Six steps to building a solid research profile
So, you have been awarded your PhD (or you are near completion) and getting ready to take the next steps to find your space under the sun in the competitive academic job market. Although three to four years of full-time intensive doctoral study imply a massive amount of work, unfortunately, it is not enough to represent your full research profile.
What carries more weight are publications either derived from your doctoral thesis or developed from other studies from yours. However, which publications are worth spending more time and energy on? How do you build your publication portfolio and, consequently, your reputation as a researcher? Therefore, to address these relevant questions, I recommend the following six steps regarding publications, listed in order of relevance, as seen through the eyes of academia. In other words, I am talking about your potential employers.
Peer-reviewed scholarly papers
Journal articles are by far, the most important type of research output that you should focus your energy on because they carry much more weight than everything else. My best advice regarding journal articles is that, whenever possible, you should try submitting at least one paper during your doctoral studies, rather than waiting to do that after your graduation. The reason is that it will give you a strong competitive advantage during your post-doctoral fellowship application processes (for more details regarding this topic, read the article How to succeed in your post-PhD career).
Other important aspects to consider are, first, that you should aim to have your paper published in internationally known top journals in your discipline or subfield. Naturally, they tend to be more challenging to go through the rigorous and highly selective review process, but this difficulty is the toll to be paid to build your reputation as an emerging influential voice in your area of specialisation. Alternatively, you can also target middle-tier journals, especially if your submission was rejected by a top journal. Either way, in case you are unsure to which journal submit your paper, you can consult, for example, the SCImago Journal Rank to explore the profile of the most influential international journals in your discipline.
The second important aspect to consider is to be careful with what is called ‘predatory publications’, which are regarded by many in academia as lacking academic rigour and transparency, questionable impact factors, among several other issues. Sometimes they approach you directly with invitations for fast-track publication, however, without acknowledging you beforehand that this invitation comes with a (high) price tag. Anyway, be careful and if you want to know more about this topic, I recommend that you consult the List of Predatory Publishers and the Wikipedia entry addressing Predatory Publishing. Finally, do not submit your paper to more than one publisher simultaneously. It is regarded as a bad practice in academia and can even damage your reputation if found by publishers.
Peer-reviewed manuscripts
After journal articles, peer-reviewed manuscripts rank second in relevance to building your research profile and reputation. Besides, they can also add to your profile a fair share of prestige as a serious and respectable emerging influential voice, especially if your book becomes recommended reading in graduate and postgraduate courses at national or international level.
The most natural route to land your first book contract is to convert your PhD thesis into a publishable manuscript, but you can also develop a book proposal based on a different project. It will depend on how much research data and material you have available, or you are capable of producing within the deadline agreed with the publisher (see the article How to write a successful book proposal for more details).
Finally, the most important piece of advice is to give preference for publishers who adopt the blind-review process to evaluate manuscripts because this approach represents a sort of ‘seal of quality’ to your published manuscript.
Conference proceedings
Evolving from the previous category, albeit its lower impact compared to journal articles, extended abstracts or working papers published in the Annals of important international conferences, are also a distinguished way to display your academic output.
One of the reasons is that, usually, papers submitted to international conferences are also peer-reviewed, which testifies to the quality and strength of the accepted papers. Moreover, it also implies that you have delivered an oral presentation before your peers and established scholars, which indirectly demonstrates your professional maturity commensurate with your career stage and a high level of confidence.
Book chapters
I have considered book chapters one step below conference proceedings due to the variety of proposals available in the market. It is possible, for example, to find calls for contributions for edited volumes where all accepted proposals are subject to peer-review before actual publication. On the other hand, there is also simpler projects where not necessarily the editors demand blind review and neither an original material (i.e. they can accept, for instance, the reproduction of a previously published article).
Furthermore, there are also scholars advocating that writing book chapters do not add much to one’s academic career, especially due to lower citation indexes and impact factor compared to other publications. I understand and respect these points of view, but my perspective is that they also represent a genuine and valid way to have your voice heard and to disseminate your knowledge and expertise.
Therefore, as you can understand, in-between the two oppositional poles, there might be a variety of models regarding book chapters, which does not necessarily mean to say that one is better than the other. Instead, I aim to highlight some of the possible differences in editorial approaches.
Consequently, when considering submitting your work in response to a call for contributions, you should analyse whether the proposed model coalesces with your career goal and interests or not. Moreover, you should try to identify who the other potential contributors in the edited volume are. This information can give you a fair idea of the strength of the book and the academic stature of the authors that you will be aligned with.
Book review
As previously addressed, there is some criticism regarding publishing book chapters, and the same applies to book reviews. To avoid being repetitive, I say that the same supporting justifications I explained before apply to book reviews.
It is clear that book reviews do not carry the same weight as peer-reviewed scholarly papers and manuscripts. However, the positive aspects of engaging in book reviewing are, first, it reveals a different facet of your productivity as a serious researcher. Moreover, it shows that you are up to date with recent and relevant publications in your field and, finally, it contributes to demonstrating your critical analytical skills. Moreover, they also represent an important contribution to knowledge since they provide fair, independent and necessary reviews of many books published regularly in your field. So, as you can notice, this sample of positive aspects is far from irrelevant.
Yet, my piece of advice is that you do not need to embrace this task as a full-time job, because it is time and energy-consuming and besides, it is almost at the bottom of the rank of publications. In other words, rather than embracing several book reviews simultaneously or in a row, focus to balance well your efforts across the array of research outputs.
There are different ways to engage in book reviewing. You can, for example, submit a proposal of book review to a journal of your interest explaining why you wish to review a specific title and your academic credentials for doing so. However, do not submit unsolicited full reviews, but rather wait for their acceptance to your proposal, and follow their editing and style guidelines.
Alternatively, there are also publications in your discipline (e.g. journals, specialised magazines, and academic portals), which are proactively searching for reviewers. In this case, usually, they already have a pre-defined list of books awaiting review. You should contact them, indicate which book you wish to review and provide them with your short bio. They might also send you by post a copy of the book for your review. Follow their editing guidelines, agreed on a deadline and get started to work.
Blog articles
The last type of publication tends to be overlooked by many people in academia due to its considerably low impact factor and citations (or practically inexistent, to be honest). However, my perspective is that they do carry an interesting and differentiated value to build one’s academic reputation.
First, different from many scholarly papers, most of the time, blog articles are open access, which means that your thoughts, ideas and arguments can reach a wider audience. Second, since they tend to be short (i.e. 800–1,200 words on average, in contrast with ca. 8,000–10,000 for journal articles), it means that they are much less time and energy-consuming. Moreover, publishing blog articles in jargon-free language allows you to reach a different cohort of agents of social change (e.g. policymakers, politicians, leaders of non-governmental organisations, press, social activists, etc.). who do not necessarily have access to or familiarity with reading complex and dense journal articles.
Besides, although blog posts are usually not peer-reviewed, they are evaluated by the editor(s) before publication, which adds at least a certain level of assessment and quality assurance. In social sciences, for example, there are many well-established, serious and influential blogs or portals such as Discover Society, London School of Economics Blogs, Social Science Space and The Conversation. However, I am confident that in your discipline there might be at least a couple of similar open-access blogs as well.
Furthermore, publishing blog articles are also strategically interesting for your emerging career as a researcher who is building a profile and reputation. It can genuinely contribute to increasing and diversify your research output and amplify your qualified exposition. Besides, journal articles, for example, can take at least six to eight months between submission and feedback from peer-reviewers (or sometimes even more). Therefore, within this timeframe, if you do not have any other paper in the pipeline, why not use this time wisely and develop a couple of good blog articles?
Naturally, you do not need to disclose data and neither replicate parts of your papers under consideration somewhere because it would not be appropriate. However, whilst you were developing this piece of research you have read many studies and, probably, left behind many interesting elements because papers have strict limits regarding the number of pages or words. Thus, you can explore this rich material left behind to support the development of your blog articles. Moreover, this sort of article can also be complementary to your published papers and add the benefit of directing traffic towards them.
Bonus tip
Another relevant strategy that you should explore to strengthen your research profile, is to submit your work to eligible academic awards available either at your institution or externally. Although there are plenty of them, you would be surprised to learn that many of your colleagues are not fully aware of them.
Thus, consider, for example, exploring awards for best PhD thesis in your discipline, best published scholarly paper, best conference paper or presentation and academic book awards. Even if you do not win them but if you are classified among the finalists or receive an honours distinction, it is already something relevant and worth mentioning in your curriculum. Besides, it represents an important independent recognition of the quality and impact of your research.
Therefore, to find these awards, explore widely in your university, in your department, talk to your supervisor who eventually might be aware of some of them, and search also across different national and international associations, research groups and funding bodies.
Finally, to sum it up, if you think carefully and strategically about the six categories of publications discussed in this article, you will be able to not only increase your research output but also diversify it and reach a wider audience, both in academia and beyond. Ultimately, following this strategic thinking will contribute to increasing the impact and dissemination of your research and pave the way to building your reputation and a solid research profile.
