Welcome to my blog!

Introduction to Anne-Wil's blog, which blends tools, evidence, and personal storytelling to make academic careers more transparent, humane, and impactful

Anne-Wil Harzing - Fri 18 Mar 2016 17:00 (updated Mon 2 Nov 2026 18:11)

I know I haven’t been an early adopter in the blogging game, but I didn’t want to start until I knew I could fully commit to it. Too many blogs dry up to a drizzle of posts after a first active six months! My blog will pull together my 25-year experience of working in academia. Rather than providing mostly personal stories and reflections, my explict intention is to present material that is useful for (junior) academics.

Personally, I don’t much like the fairly ad-hoc and random organization of most blogs as it makes it hard to get a grip on the content. Therefore, my blog has a clear structure with nine major categories and six types of material. This is what you can expect on a regular basis.

• Publish or Perish tips: Practical, “bite-sized” tips on how to most effectively use Publish or Perish, a free software program that retrieves and analyses academic citations. In each post I will focus on a key problem in bibliometric analysis that can be resolved using Publish or Perish.
• Academia Behind the Scenes: Substantive posts on an academic topic. They present my experience on issues such as how to prevent desk-rejects, finding research topics, writing successful funding applications, conference networking, collaborations, preventing burn-out, predatory open access journals, job interviews, making your case for tenure, and many many more.
• Academic etiquette: Shorter, often tongue-in-cheek, posts on how to “behave” in academia. They do have a serious undertone though. Etiquette in academia is probably not a world apart from etiquette elsewhere. But it can’t hurt to be reminded :-)
• Research Focus: Ok, so this is my blog, which means I can – occasionally – engage in some self-promotion :-). Hence once or twice a month you will find a substantive post (750-1000 words) summarising one or more of my research contributions, written in accessible language. Most of these research topics will be relevant to a fairly large audience, so I am hoping you won’t be skipping these posts. You might actually enjoy some of them!
• Classic Papers: Contains my selection of academic articles that have made a real difference to the field. Not necessarily because they were published in top journals or because they were highly cited, but because they made their readers think twice.
• From my inbox: Irregular short postings about the weird requests, stories, and findings that end up in my email inbox.
• Announcements: Topical postings about new publications, conference visits, and other important events.
• That’s interesting: This (very) irregular series features an odd collection of what I think are interestingly weird research topics worth writing about. It reports on little research ideas, which are fun and interesting, but just not “meaty” enough for a serious article. We’ll start off with “How to address your lecturer”.
• Positive Academia: Any posts that provide readers with information and tools to co-create a more positive information.
• A range of labels that allow readers to select specific categories or types of material: Conferences, Cygna, Middlesex, resources, videos, white papers. These materials may appear on my blog or on my website's static pages.