Getting your research published

(First of two parts)

De La Salle University started subscribing to Scopus a little over a year ago. This citation database allows subscribers and users to easily scour through statistical profiles of research institutions and individual researchers alike. By keeping track of the number of published scientific papers, the number of citations, and other measures of productivity (such as h-indices), Scopus allows for an accurate and relatively unbiased measure of research output. Within a few weeks of learning about our subscription, I quickly found out some key facts about scientific output in the Philippines and neighboring countries. I learned, for example, that top universities in our region, such as the National University of Singapore and National Taiwan University, each has a total of roughly 50,000 research publications listed in the Scopus database. Meanwhile, institutions such as Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur each has close to 10,000, and that the best research institutions in the Philippines have several hundreds, or, at best, a few thousands, to their name. This discrepancy represents a gap of one or two orders of magnitude, and speaks volumes about the level of scientific output in this country. It is striking to note that an especially productive researcher in a world-class university can easily produce several hundred scientific articles in his or her career. For example, Ignacio Grossman, who is a professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, has over 300 papers to his name, a figure which exceeds the output of many institutions in the Philippines.

Serious researchers know the value of the publication of scientific outputs in peer-reviewed journals with international circulation. The logic behind this emphasis is based on the incremental nature of scientific progress, with every generation of researchers making use of existing knowledge documented in the literature. Without such documentation, the global scientific enterprise would simply grind to a halt — researchers would constantly find themselves starting from scratch rather than taking advantage of existing scientific knowledge. Thus, publication of research output should properly be viewed as an inherent part of the research cycle as, say, doing literature review or gathering data through experiments. And any researcher intent on making concrete contributions to the global pool of knowledge absolutely must publish his or her work. It is especially important to realize the value of papers that appear in scientific journals (this is a point which I make explicitly clear to my graduate students), which are the primary source of state-of-the-art, peer-reviewed research findings. By comparison, conference papers (which are often considered as “published,” in the loose sense of the word) will often contain only tentative or incomplete results, while books (which seem impressive or prestigious to the uninitiated) will typically carry information that is several years old.

The statistics make it clear that much of scientific research done in the Philippines is not published in any meaningful way. I myself have volunteered to give seminars intended to help researchers in DLSU to get their research published in journals, and I have no doubt that other seasoned researchers elsewhere in the country have made similar attempts to train their peers. Thus, in this column, I intend to outline some of the key points that I delivered in these seminars, based on my own experience as a moderately successful researcher. The five “golden rules” I use in my own work are:

• Recognize that scientific novelty is the ultimate measure of the value of research.

• Keep abreast of the state-of-the-art in your discipline.

• See publication as an integral part of research work.

• Develop effective collaborative relationships with colleagues.

• Become familiar with the peer review process.

All these things are obviously a lot easier said than done. In fact, these are the very things one should learn when earning a research-based degree in graduate school, especially since the publication norms vary greatly between scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, I consider these five golden rules as being sufficiently generic to be useful to any aspiring young, or not-so-young, researcher. In next week’s column, I will discuss each of these rules in a bit more detail, with some examples drawn from my own experience over the past decade or so.

(To be concluded)

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Raymond R. Tan is a full professor of chemical engineering and University Fellow at De La Salle University, Manila. His main research interests are process systems engineering (PSE), life cycle assessment (LCA) and pinch analysis. He received his BS and MS in chemical engineering and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from De La Salle University, and is the author of about 50 articles in ISI-indexed journals in the fields of chemical, environmental and energy engineering. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, and co-editor of the forthcoming book Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization. He is also the recipient of multiple awards from the Philippine National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) and the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP). E-mail him at [email protected].