In the last post I talked about the importance of having a timeline. So you don’t get derailed. So you don’t say yes to things you ought not to do, out of some habit of needing to please or thinking every ‘opportunity’ is a good opportunity. It is not.

I also talked about the four crucial steps that you need to incorporate into your pipeline planner: What; Why; Steps; Deadline, with the emphasis on the why.

Today I want to talk about how you decide what to put in the planner and how to be realistic.

What should go in?

What goes in your planner will of course depend on your disciplinary expectations and career stage. What is expected in multi-authored disciplines far outweighs what is expected in sole authored (humanities disciplines). It also depends on what your expectations are. If you are looking for promotion, your pipeline should reflect the promotion criteria of your institution. If you are looking to build your academic brand in a certain direction, your pipeline should contain the research activities that reflect that brand.

Everyone will have certain things to do for their employer regardless of whether it maps onto your brand or what you care about or even promotion criteria. High quality peer reviewed journal articles will probably top the list. Thus your planner should contain a high proportion of these as your starting point. If you don’t know where to start, start with these.

All of your writing should go into your publishing pipeline. Articles, research monographs, grant applications, edited collections (as editor), chapters in books, journalistic pieces, blogs and any other research-related writing should included. Not all of these attract the same prestige, but all serve different functions. A warning here. If you are thinking about publishing a textbook for undergraduate students, please speak to senior professors about the desirability of this for your career goals. If you are in a teaching focused institution, this may well be the thing you need to do. In research intensive institutions, probably only senior professors who are not trying to build their career via publishing should be engaged in writing text books. Text books are a never ending publishing grind that squeeze out any opportunity for you to engage in research. Don’t kid yourself it is anything other than this.

A multiplicity of things in your pipeline means when one project is stuck on pause (waiting for feedback or data collection) you can turn to another and move that forward a little bit. You are never stuck wondering what to do with your research time.

The five year plan

When applying for jobs, an indicative research plan is usually one of the things hiring committees will request as part of the application. If you already have a publishing pipeline, you have this 5 year plan (more or less) ready to go. Although I would recommend a 1-3 year pipeline plan, it will be easy to scale this up to 5 years once you have a realistic grasp of how long things take to complete.

Progression is key

Your pipeline should consist of a mix of big and small projects that describe your potential, aspirations and development as a scholar. You can’t always work on, or claim to be working on, huge grant proposals. One grant proposal is more convincing that 5 grant proposals. More convincing still if you have built up to making a big grant application at the end of a suitable period of publications in the area.

A mix of a grant size might be desirable. A small grant which in a few years could be the basis of a large grant shows that you know you need to build up reputational capital in order to be successful. So a network grant that might lead to a pilot that could be rolled out to a much larger interdisciplinary project shows both a grasp of reality, how to build a potential team of collaborators, and a sense of academic vision.

The same is true of publications. You can’t put 5 single authored top tiered original journal articles as one year’s pipeline. It is unlikely (depending on your discipline) that you have the time each and every year to work up 5 original ideas and data sets, research and writing. But a mix of linked journal articles, some alone, some co-authored around the same dataset might be feasible. Salami slicing findings for a number of mid-ranking journals might also be feasible, but be careful in doing the too often. Quality matters. Speak to mentors and others in your field.

Journalistic pieces and blogs could also be included, alongside conference papers. Producing a 100,000 word research monograph from scratch takes more than a year so your pipeline should reflect that. It should detail how many weeks/months you are engaged in research for what chapters, and how many weeks or months you need to write that research up. Spread out your projects so that they build a picture of your career as you want it to develop, and of you as a scholar. What is your brand? What will you be known for? Have definite aims and objectives for your career and brand attached to each project.

How do you know how long something takes?

One of the key lessons I try to impart at Academic Coach is that you must start to understand how long something takes YOU to do. Everyone else is irrelevant. And the way to do this is to time yourself. You can use lots of different apps for this, but the sooner you start doing this, the sooner you will know how long research takes you (in hours). How long data collection design takes you. How long it takes to get the data and then how long it takes to analyse the data. How long it takes to read, write and edit a paper. How long it takes to do revisions.

You might think: ‘it depends on what I am doing’. Of course. Research will take different amounts of time depending how familiar you are with the topic to start with. But the writing part takes about the same amount of time in my experience. You just need to find out what that is for you. And when you do, you can break down those sessions and plot your pipeline accurately. How many writing sessions per week for how long is 100 hours of research (or whatever your number is). From there you can plan a 1-3-or 5 year pipeline in a way that ensures you are writing in your working week, not your evenings and weekends which is key to being a happier academic writer.

Taking on too many things is a cause of stress and academic burnout. Usually, no-one but yourself put you in that situation because you did not plan and you said yes to anything and everything that crossed your desk. Opportunities for working for free (publishing) are never ending. Make sure you get paid for your writing by making a pipeline that you tackle in your working week alongside your other teaching and service responsibilities.

If you want helping designing and then implementing your Publication Pipeline, join us on the Activate your Publication Pipeline Programme. 12 months coaching Programme with live coaching and lots of online course materials to guide you step by step through designing a pipeline that maximises your outputs.