Collected resources on academic career matters, writing, and software.
Resources
The resources below are designed with the intent of giving people some tools to get started solving various career challenges. They’re a mix of posts and blogs from others that I’ve found helpful, useful sites, and example materials from my own career.Contents
- Academic Writing
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Journal Selection Tools
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Predatory Outlets
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Writing a Curriculum Vitæ
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Job-Seeking
- Teaching
Academic Writing
I’ve found the below works useful in my writing.
Professors as Writers [↗] by Robert Boice
-- time management -- writing as a professional task -- psychology of writing --
An account of the problems that academics face in writing and provides strategies for overcoming these. Chief amongst these is the idea that most people struggle with writing, but conssitent habits and consistent work is the most useful for developing these. I take this to mean that we should write academically every day.
This can be ‘borrowed’ in full at the Web Archive link above.
How to Write an Article in 12 Weeks [↗] by Wendy Belcher
-- articles -- journals -- formats -- reviews --
A useful workbook for guiding a writer through the process of publishing a journal article. The idea is that by spending an hour a day on specific tasks, you’ll produce an article soon enough. It doesn’t help you to have an idea and you do need to have some sort of draft that you’re working on to take advantage of the materials. If you’re familiar with the writing process, then the most useful aspect of the book is that it provides simple solutions to common problems - abstracts, responding to feedback, framing, etc.
There is a first edition, which has circulated widely, and a second edition released more recently.
How to Write a Thesis [↗] by Umberto Eco
-- PhD theses -- form -- research questions -- structure --
A guide on writing PhDs that I think is actually quite useful in terms of giving a clear formal structure for the doctoral thesis. One of the real strengths about this work is that it aligns the work of writing to the work of research, and thus helps those that absolutely need to write to align themselves in productive directions.
Journal selection tools
Finding the right journal is a tricky task. There are a lot of metrics and data, and it can be quite intimidating to work through the process of identifying an outlet for your work. If your institution doesn’t provide specific publication outlets or publishers, then you need some sort of means to work out whether you should publish somewhere.
ScimagoJR [↗]
-- journals -- rankings --
Scimago is a good tool for finding and valuing journals, to an extent. The service works by classifying each journal into relevant areas of research and then allocating a quartile (i.e. Q1-Q4). Q1 is higher ranked than Q4. Yes, Q1 is usually presitigious, but also may not be worth the effort for publishing, as the audience for your work may not be there by the time your work is published. Equally, a Q4 journal isn’t a ‘bad’ journal - it’s just less visible, more niche, or ‘emerging’ in some capacity.
My main warning with ScimagoJR is that it can direct people towards highly quantitative approaches to publishing, which I think is a generally bad idea. Instead, think about each journal as an audience or topic, and write to your audience as a collection of scholars who think in the topic area.
At least within the humanities and social sciences in Australia it has become a defacto ranking tool for identifying the value of a particular journal, and thus for ranking the value of academic contributions across multiple disciplines.
Importantly, all journals on Scimago are indexed by academic journal databases (mostly Scopus), which means that they are - to some extent - confirmed to be a ‘real’ journal. If something’s not listed, then it is maybe predatory (see below) or non-academic.
Open Policy Finder [↗]
-- journals -- open access --
The Open Policy Finder (nee Sherpa Romeo) is a good resource for finding open access publishers. Open Access is important, and this database is useful for helping you to determine the requirements of different journals and publishers.
Directory of Open Access Journals [↗]
-- journals -- open access --
A useful resource for assessing the nature of open access publications. It gives you some information about any fees, publication times, and a brief history of the journal.
Predatory outlets
Predatory publishers exist purely to suck money out of academics, and don’t give back a ‘quality’ publication. i.e. a publication that is going to be easily circulated to other academics through existing library agreements. Predatory publishers often preying on academics who are just starting (such as students), academics who are desperate, or academics who are seeking an academic publication in another language. Depending on your institution, this may be embarassing, bad, or otherwise, and certainly you may find yourself signing away rights to your work and having to pay to have it published. Avoid them at all costs.
Beall’s list [↗]
-- predatory publishers --
Beall’s list is a list of publishers and journals that are deemed to be predatory by Jeffrey Beall. His list is perhaps more useful as a warning, rather than as an up-to-date list of which journals are predatory. You’re going to need to think about your publication outlets using more than just his list. I’d also note that there are a small number of publications on his lists that are ‘okay’, but Beall’s categories are fairly strict and absolutist, meaning that some things maybe don’t need to be on the list. That’s fine for you, though, because your publication is going to be guided by your research narrative, and not metrics, right?
writing A Curriculum Vitæ
Below are some guides for producing an academic curriculum vitae. These are shaped by my location within the Australia/Oceania context, and are shaped by my disciplinary experiences. I don’t think you need to read all of these -- find the one that speaks to you.
Dr Karen's guide to writing an academic CV [↗]
Straightforward explanation of how to lay out a CV. Provides advice on formatting so you don’t have to go too wild.
Academic Positions: How to Write a Professional Academic CV [↗]
Effecitvely a briefer version of Dr Karen’s guide, if you’re just looking for headings.
Elsevier's guide to writing an academic CV [↗]
Mostly useful in terms of the way that it explains the differences between academic and non-academic CVs.
The Guardian's top 10 mistakes in an academic CV [↗]
Useful guide for fixing issues in your CV. Importantly, like good advice, all of these issuse should be immediately fixable if you find them in your own work. I think points 1, 3, and 6 are particularly important.
Curriculum vitæ workshop slides [PDF]
From a CV-writing workshop I ran in 2018, marginally updated in 2022.
My Successful Curriculum Vitæ [PDF]
This is the CV I was using when I got my first ongoing role. This was for an ongoing role at a Go8 university, which is equivalent to an R1 tenure-track equivalent role in Australia).
Job-seeking
Looking for an academic job? You’ll find some useful resources here.
Academic jobs wiki [↗]
An informally maintained directory of job ads from around the world. While it can be a little frustrating to navigate, the wiki does get updated frequently. Perhaps more importantly, it has insights from contributors about the departments and the universities, so you can find out about the culture before you start to apply.
Sterneworks academic jobs guide [↗]
Jonathan Sterne has a lot of useful materials here for academic career considerations. Mostly these are onward links, but
Teaching
Materials from my teaching; more to come here.
Sample slides
Screenshots of some of my teaching and research slides, hopefully useful prompts for your own teaching!