09 November 2012

Publishing Milestones

Being an academic, one of the key things is to disseminate your work, after all, there is not a lot of point solving a problem if you don't tell anyone about it.
So we publish papers, in journals, in books and in conference proceedings. I try and keep a a track of how many I have published and today, whilst updating my CV I realised that I had reached 100 published articles. That 100 only includes things that are in some form of peer reviewed scientific publication (so not magazine articles, blogs, jokes or other stuff like that).
Now I do not claim that all of these are marvellous pieces of work, in fact some of them are plain wrong, some are just crap and a few are ok. I am not going to contemplate their various merits here I am just going going to celebrate the big round number.
So here is a bit more of a breakdown
100 Articles
50 in main-stream Journals
31 in Books and Special Publications
19 in Conference Proceedings

I am first author in 21 of those, which might mean I am a free loader, but I prefer to think it means I don't hog the glory. There are approximately 140 co-authors at least 20 of whom I have never met.

I have been publishing since 1993 which is almost 20 years, so that's an average of 5 articles per year. It's nowhere near linear though so when I have some more spare time or when I am very bored I will plot it up in excel. It will be interesting to see because for the last 6 years I have only been an academic 50% of the time (worked in industry the rest).

For anyone who knows about metrics such as the H-factor, mine is 17 or 18. This is ok for my career stage and better than Brian Cox,  but the sad reality is that it means 4/5 of my research output has been cited less than 20 times by others.

Then we get into the money bit! During my research careerer I have raised approximately £3.6 million which means that on average, each paper cost £36k. Each H-point cost £211k . I am not sure if that is good value or not, but I had lot of fun along the way.

Anyway I think I'll go out tonight and celebrate the double milestone of  100 articles and 50 journal articles with a cold beer. Which makes me wonder how many beers each paper has cost...