CEDARS data so far…

CEDARS has now been open for nearly a week, and we so far have 288 responses, which is exceptional as my records from 2019 tell me that – at this point – we were well below that.

So, first of all, a huge THANK YOU to all of you who have completed the survey so far.

Thank you too to those of you who have booked time in to complete it, but haven’t got there yet. We know you’re on the case.

For others, I’ll be sending you out a link reminder tomorrow.

It’s too early to be making any real analysis of the data, but with one week done, I thought I’d give you a glimpse of some of the issues that are surfacing. These include some challenges that we are aware of. But they also include some other things that we’ll want to also look into carefully, including:

  • Recognition in a host of areas ranging from contributions to grant writing, to supervision of students and other research colleagues. We know that, with future positions often heavily reliant upon CVs and reputation, that recognition is a key issue, so it’s good to have some concrete examples.
  • A need for more information about university policies to do with redundancy and redeployment.
  • Support in how to think about careers, including those beyond academia.
  • Support for those of you managing others. Many of you want more information on how to do this well, but are struggling to find it, or to get practice in how to do it as well as you could.
  • The huge impact of the COVID ‘year’, and its effect on your working environment, workloads and your career planning.

That last point is clearly something that will dominate the 2021 survey. And it’s enormously valuable data for us as we work out how we can best support many of you back into working patterns that are more familiar.

I’ll try and update more as new data comes in.

In the meantime, please encourage as many of your pathway 2 colleagues as you can to complete the survey.

And… stay safe!

 

 

 

Social Media – Part II – ‘Showcase’ sites

This post covers what we might call ‘Showcase’ sites – tools that are basically designed to allow you to display your work. They range from ORCID, which is designed as a ‘connecting’ site that brings together all of your work but doesn’t really promote engagement around it… to something like PubMed Commons, which actively encourages researchers to discuss and debate work that you post.

With all of these ‘showcase’ sites, the core of them is the material that you (and other academics) add.

ORCIDORCID logo

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It’s not strictly speaking a social media site, but it’s a hugely useful tool which allows you to create and manage an online academic profile by providing you with a simple, unique, digital identifier which you can add to publications, grant applications, and other academic outputs so that they all point back to you. This is the ORCID citation as it appears at the bottom of a paper I published, which I’ve linked to my ORCID page, so you can see how it works.

Example of ORCID citation

Three of the advantages of ORCID are:

  1. It’s a permanent ID, so it remains the same… no matter where you work.
  2. It is particularly useful if you are, for example, one of the thousands of people with the same name currently working in academia and need to ensure that you are uniquely identifiable. Note, the search means that you don’t even have to remember what your ORCID ID is, as you can look yourself up each time you need it!
  3. It works with most other systems, so once it’s set up, if you include your ORCID ID when you publish, or apply for a grant, then ORCID will link those outputs to your page for others to find.

ResearchGate

ResearchGate logo

Research Gate offers you the chance to search through up to ‘135 million publication pages’ and ‘stay up to date with what’s happening in your field’. All of those pages, and all of that ‘up to date’ information has been added by some 17 million academics, as a way to showcase their work. What this means is that Research Gate has become a professional network site for researchers around the world, particularly in scientific disciplines, although it’s increasingly popular with other researchers.

Profiles are largely built around publications, which means that – if you have co-authored with someone who is already on the site – your work might already be there!

Once registered, you can set up a simple profile, upload work (or enter your ORCID to do this automatically), add interest keywords, and ask questions and comment on and request others’ work. You can also ‘follow’ other researchers so that you get updates when they add any new material, and receive notifications when your work is downloaded or cited by others…

screengrab from ResearchGate showing chat and notifications icons

If you like metrics, then ResearchGate also generates information about how much interest your work is generating, which of your publications is most cited, etc.

To learn more:

ResearchGate’s guide to Getting Started https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/Getting+started

http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/openresearchexeter/2013/11/06/74/  A review of ResearchGate which is still largely accurate despite its age. Be aware that the numbers mentioned are well out of date.

Academia.edu

Academia.edu was the original Showcasing site for researchers, and was hugely popular until about 2013/14 when it started to charge for some of its more ‘premium’ functionality, and was acquired by one of the key academic journal publishing houses. This latter move was probably the most disruptive as it allowed the publisher to enforce the copyright on published work, which was being ignored by some academics, keen to ‘give away’ their work to those who wanted it, whether they had a subscription to the relevant journal or not.

In the wake of its acquisition, some academics boycotted Academia.edu, and it has since struggled to recover its reputation. That said, for some areas of the world less troubled by an ideology of intellectual property freedom, it’s still the go-to site. It has a greater number of registered users than ResearchGate and is popular with a wide range of disciplines, including those in the Arts and Humanities.

The features of Academia are largely the same as for ResearchGate, so any decision about which to join should be based on finding the community that you want to be part of and visible to. Other researchers in your field are likely to know which of these networks is more relevant or do a quick search for key names or topics on the site itself.

To learn more:

Academia’s introduction to setting up a profile: https://support.academia.edu/hc/en-us/articles/360042888154-Profile-Overview

PubMed

PubMed is an example of a more specifically disciplinary repository – in this case, for the Biomedical community. An early version of this guide included PubMed Commons – which was a pilot, and was hugely successful, but has now been closed down, archived, and replaced with PubMed Central. There is also a European partner: Europe PMC.

PubMed remains a repository for biomedical literature (indeed, a mandatory one for work funded by some bodies), and works in a similar way to the other sites listed by allowing you to upload papers (or links to papers), add comments, and respond and discuss with others.

Both PubMeds are key platforms for their fields of work, but both have evolved from the original PubMed. Their evolution demonstrates how important it is – if you want to reap the benefits of sites like this – not to just ‘dump’ work there and then disengage, but to be a part of the community that builds it, and to continue to interact with those others who are also interacting with you.

Clearly, you can’t do this well without investing some time. And so Social Media is something that – done well – takes some planning and a commitment of involvement. And that’s something we’ll pick up in a later post.

Social Media – Part II – A few things to consider before we show you what’s available.

Having looked at the potential value of Social Media for you, and for your career, we can start to look at what platforms, sites and tools are available.

Before we begin, a few provisos:

First, to make this section as useful as possible, it focuses on sites with active communities engaging with academic material and issues. Guides to ‘all’ social media are available, but it’s not useful to reproduce them unnecessarily. Where we refer to them, we’ll point you to where you can find them for yourself.

Second, the focus of this section will be generally sites for ‘academic audiences’. If your objective is to engage with specific audiences (particularly specific non-academic audiences) then they are likely to be active on many of the sites we look at, but may also have their own specialist communities. A conversation with people in these networks, either online or face-to-face will help you discover these.

Third, Social media changes and develops constantly, and this guide will only be updated periodically, so this shouldn’t be considered a definitive list. Happily, Professor Andy Miah from Salford University maintains a list of the social media resources used by academics which is updated regularly (the last update was Oct 2019). This gives a sense of the variety of sites available, and contains a brief description of each site, with some examples of researcher-led pages.

Fourth, because Social Media sites are user-driven, their content, culture, and usefulness often reflects their user-base. This can initially be a bit frustrating – particularly if you’re unfamiliar with them – as you’re never quite sure where to start. In time, that frustration can give way to creativity, as you get to know them, and find ways to harness their flexibility as multi-purpose communication tools. A good rule of thumb is to watch before you engage, and to start with sites that have a clear academic focus and offer features which map against the common activities and needs of researchers across the board. These features develop and evolve, but a comparison of some academic focused sites from 2015 attempted to compare a number of them with a view to the future of academic Social Media use. As with many of the resources referred to in this guide, the associated comments and reactions are as informative as the article itself.

Finally, although most sites won’t mention this up front, they all have to find ways to pay for themselves. How they do this, and what impact that has on the kind of audience, functionality, use of data, etc. is important to consider, therefore.  None of the sites and platforms we will mention charge for access or reasonable use, but it is useful to be aware of their business models and how they maintain viability. Most sites will use your personal data as a business asset and generate income through advertising which will appear in your stream. Some operate in partnership with other organisations – something that may not always be explicit and obvious. Some charge for ‘additional’ functionality. We mention this not to put you off, but to ensure that you stop for a moment and think about the fact that a “free” service needs to generate an income stream and that you should be aware that the data and information you provide may be the source of this. If you are interested in the different funding and income generating models for social media, this article on the different approaches to financial sustainability taken by three research-focused sites, may be of interest.

So, with those reminders in place, on… to the various sites:

Social Media – What value for me, and my career?

What value for me?

If you are itching to Tweet and Post and B/Vlog and Snap and Tik and… you might want to go straight on to the next section.

However, we think that, before you do, it’s a good idea to pause and consider how Social Media can benefit you and your career. That’s because, although Social Media can support you at all stages of the research cycle, it requires an investment of time (although not as much as you may fear). So, it’s important to minimise confusion and wasted time by working out why you might engage with it, so that you can engage most effectively.

A useful analogy for many of the sites we’ll consider is to view them as an empty room into which you will invite people or a room full of people with a shared interest. You have control over who to invite into your empty room and control over which rooms you enter, but little control over what people say in them – just as in physical environments.

What do you need?

With this in mind let’s start by thinking about what you need to hear and see in those rooms to help you.

  • Do you need to find out how to be a researcher, meet others who will support you to move to research independence, or address an audience of people eager to hear from you as a leader in the field?
  • Are you looking to discover and join academic and other professional networks? Share knowledge with them? Or recruit people to help set up new networks from scratch?
  • Are you trying to explain your ideas to a new audience? Challenge existing ideas?
  • Do you need to be recognised for what you share? Or are you just ‘giving things away’?

Where you’re up to in your career, and where you want to go next will shape what you do… for example:

Doctoral researchers need to manage the demands of their PhD, keep on top of literature and developments in their field, disseminate their work, maintain their momentum, develop their employability, write a thesis, prepare to defend their work in the viva and prepare for the transition into whatever will follow.

  • Who could help you find ways to tackle these demands?
  • What information would help you understand academia and research?

Postdoctoral and contract based research staff need to develop a research profile, develop their independence, disseminate their work and ensure it has maximum impact, understand the funding landscape, develop links to future collaborators, be aware of opportunities and again, be ready for the end of their contracts and what will follow.

  • Who needs to be aware of you and your work?
  • What information or opportunities would help you be more successful?

Established researchers need to develop new research ideas, publish work which is important and influences their field, attract new students and staff, build relationships with partners to enhance impact, manage their time and prioritise effectively, add value to their institution and research community, find partners for projects and proposals and demonstrate their esteem in their field and community.

  • What individuals or communities do you want to connect with? 
  • What kind of influence and impact would you like to have?

Deepening your knowledge of academic careers

Given that you will be building your profile and contributing material potentially for many years, you also need to look ahead in your career and think about future challenges and demands.

Many online resources are available to help you think about these demands and broaden your thinking about your current situation. Note that these aren’t solely focused on social media although we discovered them through social media – either through the individuals or organisations that produced them or seeing them recommended and discussed by others.

The University of Manchester’s “An Academic Career” site includes advice and insights into the demands and opportunities ahead.

Jobs.ac.uk includes a substantial careers advice section with many different articles and a series of e-books on different aspects of academic careers

Oxford University’s Apprise site brings together resources from a range of projects aimed at those in the early stages of an academic pathway and includes prompts for personal reflection.

The Wellcome Trust offers a guide detailing the kinds of things to think about for those returning to academic careers after a break, or other time away.

Vitae, a national organization for researcher development, has published a series of reports on the destinations and subsequent career paths of doctoral graduates.

There are also offline sources, like Liz Elvidge, Emma Williams and Carol Spencely’s “What every postdoc needs to know” (summary here) – a book that breaks down the whole postdoctoral career journey, and asks challenging questions that you might want to consider.

What are the challenges that you’re facing now? At the next stage? In 5 years? In 10 years?

With these challenges in mind, if you now feel ready to explore the role of social media in your career, the next section will provide an overview of social media and the platforms available.

If you aren’t ready to move on yet, you can work through the more detailed questions in the worksheet and arrange to discuss your thoughts about your career challenges with a colleague or mentor.

Social Media – A series for researchers

Social Media offers researchers huge potential to communicate with a range of audiences. Researchers who have developed an effective social media presence will talk about the ease with which they can engage people, strengthen their networks and receive key information. Reaping the benefits requires an investment of time, but just as with established networking, there are strategies to hit the ground running, to benefit more quickly and have a greater impact.

Current limitations on social interaction, and focus on working from home means that not only is Social Media particularly useful now to maintain visibility for present and future posts, but that researchers may have more time than before to engage in developing a Social Media presence.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of blog posts to help researchers to better understand the potential of social media to enhance their research activities and develop a strong, credible profile. We’ll look at the key sites and tools, and guide you through a process to evaluate any new networks you encounter.

If you’re familiar with social media, the posts will help you reflect on your communication style and career objectives, investigate unfamiliar platforms and learn from the experiences and advice of other researchers.

The posts are structured into five sections. Each will include an overview, links to resources which explore the topic in more detail and a worksheet designed to help you reflect on your approach and set clear objectives. The sections are written to help you:

  1. Reflect on your career and how social media might add value
  2. Navigate both generic and research-based social media options
  3. Relate the potential of social media to your career and research goals
  4. Communicate effectively, efficiently and appropriately online
  5. Evaluate and develop your online impact and ambitions

This resource is designed be a relatively concise starting point to the world of social media, so it covers the headlines for each topic and where necessary points to the detail available in a range of articles, books and guides on the web. These will all vary in depth, perspective and age, so you can choose how much to dig into the detail.

Watch this space for the next post… !

Online Writers’ Retreats… what you do when you can’t meet up!

If you search the Internet for writing retreats, you’ll find all kind of images that involve groups of people sat, with laptops, around a table… like this:

group of writers around a table, each with their own laptop

There’s a very good reason for this. When Rowena Murray did her initial work on structured retreats back in 2009, she found that key to success was the ‘doing together’ that comes from all being in the same place at the same time.

Writers on our retreats have told us the same.

“It helps me push through, when I get stuck and I might get distracted and give up, being with others who are also writing means I don’t stop… I keep trying, and eventually I work out how to get past the problem and I can move on.”

What do you do, then, when – like now – you can’t be in the same room? (more…)

The publication pipeline

hat someHow did that submission go? Did you get it accepted?

Yes, all in – reviews done. Now I’m at the foot of Everest again.

The foot of Everest?

Yes… I’ve not really got any writing in progress, so I’m starting again from scratch.

The first time I published, it felt like that. The process was very one-directional. I wrote, I submitted it, I dealt with the reviews, I resubmitted, it was published.

Because it was so single-minded, it was relatively easy. I just did what I needed to do, and then waited for instructions from the editor. But it also took a long time. From initial idea to print, the process was on and off, and lasted a full 2.5 years.

Both of those things – the ease, and the time – aren’t a problem if you’re starting out as an academic. But they become more problematic if you need to be publishing more often. A more recent journal article took me and a co-author nearly 5 years from conception to print.

Adding the time for the first and second publications together, that’s two publications in 7.5 years. That’s waaaay too slow for any kind of academic CV.  (more…)

Writing and publishing: strategies from/for non-native speakers

By lucky coincidence, most of the Bristol Clear writers’ retreats this year are being run in a large, well-lit room in Bristol’s ‘Centre for Academic Language and Development’. The CALD is a unit dedicated to supporting (particularly overseas) students with their English. As you walk through the main doors of the Centre, you can’t help but notice the banners, celebrating a quote by Pierre Bourdieu, which says

Academic language… is nobody’s mother tongue.

Bourdieu is right, academic language isn’t anyone’s mother tongue.

And for many of those who come on writing retreats, neither is English. And yet they are expected to not only write and publish in academic language, but in the academic form of English.

A non-native form, of a non-native tongue.

How are they doing this?

This is something that I’ve been asking those who attend retreats. I’ve also been looking in the literature to find out what others do. There appear to be four main approaches.

Write with a native

Probably the most common way that those who aren’t native speakers of English produce publication-ready material is by co-writing with native speakers (who lend their eye to all of the writing at all stages).

As a strategy, this is hugely effective, particularly at early career stage when there are potentially, naturally, multiple authors involved in a publication. But it can also carry risk, particularly if any kind of tension over the ‘authoring’ breaks out – e.g. where author ‘order’ becomes less an issue of who contributed most to the thinking, and more about who wrote more ‘words’. This can get worse when, in the mind of the authors, they begin to associate words with expertise. One writer describes the problems that arose when native English speakers in a mixed language group started to act as if they were more ‘expert’ in the research topic, simply because their English was ‘better’.

“at one point [it] caused me to go off and publish some academic articles in [my own language] just to prove that I’m better than them at something” (Sword 2017: 96).

That doesn’t mean you should avoid writing with native English speakers – It can work brilliantly, and even the difficult moments make it a perfect opportunity to practise negotiation and collaborative working (both of which are key professional skills). But it does mean being aware of the potential for tension early on, and taking steps to resolve it through a planned and professional approach, rather than assuming that ‘things will just work out OK’.

Ask a native to proof (or better still, mentor) your work

After writing with a native speaker, the next most frequent approach is to find a colleague who is prepared to proofread and/or correct a draft that you have written.

This can be very effective. Although it does rely on a (sometimes fragile) quid pro quo. Even though many fields have strong non-English literatures, in most the need to write in English massively outstrips the need to go in the other direction. Rather than a balance, then, the ‘proofing’ approach can end up relying on the generosity of a colleague, who may not receive the same degree of support back from you if they don’t need to publish in your language.

There are ways around this. Helen Sword suggests, in her book ‘Air & Light & Time & Space’ that you can establish a balance in the relationship by ‘giving back’ something: conversational language support in your native tongue, or cooking lessons. If you can’t do that, then you can at least offer constructive critical feedback on their work if they need it.

Alternatively, you might try to move away from the ‘ad hoc’, and establish a more stable relationship with a ‘language mentor’ – someone who will regularly work with you, reading what you write, to identify consistent language issues that you can then correct.

Language mentoring has the advantage that, because it systematically works on reoccurring weak points in your language, over time your English improves.

Professional proofing

An alternative approach, and one that doesn’t rely on colleagues, is to get proofing done by a professional. This can be useful, particularly if you are writing for an unfamiliar audience and need to ensure that not only the language, but the content lands as you want.

However, the expertise of editors can, on occasion, collide with the aims of the writer. I work in a field (Deaf Studies) where a capital letter can mean the difference between affirming someone’s identity as the member of a cultural and linguistic group (Deaf), or defining them as disabled (deaf). I have had editors assume that my capitalisation was in error, and remove it all – a mistake that then required hours of careful re-editing to put it all back in.

Besides which, professional proofing is expensive, and although it’s now required by some journals for articles from non-native speakers, I’m not aware of any publishers (or indeed any universities) who will pay for it.

Take a chance

The final approach is where you don’t get any native speaker support, but simply write and submit, and see what happens.

This is a gamble that can pay off… Researchers I spoke to have seen this work – but only where their English has been almost perfect, and where they happen to have landed a reviewer who has had time (and a generous spirit) enough to offer corrections, or on an editor who has seen the individuality of the writer’s style as something to be valued, rather than smoothed out.

The general rule of thumb, though, when presenting a manuscript for publication is to make it as perfect as possible. Editors and reviewers are just as tired and overworked as everyone else, and the last thing they want to do is wrestle with a script that is peppered with problems, or is unclear.

In that case, the gamble can fail – spectacularly.

I’ve known some very good articles be rejected and then really struggle to find a home, simply because in their first submitted form, they looked like the writer ‘hadn’t bothered’.

And finally… to all those native speakers out there.

All of the academics that I spoke to, and much of the literature, suggests that the better your English gets, the less you have to rely on any of these strategies, and the more you can simply write and submit under the ‘take a chance’ approach with a good expectation of success.

But as (again) Helen Sword suggests, that takes time.

Learning to write sophisticated academic English… Like any other artisanal skill, the art of communicating fluently and elegantly… requires, at the top end of achievement, thousands of hours of practice – and there are no shortcuts.

No shortcuts means that, in addition to their academic skills, non-native users of English spend thousands of hours honing a skill that most English-world academics have picked up, probably without ever being aware of it.

So here’s a thought for all those academics out there who are native speakers… consider how lucky you are, and be generous with it.

Whether as a co-author, an ad-hoc proofer, a mentor, a willing reviewer or editor, or simply as a colleague, ask what you can do to support your colleagues to succeed.

 

Structured writers’ retreats – things we learned during WriteFest

Across UK Higher Education, the month of November was ‘WriteFest’, a month for writing.

As part of our WriteFest provision, we ran four writing retreats, one a week. They’re structured days, set up specifically to allow academics to write, without the distractions of their daily work.

The retreat structure has always encouraged productive writing. But – with a whole month to play with – I was keen to examine the retreats themselves, and to identify and adapt anything that would make them even ‘better’ – to make the environment as conducive as possible to writing.

Now, at the end of the month, here are some things that we’ve learned, and changed.

(more…)

The case for structured writing retreats

If you’ve ever been to a writing retreat at the UoB, you’ll have heard us explain why we structure it as we do.

If you’ve not, then you might wonder why we run them in such a structured way.

The structure might even have put you off.

This post will explain some of why we shape our retreats like that – and what the potential benefits are.

*spoiler alert* – they’re not just about how many words you write!

(more…)