How are some scholars so productive, publishing hundreds of powerful works over their careers? To find out, author Kenneth Kiewra interviewed nearly three dozen productive scholars in his field of educational psychology. Kiewra introduces these and other productive scholars whose productivity stories are chronicled throughout the book. Kiewra also draws from his own productive scholar career, where his pioneering research on note taking, the SOAR Teaching and Learning Method, and talent development have made him a Top 2% Most-Cited Researcher Worldwide. You’ll learn in the Introduction that there are several well-trodden paths to scholarly productivity but that these pathways are rarely revealed to budding or even seasoned scholars looking to find their way. This is the “hidden curriculum” in academia, the insider knowledge needed to succeed and flourish as an academic scholar, the insider knowledge that can help emerging and seasoned scholars alike avoid dead-end missteps and years’ worth of wasted time. Be a More Productive Scholar reveals the hidden curriculum, a trail map including more than a hundred productive scholar tips your doctoral advisor and senior colleagues never told you or might not even know.

To survive and prosper, researchers must demonstrate a successful record of publications in journals well-regarded by their fields. This chapter discusses how to successfully publish research in journals in the social and behavioral sciences and is organized into four sections. The first section highlights important factors that are routinely involved in the process of publishing a paper in refereed journals. The second section features some factors that are not necessarily required to publish a paper but that, if present, can positively influence scientific productivity. The third section discusses some pitfalls scholars should avoid to protect their scientific career. The last section addresses general publication issues within the science community. We also recommend further resources for those interested in learning more about successfully publishing research.

Opening with a brief sketch of the evolution of research evaluation is followed by a description of the publication-oriented nature of academia today. The Introduction provides the necessary contextual information for investigating research evaluation systems. It then defines two critical blind spots in the contemporary literature on research evaluation systems. The first is the absence, within histories of the science of measuring and evaluating research, of the Soviet Union and post-socialist countries. This is despite the fact that these countries have played a key part in this history, from its very inception. The second relates to thinking about global differences in studies of the transformations in scholarly communication. It is stressed that the contexts in which countries confront the challenges of the publish or perish culture and questionable journals and conferences should be taken into account in discussions about them. Through its overview of diverse histories of evaluation and its identification of core issues in the literature, the chapter introduces readers to the book’s core arguments.

Chapter 6 deals with the main areas in which the evaluation game transforms scholarly communication practices. Thus, it focuses on the obsession with metrics as a quantification of every aspect of academic labor; so-called questionable academia, that is the massive expansion of questionable publishers, journals, and conferences; following the metrics deployed by institutions, and changes in publication patterns in terms of publication types, the local or global orientation of research, its contents, and the dominant languages of publications. Finally, the chapter underlines the importance of taking a geopolitically sensitive approach to evaluation games that is able to account for differences in the ways in which the game is played in central versus peripheral countries, as well as in the ways in which such practices are valorized, depending on the location of a given science system. Such differences are not only the result of differential access to resources and shifting power relations but also, as argued in the book, of the historical heritage of capitalist or socialist models in specific countries and institutions.

The world of research relies heavily on what we might call scientific capital. Scientific capital is the collection of research experiences, publications, citations, and relationships forged with others that a researcher has accumulated over their scientific career. However, this pursuit of scientific capital affects the rate and direction of medical progress in two ways. Firstly, since scientific capital determines who gets to participate in the world of research, it indirectly influences who gets to affect the rate and direction of progress. Secondly, there is a strong incentive to accumulate scientific capital. These incentives end up changing the types of research projects we choose to pursue. It rewards the pursuit of conservative and incremental research that produces quick results and boosts publication and citation metrics, creating a culture of publish or perish. Chapter 1 is concerned with how this can have negative long-term consequences on medical progress.

This chapter focuses on professional implications of journal article publication. It has five major sections, Intuitive Thoughts, Mark and Hulio, Professional obligations, Professional challenges, and Practical suggestions. It starts with a discussion of intuitive thoughts of graduate students and then a discussion of two real-life cases (Mark and Hulio) so that we can see how new authors think and act related to the central question of the chapter. After that, two core concepts, Professional obligations and Professional challenges, are discussed in detail, followed by several practical suggestions. In brief, there are two major implications. Publishing journal articles not only concerns major professional obligations to disseminate knowledge and improve human life but also generates various professional challenges of communicating knowledge scientifically.