How to manage my time juggling seven scholarly research papers?

May 30, 2023 4:40 PM

Hi all, I am a junior graduate student scholar entering a master's programme in international development in the fall, and I have like three papers that have the potential to be published but need a lot of revision and then I have four other papers I want to get started on top of that this summer and fall, but I wonder if this might be too much to tackle. What are some ways to manage my time wisely and tackle all of this with good time management?

Would it be best to focus on just the three revised papers for now or also try to start working on the other papers? What would be a good use of my time? I only work part-time and will only be a part-time graduate student in the fall.

posted by RearWindow to Education (19 answers total)

This is a great question for your advisor.
posted by Alterscape at 4:50 PM on May 30, 2023 [23 favorites]

Focus on the ones that are closer to submission. Then when you submit them and are waiting for peer review reports, you can get started on the other ones. Make sure that they are not redundant.
posted by virve at 4:58 PM on May 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

This is going to be a fairly field-specific question and also dependent on other factors not mentioned here (are they co-authored, being a big one). But my generic advice to students at your stage would be to focus on one to start with, whatever seems to be the strongest, and work on pushing that one as far as you can over the summer months. I will also add, echoing Alterscape's comment, that it is very, very hard in my experience for junior students to navigate field-specific issues in academic publishing without mentorship on the project.
posted by advil at 5:08 PM on May 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

This seems like too many things to work on at once to me, but I'll also second that this type of thing varies wildly across fields, groups, and how the student is poised.

In my experience in life sciences, 1-3 projects/papers is the most typical range for grad students to juggle at once.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:17 PM on May 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: @buntastic, I suppose you could call it junior scholar or emerging scholar? I will be a graduate student in the fall, studying for a master's programme in the social sciences.
posted by RearWindow at 6:26 PM on May 30, 2023

Yes, this is the kind of thing where expectations are so field dependent and institution dependent that it's hard to give broad advice beyond "see if your advisor to be might be down for advising you on this now."

But do take into account any co authors you have on the existing papers. If they're waiting for you, and your life isn't going to get *less* busy once you start the new program, consider prioritizing those papers.
posted by Stacey at 6:30 PM on May 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

So yes, this is field specific, so talk with your advisor (past or current). But some basic points:

-Focus on the goal you're working towards, i.e. getting an M.A. and getting into a Ph.D. program. Is one of these papers similar or related to what you might write on for your M.A. thesis? How many (if any) publications are required to gain entry to Ph.D. programs in your field? If most people are getting accepted with 0-1 publications, there is no need to go much beyond that.

-While again, fields vary somewhat, one similarity across fields is that citations generally matter more than quantity of papers. One publication in a top journal, that gets 100s of citations, is going to be much better for your career than seven papers in mid-tier (or lower) publications that few read, and nobody cites.

-I say this with no malice, but I think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself. As an incoming M.A. student, you're still a student. Which isn't to say you shouldn't publish anything, but ask yourself- do you feel a burning need to get this research out now? Why? Or is it possible that with a bit more experience under your belt, you're thinking on these topics may change, refine, or deepen? I have definitely known people who regret their first publication(s), and wish they had given themselves a bit more time to 'bake' their ideas.

-As maybe you know, the first step in peer review is that you submit your manuscript, sometimes the editor might decide outright to reject it, otherwise they send it off to 2-3 scholars to review your research and provide comments and a recommendation on whether it's publishable. The process, especially now with COVID burnout/shrinking TT faculty, can be absurdly slow. It makes more sense to send off articles one at a time and get them into the publishing pipeline, then to be working on 7 at once, and then be waiting for months (maybe even a year) to hear back on any of them.
posted by coffeecat at 7:09 PM on May 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

I’ve been at this for 20 years, more or less, and I can’t give serious thought to more than three projects at a time, ideally at different stages of completion. Two is better. Anything beyond that languishes. YMMV.
posted by eirias at 7:15 PM on May 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I saw in a follow-up response you gave that you are just starting a Master's program. I am not saying this in a gatekeeping way, but unless you are already an established practitioner in the field, conducting research in that context, or a self-actualized independent scholar with a robust research agenda, who is now getting a degree, but is already very knowledgeable in the field, publishing scholarly papers, much less 7 of them, seems premature.
posted by virve at 7:21 PM on May 30, 2023 [25 favorites]

In the social sciences, chances are good you're doing human-subjects research. If so, are all your IRB t's crossed and i's dotted? I've known more places than I wish I'd known where professors were a good bit too indulgent with undergrads vis-a-vis the IRB. That indulgence can stop quite abruptly, to the detriment of your career.

Talk to your advisor about this. You absolutely cannot afford a giant ethics mess at any point -- but now's an especially lousy time for it.
posted by humbug at 7:26 PM on May 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

To humbug: we don't know that the OP is US-based and thus subject to American federal regulations. In fact, given the scarcity of MA programs in International Development in the US, and their abundance in Europe, and the fact that they spelled "program" as "programme" my money would be on the latter.
posted by virve at 7:31 PM on May 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

If IRBs (internal review boards) aren’t applicable where you are, then there will certainly be some other type of ethics review board (research ethics committee, etc) that your proposed research needs to clear first. This might be at your university, workplace, or a regional authority or all of the above depending on the types of research.

I’m currently assisting with a paper for my team at a larger international NGO working in global health/international development. While some of the delays have been due to other workloads and difficulties in group projects, it’s still taken us 6 months to write an incomplete manuscript with sections still to be completed.

During my internship/practicum during grad school I spent the entire summer supporting the data collection and then the data analysis and writing for a research article. That time didn’t even include submissions to journals.

Focus on the top two most promising papers and move those as far along as possible for now and then return to the others if possible later on
posted by raccoon409 at 8:00 PM on May 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, and if you must move forward with all 7, a Gantt chart is a helpful tool for tracking all the steps required
posted by raccoon409 at 8:01 PM on May 30, 2023

Agree with coffeecat and others who say this is field specific, ask your advisor, you are getting ahead of yourself. Maybe you are a genius, but you are basically still an undergraduate. I have done Ph.D. admissions and job searches (different field, not quantitative) and neither I nor anyone else here has ever been moved by a publication at that level. They're almost never good (of course they might be great for someone at that level but their being published is irrelevant). Again, unless you are a genius you don't have seven potentially good papers that you are in a position to bring out in the next couple of years. Graduate school is there for a reason: to learn how to be a researcher, and it is a one of a kind opportunity. You will make a lot of progress compared to what you achieved as an undergraduate. So, talk to your advisor, pick one or two that they think most promising, work on them slowly, keep a third on the back burner. If you can get one or two of them out within the next 5 years in a competitive journal, that will help you. The ones that are in graduate student journals or noncompetitive journals, or that seem like they are written by an MA student, won't. Much better to focus on learning to be a good researcher, one or two projects with the most potential, and (slowly) building a teaching portfolio is that is something you can do at this stage. All that is from my experience in a different field though, so grain of salt.
posted by melamakarona at 8:49 PM on May 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

From a cognate field in the US, left academia after my postdoc. If I saw an incoming MA student saying they have 7 potential papers for publication, my response would be “sure you do”. This would be a decent amount for someone coming out of a top 5 PhD program in my field.

Also, even if you got all these papers published, I have a hard time believing that a majority of them would be in major journals. Lots of mid to low tier papers signals that is your ceiling. Better to signal potential.

EDIT: To benchmark: three (two of which are of very high quality) papers make a dissertation. Have you done two dissertations worth of research?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:23 AM on May 31, 2023 [11 favorites]

I'm in a field that straddles humanities/social sciences; I'm in a subfield that does articles, where co-authorship is common. I would expect a student to be coming in to an MA program with maybe 3 articles in progress max. Those three would probably be (1) BA honors thesis or similar, (2) a class paper their prof said explicitly yes, this is a publishable idea, and (3) a coauthored paper with a professor, for whom they RA'd.

Note for all three there would've been explicit mentorship and approval from a professor. (1) and (2) would still need significant advising and mentoring to make the jump from "undergraduate work" to "publishable".

Unless you've got that previous nod/ok from a professor or other researcher, you likely don't have 7 papers you can get to submittable status during your program, much less the next 6 months.

My recommendation for the summer is rather than trying to write these up is to do a lot of reading in your field. If you're going to write these papers eventually, that's going to help you out the most, and also get you on a good footing for the start of your program.
posted by damayanti at 5:31 AM on May 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

then I have four other papers I want to get started on top of that this summer and fall

Focus on your coursework this fall.
posted by avocet at 9:25 AM on May 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

Read the book How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia and follow the instructions. And yes, at some point soon schedule a meeting with a supervisor.
posted by rollick at 11:33 AM on May 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

For an incoming Master's student, I think the best use of your time is in ensuring that you are really secure in what you know about the state of your field currently, and that you have a really good understanding of any key theory. But I might be scarred from having to teach myself research philosophy quite quickly in the middle of my course. In general, it's good to have whatever assumed knowledge your advisor and others will probably expect you to have.

Beyond that, I think it depends how you work. If you tend to have a single-minded focus, then you're probably better off working sequentially and doing one at a time. If you tend to flit between things, then I think working on two or possibly three in parallel might suit you better. Seven is too many things to have on the go. For the four that you just think are great ideas, write up a one-pager about each idea off the top of your head without doing further research, and then set them aside.
posted by plonkee at 2:08 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]