How to publish more papers

Publish or perish: this is the dogma of today’s research. So, how to maximise your publication output? This depends mostly on your career level, so let us focus here first on master and PhD students, who are most desperate for publications.

Some students adopt really questionable strategies: publish the same work under different names; chop your work into smaller pieces; add tiny incremental stuff to your work; etc. This is not a good strategy, as it produces (in the best case) un-interesting works, which nobody reads or cites. Don’t forget: now you are desperate for publications, but tomorrow you will be hunting citations. So prepare for the next step too.

A good strategy follows three different paths:

  1. Align what you are doing to what can be published, not the other way around. I often see this problem: a student works on something, without taking care about how to publish it later and then she wonders why she cannot find a publication venue or so mich additional work is needed to get to a publishable state. Thus, before you start doing something, ask yourself where and what you will be able to publish. You always need to offer innovation!
  2. Make the extra work also publishable. Often you produce a lot of secondary material,  like source code, datasets, etc. Make sure those also get published in repositories (data and code) or specialised publishers. Those will not necessary contribute to your “official” publication record, but will your work more prominent in the community, people will remember your name and THEN they will also start reading and citing your work…
  3. Help others. Usually people do not ask you simply “Would you like to write this paper together?”. At least not when you are still a student. However, you can watch out for opportunities. At conferences, at workshops or at group research meetings, you can listen carefully to the problems of other people and offer your help. Very often the result of this is a joint paper. Your interest and offer to help should be genuine, otherwise people will never repeat the experience with you.

And, last but not least: Publishing papers means writing papers. Practice it as much as you can: write, write, write…

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Can I submit a paper to my own journal special issue?

I am currently serving as a guest editor for a special issue at MDPI. Some of my students got really excited: Can we submit something there? I am not really sure why they think this is a good idea and in fact, some people do this. However, my simple answer is: No.  It is not a good idea. First of all, if the journal and /or publisher are sensible, they will require a completely independent review process for your papers. They will need to find another editor for this job. At the same time, if it gets published, that process is not visible any more and people might think: Oh, how unprofessional is that, publishing in your own SI!

Remember, your scientific reputation is all you have. Do not put it on risk just to get another paper on your list.

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Wish post: how to make presentations

A student asked me recently how to prepare good presentations, “as in your lectures!”. Beside being really touched by the fact that she liked my presentations, in fact I do have some tips, which I acquired over time.

  • You need to address two different senses of your audience. Assuming a typical slide-based presentation, this would be hearing and seeing. Your audience listens to what you are saying and they see what you have on your slides. However, the problem is when the slide is full of text. Psychological studies have shown that reading text and hearing text is processed by the same area in the brain. This means that you double occupy this region when you offer text on your slides. Think of your own experience: When  I see text on a slide, I try to read it, but this occupies my full attention and I stop listening. So, you need always to make sure that the audience is not currently occupied with reading when you explain something.

Look at the following two slides – which one is nicer to look at?

However, now it becomes crucial what you say. With the first slide (the text one), you can say anything you want, since the audience is not listening at all and struggle to read your text. With the second one, you need to explain everything on the picture. Best, you introduce the individual items (the nodes, the sink, the wireless links, application) one by one with an animation. Note the arrows and the definitions, they are important!

  • Identify the goal of your presentation! Is it to show new results? Is it to teach something? These two need completely different approaches (maybe I will write about those in the near future…). I general, when teaching, you would use much more text for the people to have a reference later. However, in the best of all worlds you would have a proper presentation for class and handouts/scripts for home and reference. With research results (also from student projects!) you would focus on numbers and important definitions (e.g. a legend).
  • Sometimes you need to present difficult stuff: a complex equation or graph. Make sure to present it step by step, for example like in this slide:

Here, I have used an animation, which shows each line separately, so that I have time to explain it. Especially when it comes to the complex equation at the bottom, I go slowly one spot at a time and give intuition behind what is going on. Do not rely on laser pointers for this! They shake when you are nervous, they are not well seen and people do not know what are you showing them.

You should use the same trick with animations, arrows and spotlights also to present graphs – show the people what exactly they should look at.

  • Build a story. A presentation is not a historical overview and does not have to follow the sections of your research paper. You should also focus on some of your results, not all. You can build the story also visually, see this slide:The colourful legend at the top is not only part of the title of this slide, but also tells the audience where we are in the story. Some people also do this with a normal table of contents. In this slide, you can also see how text can work – you simply need to introduce the bullet points one by one and to have them short.
  • Focus your text on what is really important, do not waste the reading time of your audience with full sentences, conclusions, etc. At the same time, make sure that all important stuff, like mathematical definitions, colours used for coding something, axes on the graph, etc, are always clear. You can easily do this by offering a small legend at each slide.

I would really like to hear from you! Let me know whether you found this useful and what tricks do you have!

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If I ever have to teach online again, …

I will start with a session about how to efficiently and politely use the online tools.

In the online lecture last week, I decided to use Zoom’s breakout rooms. The students loved it and I really think it is a great tool to create a private working space for the students. In fact, I think it works even better for the students than my usual in-class group assignments. However, many of the students wasted almost their complete time in trying to figure out tech stuff, like sharing your screen, connecting via laptop and phone, etc.

Another big problem I am facing right now is students not switching on their cameras. When I asked at the beginning of the lectures who has a camera and who doesn’t, all said they have one. But when I ask now to switch them on, at least half of over 30 students simply do not. I tried to explain them that it is simply not polite and not very useful for the lectures – I need also visual feedback how they are doing.

So, in summary, if I ever need to teach fully online again, I will start with a session on advanced tool usage and what we call netiquette – how to behave politely and efficiently in online lectures.  More concretely, these should include:

  • Switch on your camera, position it correctly
  • Switch off your microphone, unless you want to say something
  • Put your full name
  • Use the “raise hand” and other available buttons
  • Use the breakout rooms, call for help, return back to main room and back to breakout room
  • Use the chat
  • Share your screen
  • Connect with two devices: your laptop and your phone, share the screen of your laptop
  • Use polls

Of course, this is very Zoom-centric. However, most of the video conferencing tools have now one or more of these features, which are indeed very useful. If you want to use some additional tools, it is even more important to practice them before (e.g. for polling).

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My favourite book on scientific writing

I have found this book during an extensive search for books and materials on how to write papers. Its title really attracted me and I decided that if this guy knows how to attract my attention so well, he should also now a couple of tricks how to write papers! So, here we go:

Writing Science: How to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded. By Joshua Schimel.

The book is mostly based on examples from chemistry and biology, but is well comprehensible for all natural scientists out there (I am a computer scientist and I do understand it). The tips are great and very practical, going into details about writing and presenting data.

Now a must for all my students (and for myself)!

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Simple tricks to activate interaction in online lectures

The semester started late this year in Bremen – only on Nov. 3rd. In these weird Corona-driven times, we decided to go fully digital and are now running our lectures in real-time via Zoom.

I was researching a lot about how to activate interaction in class and how to make students more comfortable to ask questions and to speak up. At the end, I decided for two actions:

  • In the first Zoom lecture, I asked everybody to quickly say hello, their name and where they come from. This took quite a lot for 40+ students, but it was definitely worth it – later on, I received many thanks from the students to have given them the chance to say something. Also, it forced them at first to switch on their cameras and most of them stayed with camera on – much better also for me, since I do not like teaching to black boxes. It feels like talking to the wall…
  • We have already done very good experience with weekly homework during the first pandemic semester. Also this time, we started right away with some simple exercises. One of them I called the “forum games” – everybody should contribute two posts on the class forum, document that and submit for homework. Surprise, surprise: discussions are now flourishing!

Simple, but effective tricks – do you also have some? Share them as comments!

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How I record my teaching videos

People keep asking me what hardware and software I use to record my videos (many of them on YouTube). Here we go:

I have my own video room at the University of Bremen (NW1):

I use two cameras: one facing the table with me sitting on the chair and on document camera above the table. A wireless microphone is connected to the face camera. I use TechSmith’s Camtasia to record the face camera and the sound. The recordings of the document camera are stored locally on a SD card.

Additionally, I use a second copy of Camtasia on my laptop to record my screen (e.g. when I show how to code).

Yet on top of this I have an iPad Pro with a pencil, where ExplainEverything is running and recorded via TechSmith Capture.

Later on, we take all recordings together and cut the video via Adobe Premiere. There, we also cut away the green background and exchange it with transparent. The result is one of the following:

Note about cutting: we tried Camtasia and Premiere. Camtasia is faster and simple to use. However, the green background removal does not work very well and I had a green “halo” around my head. Premiere has some performance issues, but cuts away the background very well.

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