Help!!! Meeting an important visitor? Only have 10 minutes?

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to prepare for a meeting with an important academic visitor in no time at all

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 19 Oct 2024 15:50)

Do you recognise the following scenario? You are about to meet an official guest of some standing, but you do not know the academic in question very well. Hence, you do not have a clear idea of what s/he is well-known for. You have been running around all day and only have 5-10 minutes before the meeting. How do you ensure you are well prepared and don’t blunder your way through the meeting?

You could of course start searching on the web for the academic’s university staff page. However, this might not always be easy to find, especially if the academic has a relatively common name. Moreover, not all universities allow their staff to create their own web pages. Even if they do, they often are out of date as most academics are not very diligent in maintaining them.

Here Publish or Perish comes to the rescue with a quick solution. If you know the academic’s given and family name you can use these for a very quick author search, which can allow you to deduce quite a lot in just a couple of minutes. I recommend you try a Google Scholar Profile search first as this is likely to give the most comprehensive record and the quickest result. However, if the academic doesn't have a GS Profile, a regular Google Scholar search will do too.

What are you best known for?

Even though a “quick-and-dirty” search might not be able to give you fully accurate citation metrics, looking at the academic's most cited works will give you a very quick idea of what the academic you are meeting is best-known for. It might also give you a good insight into their publication strategy.

  • Do they have a large number of papers that have gathered a reasonable number of citations? That might point to a more diversified publication strategy.
  • Do they have one or two papers with a huge number of citations and other less cited work? This might point to a very focused publication strategy.

If you do this for my name, you will see quickly that much of my highly cited work is in the area of citation analysis, with Publish or Perish itself ironically being my most-cited work. However, you can also see other highly cited work in the field of International Business. So a logical question might be: "How did you get to do research in citation analysis?" For the answer, you will have to read the introduction of the Using the Publish or Perish Software Guide (see below).

Who are you working with?

By sorting the search results on the author column, you can quickly find who the academic’s co-authors are. You might have an academic acquaintance or even collaborator in common? Nothing is better to get a conversation going than talking about people you both know. Looking at an academic’s earliest collaborators might also give you a clue about who their PhD advisor was. Finding that someone mostly publishes on their own is also useful to know. You might not bring up collaborative work in that case, certainly not in a first meeting.

Sorting my work by year, it becomes immediately evident that in the first years of my career I published most of my work alone, although I made up for that since 2002 and since then have published with well over fifty different co-authors. So, it is quite likely you would find that we have a collaborator in common.

What are you working on recently?

Sorting the search results on the year column helps you finding out what the academic in question has been working on most recently. Most academics don’t like it too much if you only talk about papers they published decades ago (even they are classics). The research in question might be more than twenty years old and they might have moved on to completely different topics by now.

When looking at my work in the last three years, it is evident that although I am still publishing about two articles a year journals, I have also published a lot of things that appear to be books (The Book series: Crafting your career in academia), but also things that were published on my own website. These are white papers or bibliographic analyses of departed AIB Fellows that I am doing in my role as AIB Fellows Bibliometrician.

If you felt comfortable enough, you could ask me why I have decided to diversify my publication portfolio. The answer would be that after publishing nearly 100 articles, I enjoy the freedom to write books and white papers. This means I am not constrained by what will fit in a journal and don't need to go through the - sometimes tortuous - review process. Most of all though, these non-journal publications reach a far larger audience than my journal publications ever have.

How long have you been in the business?

Reviewing the years active statistic gives you some feel for how much academic experience the person you are meeting is likely to have. Of course, this might not be of great importance, but again it might change what you will be talking about with this person. Knowing this ahead of time might be helpful. Your conversations with someone in a mid-career stage might be different from those with someone who is close to retirement. Your earlier analysis already showed I started publishing in 1995, so it is clearer that I am much closer to the end of my career than the beginning.

What journals have you published in?

Sorting on the publication column will allow you to find out which journals the academic has published in, giving you an idea of their disciplinary orientation and publication strategy.

  • Have they published in general or specialised journals?
  • Do they publish mostly conceptual or empirical work?
  • Have they published in the top journals in their field?
  • Have they published in lots of different journals or focused their output in a small number of journals?

Reviewing the Publication column for my work shows lots of different journals, as well as books, book chapters, white papers, and blogposts on official blogs. However, it also shows that much of my work was published in three key International Business journals. Hence, this would hopefully allay any fears if you had invited me to talk about International Business rather than citation analysis :-).

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never even thought about before!

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...

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Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sat 19 Oct 2024 15:50

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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