To write my last post for phd2published. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time as the managing editor of this site but it is now time for me to move on to new things. When Charlotte offered me this opportunity just after my viva last year I wasn’t sure what I could contribute or whether it was a good idea but I have always taken every opportunity that has come my way so I said yes and saw it as a fabulous learning curve, and that’s exactly what it has been.

I have learnt a great deal about academic publishing and academic career development over the last 9 months and a great deal has happened for me on the back of being here thus, I shall use this last post to review my achievements through giving you my top tips:

Put Some Thought into Your Journal Choice and Don’t Be Scared of Top Ranked Journals:

For a variety of reasons I came to the end of my PhD not having published anything as a sole author. I had contributed to a number of policy reports but I had not got any peer reviewed publications out. this was a conscious decision which made sense at the time but at the same time when I got to the end of my PhD I was playing catch-up and this does impact upon your ability to get a post-doc position. Academic departments in the UK are now looking at what potential new staff can or will be able to offer toward the REF. For early-career researchers this is two publications in ‘good’ journals. ‘Good’ generally relates to impact factor and many early-career researchers are scared off from aiming at the top ranked journals in their field. One of the key messages from the Royal Geographical Society Post Graduate Forum Annual Conference Training Symposium (PGF-ACTS) was that if you have a piece which you think is relevant to that high ranking journal you should go for it! they treat everyone the same, even the big names get rejection letters! Read more

As a Geographer I am very proud to say that today I will be representing PhD2Published at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference. I have been asked to be on the panel for the Postgraduate Forum Annual Conference Training Symposium (PGF-ACTS). The purpose of the postgraduate forum is outlined below: Read more

I hope from this week’s posts you can now see the different ways that social media applications can be used for your research and researcher development. Different applications and strategies will be applicable to different disciplines and research methodologies however, what will apply to everyone are digital research ethics. In this post I discuss the three major ethical implications raised in my PhD research – Informed Consent, Access & Data Protection: Read more

Right, so my thesis has been completed and examined and I passed subject to minor corrections, which were dutifully done within 3 months, so now what? Well, according to my examiners the first step in my post-doc life should be publishing a paper in to a good academic journal. This seems to make perfect sense however, at the same time it raises three important questions;

1.       What parts of my thesis would make good journal articles?

2.       What constitutes a good journal and how do I choose?

3.       What do I do if  my paper gets rejected?

Over the next three weeks we will consider all these issues with guest posts from Dr Inger Mewburn who writes about Journal selection and Professor Chris Hamnett who offers advice on dealing with rejections and resubmissions. In this post I will consider the first of these questions – what parts of my thesis would make good journal articles? Read more

InterFace is a new international forum to learn, share and network between the fields of Humanities and Technology.

Below is an outline for the conference and the call for participants the conference will be held at University College London between 27th – 29th July 2011:

The symposium aims to foster collaboration and shared understanding between scholars in the humanities and in computer science, especially where their efforts converge on exchange of subject matter and method. With a focus on the interests and concerns of Ph.D students and early career researchers, the programme will include networking activities, opportunities for research exposition, and various training and workshop activities. Read more

Hello and welcome to my first post as Managing Editor of phd2published. Now that Charlotte has secured her book contract she has, partially, passed the baton on to me, so I can document my progress toward and my experiences with getting my book published. Charlotte will still be documenting her experiences of writing her first book as well as contributing other relevant posts here and there.

I thought I would use this first post to introduce myself and my plans and ideas for what I want to bring to this site:

Who am I and why am I here?

I am a social scientist, more specifically a Development Geographer and my research interests lie in the areas of international environmental governance and development planning and financing, particularly in relation to sub-Saharan African countries. I completed my PhD in the Geography Department of King’s College London in 2010 and I am now working toward securing a post-doctoral research position and, as my examiners keep reminding me, publishing!

I came to this site through twitter, I love to tweet, as you meet so many new people and find invaluable pieces of information like this site. I looked through the pages and thought while I know how to approach post-doc research through a mass of grant and job applications, how do I address the issue of publishing? I suddenly thought that I really don’t know how to go about developing a publishing strategy, this worried me. Read more