You’ve just presented a paper at your association meetings at Congress. I hope it went well. Did you meet some interesting people? Get some good feedback?

In my earlier post, I suggested that conference presentations make great first drafts of journal articles. The hard part is actually sitting down to turn that excellent first draft into something good enough to submit to a journal.

Dealing with criticism.

Maybe someone in your conference session asked some awkward questions. Or made some suggestions about where you could take this. Or focused on some of the things you didn’t get a chance to talk about. I hope no one attacked you, though I know it happens sometimes. I have had it happen myself.

Even when people give respectful and helpful feedback on your paper it can be difficult to deal with. You worked so hard and sometimes feedback makes you feel like you don’t know enough. There is a real temptation to try to do everything in this one paper.

Take a few deep breaths. This is one paper of many you will present and publish over the course of your career. Some of the criticism (or helpful advice) you will disagree with. And that is fine. Some will help you improve your thinking, and your paper. It is okay to feel a bit bruised, but try to relax and work out some realistic next steps to move this presentation towards publication.

As soon as possible after the conference, find some time to write some notes about what you need to do with it, based on the feedback you received. Note positive comments, too.

If you are feeling particularly chewed up about the experience you might want to try journalling a bit about it just to get it all out of your head. You may or may not do anything with this writing but it helps a lot of people process difficult experiences.

Creating a deadline

When you were writing the conference presentation you had a deadline. You might have procrastinated. You might even have written significant portions on the plane. But there was a scheduled session in which you had to present it, no matter what state it was in.  For some people that deadline is an important motivator.

Start by scheduling some time to do the work of turning that presentation into a publication. Give serious thought to where you plan to submit the paper. Making a decision at the outset will help with the writing.

The most important consideration is who you want to communicate with.

Consider journals that reach that audience and are well respected. Make a ranked list of your top 3 journals for this purpose. This gives you a plan for where to submit the finished article and where to send it next if it is rejected. Now put that list aside. Write for the top one. (If you need help figuring out how to rank your list of possible journals, read my free e-book Publish or Perish? There is an excerpt here.)

Give yourself a realistic deadline for having a good next draft ready. And line up a trusted colleague or mentor to read that draft. Have them schedule time to read it (or at least check that they will have time around then).

Presto! you have a deadline.

Now do the work

Revising a conference presentation involves a lot of things that you already know how to do and do well. Extra research, thinking, or whatever to strengthen the weak points. Clarifying the focus and get rid of the material that doesn’t really fit. Writing the contextual section that a journal article needs to place this argument in the wider debates.

Use your notes on the feedback to make decisions about what needs to be done. Make sure you retain a clear focus. Start a file for the other papers you will write elaborating some of the related issues.

Take into consideration the journal you plan to publish in (only number 1 on your list). Make sure you address relevant articles published in that journal recently. Make sure your style is appropriate.

Your aim is not to have the article accepted without revisions. That is actually quite a rare decision. Your aim is a revise-and-resubmit decision. When you think it is good enough for that, get it off your desk.

Remember, you are giving it to a colleague for comments first. The paper only needs to be good enough that it is not a waste of their time to have them read it. Sharing your work and getting feedback is a crucial step in getting from good enough to excellent, as my friend Charlie has said.

Submit your better draft to your colleague

You have to let go. If there are only a couple of things that need tweaking resist the urge to extend your deadline. You will make revisions based on their comments anyway. This is a good paper. It is better than the conference presentation and that went public. Relax.

When you give it to your colleague, make an appointment for coffee, lunch, or a meeting to discuss their comments. This gives them a deadline so your paper doesn’t float to the bottom of their pile of things to do.

While you are waiting, put the paper away and work on something else. Don’t read it until a day or so before your appointment, at which point, you will probably see new things in it, too.

Submit the paper to a journal

Make appropriate revisions based on your colleagues comments. Don’t spend a lot of time on this. They should be minor at this point.

Then submit it to the journal you chose. Do not panic. It will not be the end of the world it if is rejected. You have a back up plan (numbers 2 & 3 on your list).

And it is a good article. You presented it at a conference. You got feedback from a colleague. The most likely outcome is a “revise and resubmit” and then you will have reviewers comments to work with.

Congratulate yourself

You’ve submitted an article!

Take yourself out for dinner. Or at least a drink.

Need help?

Would you find it helpful to talk about your writing with others in similar position on a regular basis? I run virtual writing groups by tele-conference. We meet 4 times a year, giving you deadlines for having made progress on your writing and an opportunity to discuss what is going well and brainstorm solutions for what is going badly. I facilitate the calls and provide advice and encouragement to help you achieve your writing goals.

The VIP option includes a one-on-one coaching session with me to help you figure out what you want to achieve, your barriers to getting it done, and a plan for overcoming those barriers and achieving your research goals.

The academic life is pretty good. It looks almost decadent to those outside of academe.

Your hours are flexible. You have a lot of autonomy over the content of your work. And you are doing work that you love.

On top of that, you will be rewarded for the thing you most want to do.

The thing that drew you into an academic career is research. You are passionate about certain research questions. You can’t imagine an office without bookshelves. You are inspired by ideas.

And research is central to being hired, to getting tenure, and to being promoted.

Unfortunately, on a day to day basis, many academics don’t feel like they have autonomy and flexibility, nor that they are doing work they love. It can even feel like the system of reward is out of line with the work they do most of.

You have the most autonomy and flexibility in your research

But the downside to having so much autonomy in this central area of our work is that there is very little structure provided. No one else schedules time for research into our days. And we have few occasions to report on our progress or our plans.

If you didn’t do any research this week, no one noticed. Except you.

There are no clear performance targets for tenure or promotion, either. That is usually seen as one of the good things about academic life. But it also means that you are aiming for a goal that is vague at best. How do you know if you have done enough? Or if what you have done is good enough?

If you have perfectionist tendencies the vague nature of the goals combined with the lack of external structure can be paralyzing.

Other parts of your academic life have more structure.

Teaching is scheduled. You have to show up at specified times and deliver a class. You can turn up unprepared but people would notice. And you would feel bad that you had performed so badly in public.

You also get direct feedback from students in the form of a range of classroom behaviour, compliments, and complaints. There are formal evaluations.

Administrative responsibilities also have scheduled meetings, deadlines for submitting paperwork, etc. Those deadlines and the fact that someone else is going to see and use your work often act as incentives to getting things done even when they are difficult or distasteful.

If you are any good at the administrative stuff, you tend to get compliments. And asked to do more. Clear, immediate rewards.

Your work gets out of balance

Because teaching and administrative work have more imposed structure and more immediate rewards, your workload can get out of balance. During term time, research can get squeezed out of your flexible schedule.

That can make you question why you became an academic in the first place. Or it can make you resentful of a formal reward structure that values research so much.

Managing Your Research Career

The thing about autonomy is that you have to provide your own structure.

An academic job is much more flexible than most others. You have very few hours in your week that are scheduled by someone else. And there are big swathes of the year with no scheduled time at all.

The lack of clear performance targets means that you have to judge your discipline’s standards, set your own goals, and work to achieve them.

This isn’t easy.

Are you coming to Congress?

I’m giving a presentation about these issues as part of the Career Corner series at Congress.

I talk about planning a long term program of research that includes a series of projects with differing resource needs. I clarify the various research activities you need to be engaged in. And I provide some ideas for finding time for research.

Reducing your stress will improve your performance in all areas. Research and teaching are not in competition with one another. They are both important parts of an academic career.

Come and hear my ideas and then ask your own questions. I want you to acheive your research goals. And I want you to love your academic job.

Come here me speak

Managing Your Research Career

University Centre, Room 279

Monday, May 25, 3 p.m.

Friday, May 29, 10 a.m.

Update: For those who attended Monday’s presentation, I’m sorry about the technical hiccups. You can view the slides here.

This is a question I get asked a lot. Whether it is for hiring, tenure, or a research grant, researchers seem unsure of the value of conference papers.

On the one hand, conference presentations feel like they have more impact than other forms of dissemination. There are real people in the room listening. They ask questions. They might come up and talk to you in more depth later. They take a copy of the paper.

And yet, in most formal assessments of your research achievements, conference papers don’t seem to count for anything. They are considered “low impact”.

This is largely because the audience for a conference presentation is small. The presentation is likely to be short. And the material is usually work in progress, nowhere near as polished as a full journal article or scholarly monograph.

While conference papers can circulate widely through informal networks, usually the impact on the advancement of knowledge is small.

Furthermore, there is rarely any peer review for quality. Selection processes often use merely an abstract and the criteria for inclusion may or may not be about quality, focusing additionally on the general shape of the conference, breadth of coverage of particular topics, balance between graduate students, new scholars, and senior scholars, etc.

So why bother with conference presentations?

A conference paper isn’t an end in itself. It is part of a larger process of knowledge creation and communication.

With that in mind, you can relax about the paper itself. The goal is not a “finished” piece (whatever that is) but a coherent presentation of some of your findings, insights, theoretical or methodological musings, or whatever.

A conference presentation

• provides a deadline for writing.
• enables you to get feedback on your work in progress.
• enables you to connect with other researchers, with whom you might collaborate in various ways over your career.
• is a great first draft of a journal article or book chapter.

Your objective is to meet the people who will want to have longer discussions about your research and to get useful feedback that will allow you to improve your work and turn the paper into a solid publication.

Need Help?

Having trouble with the idea of presenting unfinished work at a conference? My previous post Good Enough? Finished? deals with the issues in more depth.

And a future post will deal with the practicalities of turning your conference paper into a journal article.

If you are interested in learning more about how others will judge your work, why that doesn’t matter, and how to develop a writing and publishing plan that will help you achieve your research goals, sign up for my newsletter and get the free e-book, Publish or Perish? You can read an excerpt here.

And when you get to Congress, look me up. I can be found in booth 50 of the Book Fair (centre aisle, behind the Concordia booth).

And I’ll be giving a presentation in the Career Corner series:

Managing Your Research Career

University Centre, Room 279

Monday, May 25, 15:00 – 16:30

Friday, May 29, 10:00 – 11:30

More about that next week.

Are you going to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Carleton this year?

Are you worried about your conference presentation? Or excited about meeting up with colleagues you don’t see in person very often?

Is this your first time? Are you unsure about what it’ll be like? What to wear? Who to talk to? How your presentation will go?

Don’t panic. Everyone feels a mix of excitement and fear about conferences.

On the one hand it feels like a place where you are going to be judged.

You are going to stand up and talk about your research, this thing you are so passionate about and so invested in, to a bunch of strangers. And you probably think that they will know, from that one short presentation, whether you are cut out for this academic game. Will they like you? Will they think you are a fraud?

On the other hand, Congress is an opportunity to meet up with other people who are equally passionate about ideas and who don’t think it is crazy to stay up until 3 a.m. talking about Deleuze (or whatever it is you would love to stay up until 3 a.m. talking about).

I’ll let you in on a secret. The second one is what it is all about.

Conference papers are like speed dating.

You can’t say a lot in a 15 to 20 minute conference presentation. And this worries a lot of people, especially if you think that the point is to show the audience what a brilliant academic you are.

In reality, your goal is to connect with the people in the room who would love to join you for dinner/beer/wine/coffee to talk for much longer than 15 minutes about your research.

Focus on your findings, your insights, your theoretical musings. What is it about your research that you’d like people to know? Talk about that.

You can talk about how it relates to wider debates in the bar later. And how it relates to someone else’s findings. And the interesting theoretical stuff that you are still trying to figure out. That is what is going to keep you going until 3 a.m.

The presentation is where you meet the people you are still going to be talking to later.

Which sessions should you attend?

A successful conference is one in which you meet someone interesting. Go to sessions to find someone you would love to spend longer than 15 minutes talking to about their research (and maybe yours, too).

These are the people who can give you useful feedback when you are stuck on an article.

These are your future collaborators; the people who help you develop new ideas and new research directions.

Congress is where you get to meet up, every year, to discuss what is happening and really advance those ideas. In between, you have e-mail. And the telephone.

Being instrumental

Building connections with other scholars is an important goal. You don’t want to seem only instrumental, no one will want to hang out with you if you seem like you are just in it for what you can get. But you should be aware of all the ways that you can make Congress work for you.

Are you looking for an academic job?

No one is going to hire you or not because of what one person heard you say in a conference presentation. But wouldn’t it be great if someone listening to your presentation were able to say, “There are some really interesting people on the market right now in this area. I heard a couple of good papers at Congress.” the next time they were discussing possible new hires in their department?

Already have a job?

What if there were jobs opening up in your department? What kind of people would you like to join your department? You don’t want another you to compete with. But I bet you want interesting colleagues doing interesting research that complements yours. Read the program with that in mind. Dream of possibilities.

Talk to publishers

Did you ever think about why the publishers are there? Sure they sell some textbooks. But the  main reason publishers come to conferences is to build their lists.

Editors are going to sessions with the same goal you are – to find interesting people doing interesting things. They are accessible through their stall in the book fair at other times. Even if you are nowhere near ready to publish a book, chat to them about your ideas.

WARNING! Don’t get too excited about what they say. Rachel Toor, a former university press editor, has some good advice about interpreting editorese in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Take advantage of career development opportunities.

The folks at the Federation have organized Career Corner to provide helpful information that you need. There are sessions on grants, publishing, knowledge mobilization, and managing your career. These sessions are not just for graduate students.

Find some time to attend relevant sessions. Ask questions. Provide feedback.

See you there!

I’ll be presenting “Managing Your Research Career” as part of Career Corner in University Centre, Room 279. Come hear me speak Monday at 3 p.m. or Friday at 10 a.m.

And I’ll have a booth in the Book Fair. Booth 50 on the centre aisle behind the Concordia booth. It’ll be the one without any books. But I’ll have a couple of armchairs. And I might be knitting.

Come talk to me. Let me know how your paper went. Or come before your paper for a quick pep talk. I’d love to meet you.