Strategic publishing

Publishing strategically

Strategic publishing involves taking a systematic approach to ensure you publish in the most effective place and maximise success in your publishing endeavours. Your publishing record will have a crucial impact on your career if you pursue academia or research and can be a valuable addition to your CV if you choose to work in industry or government.

Planning your publishing strategy will help you to:

  • plan your project and its outcomes - how many papers are you aiming to write and in what time frame?
  • set realistic expectations and define the boundaries of what is possible and desirable to achieve
  • identify the right journal for your paper and determine your target audience
  • amplify the impact of your research
  • meet your employer’s/funder’s requirements
  • put a focus on your career by determining where your career path is headed.

Read:

Tress Academy Why you need a publishing strategy

Anne-Wil Harzing The four P’s of Publishing

Anne-Wil Harzing The four C’s of getting Cited

A balanced publishing strategy

There is often a balance to be drawn between your obligations as a Curtin author with University reporting requirements and a need to promote your work for maximum impact.

Australian Universities are required by the federal government to collate and submit their research output via Excellence in Research Australia (ERA), an assessment system administered by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The Research Office at Curtin (ROC) collects information on ERA eligible publications to feed into the ERA rounds which occur every five years. To be eligible, publication outputs must achieve a certain level of citation and to do this they mostly will need to be published in quality journals that are indexed by scholarly databases.

In addition, Faculties and Schools will have their own view on quality practices in relevant disciplines, often relating these to their annual planning process.

It is important that you consider these requirements when deciding how and where to publish.

Since 2018, the ERA process has broadened to include an Engagement and Impact assessment (EI). This assesses how well researchers are engaging with end-users of research, and shows how universities are translating their research into economic, social, environmental, cultural and other impacts. It has opened the gates to a whole new range of publication options, including blogs, social media posts and writing for The Conversation. These non-traditional forms of publication can now be tracked and counted using platform such as Altmetric Explorer and PlumX and can be an important part of your publishing profile.

You can learn more about this process from the Curtin Research and Engagement webpages.