In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Claus Wilke’s blog post on the essential need of writing and publishing a lot of papers for academic researchers. This is such a beautifully formulated argumentation for the position that may easily feel like a losing one in this debate. Quite often we hear calls claiming that researchers should publish just one paper per year. I always felt that this take is akin to the most radical populist statements – a simple solution proposed to fix a difficult issue.Such propositions often appeal to the wider audience on the first glance but turn out completely meaningless in all the practicalities and even harmful if being implemented literally.
Thinking about this blog post, I drew parallels to my own experience of making my first baby steps in academia. It so happened that my first proper scientific paper that was published in a good journal (Kashnitsky and Gunko, 2016) was a sidekick analysis at the beginning of my PhD trajectory. It evolved from an assignment during the R spatial course of Sebastian Klussener at IDEM MPIDR. I got so excited about the analysis and about the superpowers that R opened to me that a simple course assignment grew into the first, very raw, paper draft. Since it was not directly related to the topic of my then starting PhD project, I didn’t sit too long on the first draft. So I just boldly submitted it to a top journal in the adjacent research field where the topic belonged. Now I realize how much of a long shot this was and how exceptionally lucky I was that the editor found this analysis interesting enough to give me a major-major-major revision. And then I realized that I was not in the position to improve the paper to fit the high bar of the journal. Then I invited Maria Gunko to join me in this revision and together we worked hard on morphing my curious analysis into a proper paper, grounding it in the literature and building the stage for the analysis. After months of intense collaboration and two more rounds of revision, the paper got published. And to this day I feel grateful about the whole experience and I even feel satisfied with the paper.
I think that the most useful part of this experience was dealing with the editorial process in a constructed environment that was decoupled from the emotional attachment and the high stakes of my own PhD project. So when I hit the unavoidable hurdles of navigating academic publishing with my PhD papers I was much better prepared. It may actually be a worthy advice to all starting PhD students – craft a quick paper out of your master thesis or any other sidekick project and try to publish it: submit it to a proper academic journal, maybe get a desk-rejection and re-submit to another journal, receive the first comments from the reviewers… Just get the first experience of navigating the whole, often frustrating, process. We hear a lot how difficult it may be to accept rejections that are coming so often in academia. But hearing this multiple times is totally not the same as opening the damn email that you were nervously awaiting for a couple of months and reading in between the lengthy formal words about your paper the key phrase starting from “unfortunately”. Yet, when this is connected to a sidekick project it’s so much easier to process emotionally and mentally.
I realize that advice based on my success story from early PhD days may look a lot survivorship bias driven. To balance this out a bit let me bring several less shining examples from my early career steps. My very first academic paper in English, based on my master thesis, happened to be published in a predatory journal 🙃 It was the first draft of a paper that I wrote in English. And I submitted it to a conference in Rome. Alas, this happened to be a conference organized by predators. The most surprising thing was that it actually was a physical conference in Rome, and I even attended it with great pleasure, wasting just 1.5 hours of the session with my talk. The rest of the four days in Rome were a beautiful debrief of my honeymoon trip that summer. But the biggest unpleasant surprise was when the conference organizers published all the conference papers in their predatory journal. This way my extra raw, never peer-reviewed, not even proofread properly draft suddenly became my first official doi assigned and Scopus indexed paper (Kashnitsky, 2013). I’m not too concerned, since the paper itself is just very raw but not too embarrassing. Yet I’m very happy that this unfortunate publication in a predatory journal, that was banned from Scopus a couple of years later, did not harm my just starting academic path. Later on I developed this paper a lot, then submitted it to several reputable journals, got several desk rejections and one rejection after a thorough peer-review. Only after a journey of rejections and a thorough rework this paper finally landed in a proper journal (Kashnitsky, 2020), five years after the initial accidental publication in the predatory journal, and the volume/issue printed version of the paper came only in 2020, 7 years later.
Linking back to the populist idea of limiting how many papers researchers may submit, I think that writing freely and crafting sidekick papers is exceptionally important for academic development, especially during the baby steps in the profession. Trying to regulate this intimate process can cause a lot of harm. Generally, learning to share publicly the outputs of your own efforts and then to deal with the feedback is essential for becoming a good scientist. Here I would just link to the evergreen talk of David Robinson called The unreasonable effectiveness of public work.