How to Make Time for Research and Writing

Summer is just around the corner and can be a great time to be productive, even if you have to work around teaching summer classes, field work or family vacations. The Chronicle shares some thoughts from fellow academics around the country on How to Make Time for Research and Writing, part of their Productive Summer article series.

Increasing your research's impact

Academia is more crowded and competitive than ever, both in terms of research dollars and the multitude of ways people now have to shout about their own research, which could drown out your voice. Learn 8 Tips to increase the reach of your research in 2017 from editage Insights.

Rejection of rejection

Cath Chapman and Tim Slade from the University of South Wales, Sydney, Australia, provide the template of a "rejection of rejection letter" in a recent BMJ feature, which begins:

Rejection of rejection letter

[insert university emblem here]

Dear Professor [insert name of editor]

[Re: MS 2015_XXXX Insert title of ground-breaking study here]

Thank you for your rejection of the above manuscript.

Unfortunately we are not able to accept it at this time. As you are probably aware we receive many rejections each year and are simply not able to accept them all. In fact, with increasing pressure on citation rates and fiercely competitive funding structures we typically accept fewer than 30% of the rejections we receive. Please don’t take this as a reflection of your work. The standard of some of the rejections we receive is very high...

Read the rest at BMJ:
Rejection of rejection: a novel approach to overcoming barriers to publication

thanks to Dean McKay for finding this!

Scientific papers with shorter titles might get more citations, study suggests

A study in the journal Royal Society Open Science suggests that articles with shorter titles may be cited more often that those with longer ones, based on 140,000 papers published between 2007 and 2013. Read more about this study in ScienceInsider.