Book Published Peek

—Table of Contents—

1 Introduction

Part One: Becoming a Productive Researcher
2 Motivate Research with Questions
3 Prioritize Deep Work
4 Build Consistency through Habits
5 Cultivate a Virtuous Cycle

Part Two: From Research Idea to Published Journal Article
6 Review the Literature
7 Outline the Project
8 Run the Experiment
9 Visualize the Findings
10 Write the First Draft
11 Edit the Second Draft
12 Revise until Published

13 Epilogue: What Next?

—Chapter 1: Introduction—

Despair hollowed my gut as I read it: “…please revise your research article to address the reviewers’ comments and resubmit.” Two years prior I had left industry to pursue an engineering PhD. I wanted to shift my focus: to work on broader problems that would advance scientific understanding and make the world a better place to live. But the challenges of navigating my first project were suffocating that noble ambition. The whole process had so many hurdles. I had spent months developing an unusable computer model, debugged my experiment multiple times, and battled two rounds of peer-review. This latest email—an invitation to fight peer-review round three—left me feeling desperate. Would I ever see this project published?

If research feels hard, it’s because it is hard. For one, the work is outright difficult. To advance our projects toward publication, we must complete a multitude of tasks. Some of those tasks are exciting. Some of them are tedious. All of them are hard work.

But the more challenging part of research is its mysterious process. We know that it begins with a research idea and ends with a published journal article, but the path between those points is unclear—especially to the novice researcher. 

Yes, our first publication attempt is especially difficult. For one, we have no idea what we’re doing. We’ve never completed the journey from research idea to published journal article, and that inexperience creates uncertainty. What task should we be working on? How do we know when that task is complete? After it is complete, what do we work on next? And how many subsequent tasks must we finish until our project is done? 

Eventually, that uncertainty gives way to doubt. We begin to compensate for the many things we don’t know by elevating our standards on the things we do know. If we don’t know how to write a first draft, then we’ll become such good experimenters that nobody will notice. But to pull that off, we must raise our experimenting standards to perfection. And when we fail to achieve that perfection, we begin to doubt whether we belong in a research environment at all.

Needless to say, that doubt makes it difficult to stay productive. When our work feels never-ending, when our best efforts fail our perfect standards, it’s hard to muster the motivation to continue. And it’s also hard to ask for help. 

And when we seek help, it’s difficult to find adequate guidance. It turns out that our peers are just as clueless—and just as good at hiding it—as we are. And our supervisors, however generous, often lack the time to offer step-by-step assistance.

The upshot: novice researchers—despite our inexperience, insecurities, inefficiencies, and limited guidance—are expected to dive into the research process and emerge from the other end published. Amazingly enough, that actually does happen. I did eventually publish that first research project, and you might stumble your way to the end of yours. But the frustration, burnout, and anxiety nearly extinguished my fledgling research career. Sure, we learn from our failures, but did that first research project need to be so challenging? Was all that frustration really necessary?

Goal of this Book

My answer to that question is no. Truly, research is difficult work. But we can avoid many of the mistakes that push our first research project from difficult to demoralizing. More productive working rhythms, a cohesive picture of the whole research process, and a step-by-step, task-oriented to-do list can help us avoid many missteps. And though I had to gather that information the hard way, I want to make it easier for you. That’s why I wrote this book.

But before we get into the goal of this book, let’s clarify the goal of our first research project. One goal might be to prove our worth. Although we might not admit it, we often see our first project as an opportunity to establish our researcher identity. But when our work defines our identity, we become defensive perfectionists who receive criticism as personal attacks and view imperfect research as a blemish on our record. Not only does that mindset produce anxiety, but our defensiveness will keep us from seeking help, and our perfectionism will keep us from finishing our project.

Another goal for our first journal article might be to advance scientific understanding. That motivation is certainly noble, but for the novice researcher it’s rather ambitious. It’s rare for a single publication to substantially advance a research field. Knowledge develops slowly, and it takes a portfolio of research projects to push the boundaries of science. When we expect that impact from a single publication—especially from our first one—we’re bound to be disappointed.    

No, the main goal for our first project is much more modest. Its main goal is to give us an opportunity to learn how the research process works. Its main goal is to give us confidence.

And to achieve that goal, we don’t need to produce a perfect, ground-breaking publication. We simply need an achievable research idea that yields an above-average journal article.

Once we have that above-average publication behind us, we can improve our research process and hold our subsequent articles to higher standards. And as some years go by, we may look back on a stack of high-quality publications and be proud of the contributions we’ve made to solving big questions in our field. Or maybe we simply grasp the research process well enough to crank out a few good articles, shave some semesters off of grad school, and finish our dissertation in less time and with less stress. That sounds pretty good too. In either case, we need to get this first publication out of the way.

The goal for this book then, is to guide the novice science and engineering researcher to publish their first journal article with as little frustration as possible so that they can gain the confidence to produce subsequent publications that will change the face of science.

Scope of this Book

The book pursues that goal by providing a step-by-step plan for advancing a project all the way from research idea to published journal article. The book organizes the research process and breaks it into manageable tasks that steadily move us toward that goal. And it begins with some productivity philosophies that will help us complete those various research tasks more effectively.

Part One of the book guides us through three productivity frameworks that help us become more productive researchers—the kind of researchers that can effectively complete the mountains of work required to publish a research project. Part One teaches us to:

• motivate our research with questions,

• prioritize high-concentration work, and

• build consistency through habits.

It concludes by helping us apply those productivity frameworks to develop a tailored plan for improving our unique working rhythms.

Part Two—the bulk of the book—demystifies the research process. It divides the process into six consecutive phases:

• Review the Literature

• Outline the Project

• Run the Experiment

• Visualize the Findings

• Write the First Draft

• Edit the Second Draft

• Revise until Published

Each of these phases has its own chapter that explains the phase’s goal, provides a series of step-by-step tasks to complete that goal, and instructs us when to move on to the next research phase. Each chapter ends with a flowchart, a recap of the chapter’s main material, and directions to online material—handouts, worksheets, templates, and other downloads—that aid us in completing the research process.

If all goes well, you’ll finish the book with some better working rhythms and a successful march through the research process. In that process you’ll find a research gap, develop a research question, run an experiment that answers that research question with its results, write a manuscript that explains the project in the context of your broader research field, and maneuver that manuscript through the peer-revision process until it’s published. And years from now when you’re a distinguished researcher with scores of science-revolutionizing publications, you can write me a thank you note for helping you get this first article behind you.

Sound good? Then, let’s get started.

This book will be available for purchase in November 2019