Open Science

Your guide to Open Access publishing and Open Science

Tag: guides

It’s ok to be lazy with the Google Scholar Button

Google comes with a new serviceable solution for researchers. The Google Scholar Button has become a hit in the past few weeks. It also almost made me cry with joy. What is so useful about it? The Google Scholar Button extension is currently available for both Chrome and Firefox browsers, which means for the majority of Internet users. The add-on has already been installed by more than 374 thousand Chrome users and 27 thousand Firefox users (there are plenty of scholars around the world, right?) What is more, the extension is highlighted among “the hottest” on the official Firefox add-ons website. […]

Blog on your own and blog with your publisher

Both journal editors and authors rack their brains on how to increase citation scores. This is why they should work together to solve the problem. As I pointed out in my previous entry on this topic, to be cited an article has to be first discovered. The discoverability of a paper can be increased with, amongst others, search engine optimization and academic blogging. I discussed the problem of SEO here. Now it is time to write a little bit more about academic blogging. Academic blogging is quite a new thing and we are still lacking a deeper understanding of this […]

Academia is more and more crowded

In the race for citations, journal editors and authors should work together

Citation count is widely seen as the best proxy of impact in the academic community. The success of authors and journals depends on their citation scores. That is why, both journal editors and authors wonder how to attract the academic community to cite their articles or journals more. And this is why journal editors and authors should work together to solve this problem. If you are an author, who is not a Nobel Prize Laureate, you are probably wondering how to improve the chances of your work being cited. And believe me, the managing editor of the journal you are […]

Problems of Academic Writing

Three common problems of academic writing – the greenhorn guide

So, you do not know LaTeX? You’re afraid of artificial syntax? You get scared when you only see something similar to “<script>blabla</script>”? Well, I think you should work it out. Regardless of the discipline you are working in, you should not be uncomfortable with using tools like LaTeX or Markdown. They might even make your life easier. Even if you are a humanist and if you never had anything to do with coding. I think almost everyone knows that academic work is not a piece of cake. There are thousands of well known anecdotes about the obstacles faced by PhD […]

Should you care about your h-index and if so, how to improve it?

Should you care about your h-index, and if so, how to improve it?

If the career opportunities, research funding and awards of Claude Shannon had depended on his h-index, he would have been in serious trouble. Even though his works were absolutely revolutionary and he created the basis for the recent digital revolution, he did not like to write too much, and would have probably faced hardships in academia today. Nevertheless, now, in the competitive “publish or perish” environment it is important to publish, and to publish in the right way. A career in science depends more and more on quantitative measures that aim to evaluate the efficiency of work and the future […]

How to get your Article Processing Charges funded? – a step by step guide

Publishers do not expect authors to pay for APC out of their own pocket, and usually try to inform authors about all the possible sources of funding that they can use to cover the cost. This blog post is one such try. So you have decided to submit your paper to an open access journal, probably because of its excellent quality, relevant scope, and since you expect that thanks to the openness, your work will have a broader impact and gain more citations. Now it is time to think a little bit about money. Who will cover the cost of […]