1.1.1 The many and variable uses of Publish or Perish

Academics that need to make their case for tenure or promotion will find PoP useful to create reference groups and show their citation record to its best advantage. When evaluating other academics, PoP can be used as a 5-minute preparation before meeting someone you dont know, to evaluate editorial board members or prospective PhD supervisors, to write up tributes (or laudations) and eulogies, to decide on publication awards and to prepare for a job interview. Deans and other academic administrators will find PoP useful to evaluate tenure or promotion cases in a fair and equitable way.

PoP can also be used to assist when you are uncertain which journal to submit it to. You can use it to get ideas of the types of journals that publish articles on the topic you are writing on and to compare a set of journals in terms of their citation impact. Once you have decided on the target journal, it can also help you to double-check that you havent missed any prior work from the journal in question.

PoP can help you to do a quick literature review to identify the most cited articles and/or scholars in a particular field. It can be used to identify whether any research has been done in a particular area at all (useful for grant applications) or to evaluate the development of the literature in a particular topic over time. Finally, PoP is very well suited for doing bibliometric research on both authors and journals.