecognized, the non-recognition of any particular piece of research, what Mary Douglas (1986) terms its ‘institutionalized forgetting’, is never a decisive or complete verdict on its quality. Yet ‘not caring about citations’ is at best a self-defence mechanism, a necessary morale prop that should not be taken too far. Once embodied into a group or organizational culture, such a stance can strangely transform, becoming a justification of non-ambition or of under-performing in repeating ways.

Yet, beneath this public culture of diffidence, it has long been established that researchers often have an ambivalent attitude to performance and citation indicators (Hargens and Schuman, 1990). They tend to protect their beliefs about the value of their individual work in their interpretation of citation scores. Scientists and academics do seek citations since they are a key part of the academic reward system, and they can be drawn upon in competitive struggles for promotion and for intellectual persuasion of colleagues (Aksnes and Rip, 2009, p. 895). At the same time, they criticize citation counts for not reflecting actual scientific or scholarly contributions. ‘Folk citation theories’ abound, which do not have to be consistent in order to be mobilized by researchers as explanatory devices in their competition for reputation. A repertoire of coded ‘things to say’ can be flexibly deployed to cope with or explain away many different situations. But underlying this apparent ‘ad hoc-ism’, actually scientists and scholars appreciate the complexity and ambiguity in citations and other performance indicators. ‘Scientists have a sophisticated understanding of the citation process and its outcomes, and can explicate such understanding when there are no immediate stakes to be defended’ (Aksnes and Rip, 2009, p. 904).

Our approach in this part argues that it is a clear and central professional responsibility of scientists and scholars to conceptualize, design and expound their findings and arguments in the most effective ways feasible so as to maximize academic impacts. We define an impact as ‘an auditable or otherwise recorded occasion of influence’, and the classic example is citation by another author. However, there are many other ways of tracing influence, including altmetrics, measures of academic reputation and qualitative analysis of disciplines and fields of study.

We first look at the importance and general operation of citation processes (Chapter 1). Next, we examine how an individual researcher can track the academic impact they are achieving (Chapter 2). The following two chapters focus on writing for journals, looking at the preparation needed for getting published (Chapter 3), and ways of crafting journal articles that maximize their accessibility for readers (Chapter 4). Lastly, in this part, some key approaches need adapting for other forms of academic publication – for books and book chapters, which remain important in many disciplines (Chapter 5).

CHAPTER

1

How Citations Work

‘Achieved nothing’ – it’s every scholar’s most feared epitaph.

Elaine Showalter¹

The core process of most academic influence is producing publications that get picked up and cited by other researchers and scholars – only in this way can academics fend off Showalter’s dread above. But just having a long list of published works, or an impressive professional resumé or CV, is no longer sufficient for contemporary academic influence. You must now be able to show some evidence of their reception, that these works are also widely read and well regarded.

Citations have many roles that are common to all scholarly work, which we signal briefly in our first section. Yet, at the same time, different disciplines cite at very different rates to each other, for reasons we explore next. The third section discusses perhaps the most obvious factor shaping citation rates – time, as reflected by an academic’s age, experience and progress along their particular career trajectory. Within these powerful determinates, many different factors condition success in citation terms, but their role is mostly still under-researched. However, we can at least produce a ‘long list’ of the most plausible factors likely to be involved, considered in our fourth section. The last bit of the chapter discusses some thorny issues around self-citation.

The roles citations play

[T]he institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. [Readers] located outside the domain of science and scholarship may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable nuisance … [But] these are in truth central to the incentive system and an underlying sense of distributive justice, that do much to energize the advancement of knowledge

Robert Merton²

All academic research and argument has some essential characteristics.

– It is formally stated.

– Each work contributes to an advanced and specialist conversation.

– Research is cumulative.

– Academic work tackles difficult issues.

– It forms part of a cumulative and collegial endeavour.

– Research is evidence-based, and the provenance of facts or data can always be checked.

– Academic work is also demanding and consistent in assessing empirical ‘facts’.

These seven features mean that referencing and citing are vital components of academic practice. Figure 1.1 unpacks a bit further the reasons why citations are as important as Merton says (above), set against these seven criteria. The decisions that scientists and academics make about including or not including citations to support their arguments play a very important role in condi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Glossary and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Academic Impacts
• Part Two: Academic and External Impacts
• Part Three: External Impacts
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index