The Cloud Academic: Part 1

There has been a fundamental shift in the way in which we work as academics. No longer are we tied to our desks, hard wired internet/intranet connections or dusty collections of texts and papers. It is now possible, and in some cases desirable and more productive, to work from home, from libraries, in the field, from coffee shops, anywhere that has a wireless internet connection – even bars… Much of the software technology that we use in our day to day lives however, is not compatible with this more light, flexible way of working. For this reason I have decided to embark on an experiment to see if I can undertake my daily duties using only online, free, cloud based software programmes. But is this practical on a day to day basis? can a busy academic really perform all of the duties expected of them using only free, online web programmes? This is what I hope to find out…

Developing an Academic Publishing Strategy

Last week I tweeted the fact that I had received a rejection email from a high ranking Journal less than 24 hours after I had submitted. The email stated that “We now have many more submissions for our refereeing process than we can cope with”. This annoyed me, not so much the rejection, more that it had taken me the best part of an afternoon to format the paper for this particular journals submission requirements and comply with the rather exacting requirements of Scholar One – when there was little or no chance of being accepted. Fellow twitter users suggested that such a situation may be due to a backlog of paper submissions as researchers seek to publish in time for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment in the UK. Others joined in and shared their arguably worse experiences of long delays – sometimes months – before ultimate rejection in some of the top journals, presumably again due to a backlog of papers for consideration. Eventually the conversation turned to the difficulties for early career researchers seeking to publish in the run-up to the REF and possible publication strategies. You an view the entire twitter discussion on my Storify page here.

How to Manage a Research Library with Zotero

Keeping up to date with research and managing an increasing number of journal articles and other material is a vital skill of academics and graduate students…

Here I set out my workflow developed over the lat few years using tools such as Zotero, Dropbox , my iPad and Goodreader. Together these tools, and others, see me through from article discovery, through cataloguing and annotating research papers, to synchronising my library across multiple devices, all the way to citing outputs in my own research and preparing accurate reference lists.

10 PhD Viva Survival Tips

The PhD ‘viva voce‘ (Latin for ‘by live voice’) examination, or oral defence, is the final hurdle in the journey towards gaining the doctoral degree that you have worked for so long and hard over the last 3-6 years. The viva serves a number of purposes: to clarify any issues relating to specific parts of the thesis, to the thesis as a whole, and to the award; to ascertain that the thesis is the candidate’s own work, that they have developed research skills at this level, and that they understand the relationship of the thesis to the wider field of knowledge; and where the thesis and/or the candidate does not meet the criteria for the award, to try to determine the possible reasons (more detail can be found here).