Writing about my last professional journal article got me to thinking about the way academic scientists are required to communicate in order to advance their careers.  (I can say "they" in this case because I don't have those restrictions any more; I can communicate however I want, as long as I don't violate any publisher's copyrights.)  

There are lots of scientists blogging out there right now, as a way of communicating with the public or with colleagues prior to publication (which can sometimes take a year after submitting the manuscript).  At a small liberal arts college or a community college, this is less important, but at research universities those posts are definitely not considered publications by most hiring committees, or tenure/promotion committees.  

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a really neat tool for literature searching.  You can find all kinds of articles as fodder for Steemit posts, or just for your own interest.  One benefit is that the citations very often have a link to a copy of the paper, either on an open-access publisher's site or a PDF of the author's original unproofed manuscript (which the publisher does not own).  

GS's author profiles of individual scientists are also useful.  They auto-generate from peer-reviewed journals and citation databases.  Right-click on the link below to open mine in a new window so we can look at it together.

Randall D Hayes profile on Google Scholar

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Notice that some of those citations are not actually full papers, but only abstracts of posters that I did at scientific meetings.  You can tell if the citation consists of a single page, or if the page numbers have an A or an S (for supplement) in front of them.  Those count for very little -- more than a blog post or an interview with a journalist, but not much more.

So that means that I published three peer-reviewed papers:

• Hayes & Merigan 2006
• Hayes et. al. 2005
• Hayes 2013

plus one book chapter.

• Hayes, Byrne, & Baxter 2003

There's also an unpublished manuscript, way down at the bottom, which has names attached but no journal citation.  Those don't count towards anything.  They might have been rejected by peer reviewers, or they might have been the work of a student who moved on to other projects and never bothered to submit the paper.  That happens a lot with students, especially undergraduates, but also with graduate students.  In this case, I was a postdoc in another lab, and while I did some preliminary work with the model and data set, that work was mostly covered in my 2003 paper.  I didn't actually write any of this paper (in fact, I don't think I knew it existed until Google Scholar told me about it).  Listing me as an author sounds like something an undergraduate would do.  An acknowledgement would probably have been more appropriate.  But, as I said, it doesn't matter, because it's an unpublished manuscript.  Zero times anything is zero.

There's a lot of similarly invisible science out there.  For instance, my lab rotation projects, on monkeys and humans and bats, were presented to my program, and at scientific meetings, but they were never written up for publication.  If there's interest, I might try to dig up some of that stuff, just as a lesson on how scientific training goes (or went, in the mid-to-late 1990s).  I might not even remember those projects well enough to describe them accurately.  There were cool pictures, though (on film!).

Citation Counts

So, maybe you don't have a lot of papers, but maybe they're really GOOD papers.  How can you tell?  Well, you look at the citation counts.  If lots of other scientists are reading and citing your papers, that's a proxy variable for their impact and thus their quality.  Not a perfect measure, by any means, but it's the standard one.  Click on the "cited by" tab in my profile and look at the graph.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uWZ5lvsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

2007 (9) and 2016 (6) were my best years.  By 2016 I had already left academia!  

This is not to sound bitter, but just to point out that in any system there are limitations and loopholes.  I made choices, like quickly self-publishing a book to get it out there for free, as opposed to spending a year going through an academic publisher and taking advantage of their marketing department to put it into readers' hands.  Big mistake, from a tenure/promotion point of view.  I spent a lot of time on a blog and a podcast, as public outreach, because I enjoyed doing those things.  Both the book and the podcast were grant-funded projects, which I expected would carry some weight.  Nope.  Zero times anything is zero.

The upside of all this is that I can now share some of that work on Steemit.  Keep an eye out.  I worked on some cool stuff back in the day.

Thanks for reading my ramble down memory lane, here on the final evening of 2017!