Academic Productivity

The Chronicle (newspaper) has a good website with a very active forum. I have been monitoring it for a while, and I can certainly say that there are very informative threads in there. It seems to be a very good place to get privileged hard-to-find information about subtle topics such as what is a good job offer, whether a particular department should be red-flagged because of internal fights, or how to negotiate a start-up package. This forum may well be old news for many, but it was an interesting discovery for me so I’ll just post about it just in case it’s useful for anyone.

They have a section on “balancing work and life”. I wonder how many similar forums centered around a profession have one. Scary.

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The “beyond my mind” blog has a post comparing different academic search engines. The author also describes his search strategy:

The way I search for scientific articles is pretty simple. Say I have a problem to solve that was assigned by some course teachers or my research supervisor. I mark some keywords and Google for them. If I don’t find any relevant information I use combination of those keywords or use alternative keywords adapted from the search results. Once I start getting some keywords that produce relevant results in Google, I pass it to Google Scholar. Sometimes I go to some other subject specific search engines to search using those keywords

I use Web of Science, because it can track cited articles. This is also present in google scholar, but somehow I don’t find it as reliable. I tend to sort by citations, and pay attention to the top few papers only. I guess if most people do like me, there must be a snowball effect going on here, with a ‘rich gets richer’ situation.

Search engines are measured using precision and recall. This is of course relevant, but sometimes more mundane measures are interesting too. The basic unit for productivity evaluating search engines should be something like “time (or clicks) needed to get both the full text and the reference to your hard drive”. Here, small inprovements in usability like going from 21 to 16 clicks to achieve your goal can save quite a lot of time, since we academics use search services so often.

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Brazil (the movie) describes a society in which the Ministry of information retrieval dominates every aspect of society and there is a form to be filled for every action. One can even get a receipt for a husband (after filling a form that acknowledges receiving that receipt).

This was supposed to be funny, but I have had similar experiences in the academia. Buying a computer or a chair from one’s own funding can be as laborious (and in the UK at least, this is only possible from a selected list of providers that have agreements with the University). The record for me was a chair that took over 3 months to materialize in my office after doing all the ceremonial paperwork, and a number-crunching machine that I never bought because going through the standard providers resulted in a tag doble the market price.

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Dan posted in his blog that he had managed to get seven papers out in the open literature in January. I had to interview him.

AP.com: How do you manage your daily workload?

Dan Navarro: A lot more pragmatically than I used to. I put an hour or so aside each morning to cover the miniature administrative rubbish - it’s not really enough time to do it properly, but I’ve started to realise that most of it doesn’t matter very much, so I can cut-and-paste a lot of things (Incidentally: never throw away a good piece of bureaucracy-speak, like a research profile or a course description. You can reuse it about 10 times before anyone starts to care). I tend to do intellectually heavy things throughout the morning and into the early afternoon. I tend to take a bit of a siesta in the late afternoon - I don’t sleep, but I do switch off a bit (sometimes I do paperwork). I find this makes it easier to do something useful in the evening.

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Have you used wikis as a mean of collaborative work with colleagues? Have you been frustrated by the current implementation, thinking that some ideas are just hard to put into wiki format? Gerhard Fischer, at the University of colorado, Boulder, has received a grant to improve existing wiki technologies for academic use. From the article:

The proposed research will create environments that go beyond existing Wikis (being primarily focused on hypertext) to permit the integration (not just attachment) of other forms of media ranging from movies and animations, to sharing of datasets, to the creation and utilization of social network information to support community interaction, to conceptual mind-mapping media.

I’m really interested in how several researchers collaborate on the same topic. Currently, most people I know simply email back and forth a word document with ‘track changes’ enabled (which can get messy after a few iterations). Not many people write papers using a ‘wikified’ document, and this could partly be just because hypertext (and all the symplified wiki markup languages) are not appropriate for the task. I wonder if the new additions would change current practices much (I’m really curious about the integrated mindmapping part).

Link to O’Reilly Radar > NSF Looking for a Better Wiki

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Here is my attempt at a general strategy for managing time. I define productivity operationally here by measuring it in terms of publications (of course, this definition may have critics).

The central point is that your time at work can be divided into productive and unproductive time (see graph), and that both are important; however we should try to maximize the productive time.

The graph may be biased towards the kind of work I do (modeling and experimental cognitive science); other disciplines may not have some of the activities, and the partitioning of your time may well be very different, so feel free to make your own graph with relevant tasks.

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Matthew Cornell at Matt’s idea blog has just posted a piece on a pilot study he is running that seems very relevant:

I recently completed a small pilot funded by the office of new faculty development at a large university. I approached the director to see if there was interest, and to figure out a way to test the effectiveness of the Getting Things Done methodology for new faculty. We came up with an informal program in which I would work with three self-selected early faculty members, coach them in the method, and hopefully give the director enough information to decide if the results merited a larger follow-on effort.

The faculty were professors from three very different departments - Nursing, Japanese, and Communication Disorders - and each had different styles in how they managed themselves at their work. One thing they all shared, however, were the common challenges facing new faculty, who essentially act as entrepreneurs. For example, they have to:

• Obtain grants for research,
• Plan and perform original research,
• Advise and guide students,
• Teach classes (prep, grading, etc),
• Provide service to the community, etc.
• all the while working to get tenure (there’s a reason it’s called the “tenure track“)

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The November 2006 issue of PLoS Computational Biology has a short editorial with ten rules for evaluating postdoc opportunities. An interesting — albeit commonsensical — collection of hints, if you’re approaching the end of your PhD and looking for job opportunities after your defense.

Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position

Thanks Benoît for the pointer.

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Jay Myung, a psychologist at Ohio State University, has a number of interesting links to articles and tutorials on academic productivity on his personal website.

Some of these articles are targeted at young researchers/grad students starting a career in specific scientific domains, but they contain a lot of useful general-purpose advice.

I post a slightly annotated version of Jay’s list as a teaser for an actual links section to appear soon at academicproductivity.com.
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