One of the requirements of being on sabbatical is that upon returning to my home campus I am required to report out to my colleagues on what I accomplished. With this in mind I am preparing a seminar.
Going into the writing process I was lamenting how unfinished the sabbatical work was and how I was not sure if there was enough to talk about. After I prepared the first forty slides by stream-of-thought without getting to the end of what I had done I realized that the seminar might approach three hours in length. It was not just a matter of being more concise. There is just too much to say. At this point I recognized that I have two or three talks depending on the point of focus taken.
Perhaps those of us who are research active but not research productive (in the sense of publications) should get out more. Lacking that, in spite of the flashbacks of ritual torture, departments wishing to advance their research profile might require that all research active faculty who have not published in the last year should file a Research Report. It might help us get unblocked on publications.
T.S. Hall
This is a problem that deserves attention and more than just what we have given it.
ReplyDeleteToo much gets done at PUI's that never gets published - for many reasons. I suspect though that we are correct in thinking that the work needs "something" more. In other words, there is good work that needs to be written up, but it also needs to be written in such a way that it gets read by somebody and is not just filling some library shelf.
I know the syndrome all too well.
I know what you mean completely. Seems like a project just doesn't have an end. I agree with Anonymous above, a lot more attention needs to be given to this issue. So many PIs, even at PhD institutions, have this issue. Sometimes getting scooped in the process.
ReplyDeleteI had the same problem with my publication. Could've published a year before, but we just kept dragging it out, garnering diminishing returns in the process. After publishing I realized a good rule of thumb. Establish one precedent per researcher per paper. Don't worry about perfect yields, worry more about the patterns of those yields and be able to explain them scientifically. (I'm obviously synthetic, don't know about other fields).