Publication strategies under the Publish or Perish Paradigm  – using Kolb’s ELT to understand PhD students’ needs

Lone Bredahl,Bertil F. Dorch,Mette Brandt Eriksen,Charlotte Nordahl Wien

doi:10.18352/lq.10349

Abstract

Having a viable publication strategy at an early stage of the career can nowadays make a researcher. Not having one appears to break them. We as librarians are in a unique position to guide them in their endeavours to create a viable publication strategy. In this paper we use Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory as our theoretical framework for understanding learning processes related to the development of a publication strategy. We compare a set of publication strategies developed by newly enrolled PhD students 4 to 5 years ago to articles retrieved from PubMed and Scopus using the PhD students’ ORCID as identifier. We subdivide the publication strategies into three categories (fulfilled, partially fulfilled, abandoned). We find evidence that the more realistic the publication plan is, the more likely it is to be followed. This indicates that it is of importance that PhD schools support students’ efforts in developing their publication strategy at an early stage of their career.

Highlights

Introduction and BackgroundThe ‘Publish or perish’ paradigm has put young researchers under considerable pressure: While their senior colleagues could allow themselves ‘a few mistakes’ during their career path, young researchers must plan their course in much more detail
The other continuum is the Processing Continuum which may be visualised as an east-west axis where Reflective Observation (RO) is found at the east end and Active Experimentation (AE) at the west end (McLeod, 2017)
For this reason, and because we needed a pool of comparable assignments to analyse, we chose the assignments from the 2014 cohort of responsible conduct of research (RCR) courses at the Faculty of Health, SDU (N=52)

Summary

Introduction and Background

The ‘Publish or perish’ paradigm has put young researchers under considerable pressure: While their senior colleagues could allow themselves ‘a few mistakes’ during their career path, young researchers must plan their course in much more detail Must they consider the career potential of their topic and the political importance of the topic with respect to the international research agenda, they must ensure regular publishing, they must network with the right people, negotiate co-authorships for their own work and contribute to that of other researchers. It became the obvious choice to nest the PhD students’ work on their publication strategy within the framework of our RCR courses. Today these courses are a mandatory part of all PhD programmes at our university. Before describing our data-collection method and presenting our empirical analysis, we wish to present the theoretical framework that has inspired and guided our work

Theoretical Framework

Data Collection Method

Analysis

Conclusion and Discussion