Academic Productivity

This post is an ode to Google Scholar (GS). GS has a major advantage against expensive institution only academic search engines in that is free, which makes services indispensable to independent scholars wishing to get some access to research literature when they don’t have an institutional subscription. However, even though I personally have institutional access to indexing services like Web of Science and Scopus, I still prefer GS for the majority of my searches, and in this post I will explain why.

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From Pascal Cavalier’s blog, I got a pointer to a nice article on Thesis time management. Looks like I’ll have to check this Canadian online-magazine on Higher Education in the future:

Perhaps what is most daunting about writing a thesis is realizing that if you want to be an academic, this is a good introduction to the rest of your career. Writing proposals, grant applications, journal articles and books will be a significant part of your life from here on. Gaining the skills to be a productive and prolific writer is key to success as an academic. That means making writing part of everyday life.

Wrestling your writing to the mat, By Käthe Lemon.

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Good writing is a skill. I’m not saying I have it, and remember, this is a blog post, maybe the fastest form of writing and reading ). As a skill, it requires practice. And, as Graham says, “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”In fact, writing posts like this one is helping me to review and polish ideas I didn’t know I had about writing till this very moment. I’ll start with the most obvious, and will get more subtle/interesting as the list grows.

1. Get your relevant Manual of Style. (e.g., Chicago/APA). APA wants you to buy it in book form, but I think this is one of the resources that should be online.
2. Get Oliver Strunk’s elements of style. It’ll recommend some rules of thumb that may well be obvious (e.g., avoid passive voice. Reduce the use of adverbs to a minimum) but overlooked. There have been several editions, and the older ones can even be found online.

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The Chronicle has an interesting piece: “Is Your Spouse Hurting Your Career?”:

in some “mixed marriages,” with no malice or sabotage intended, the nonacademic partner’s behavior or ideas can undermine or even cripple the scholar’s career — because of mutual ignorance and mistaken assumptions. And in those cases where the relationship is failing, the academic’s work can be but one collateral casualty of a wider war.

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