In this week’s collection of articles from around the web, we’ve found some helpful tips for academic researchers related to digital workflow, free writing, note taking, and time management. We’ve also found information on how openness influences research impact, things to avoid when developing surveys, and reasons one researcher would unfollow you on social media.

Richard Bach reminds us that “a professional writer is an amateur who never quit.” We hope that this week you can apply some of these tips to improve your writing practices and success. Happy writing!

Setting up a digital workflow for academic research

Why do you need a digital workflow? Because you spend too much time 1) finding articles, 2) downloading and naming files, 3) annotating and editing pdfs, and 4) organizing and citing research.

Looping – a free writing strategy for generating ideas

Looping alternates free writing with periods of reflection and analysis. It’s a write -reflect- write – reflect pattern of activity. And the term looping is used because each new pomodoro moves you forward.  You write after you have done some reflection and analysis.

The Cornell note taking method – revisited

The Cornell method was first devised in the 1950’s to help university students take appropriate summaries of what they were learning (from Pauk and Owens: How to study in College). The method limits the amount of space available for the students to summarise each text by means of a template. I have updated the design to suit note taking on Microsoft Word and gone a step further, in an effort to make it more useful for PhD students, or anyone else taking summarising texts for a large piece of work such as a thesis.

The academic’s dilemma: Being a good citizen and managing time

Tis the season for academic navel gazing so here are some things I’ve learned the hard way. This is primarily a piece for folks on the tenure track. I know that I come at this from a position of immense privilege as a tenured professor at an R1, layered by being a white guy. I know that some of the advice I’m going to give won’t be all that helpful to folks in more vulnerable positions as adjunct faculty, but I still think this advice needs to be said for new tenure track faculty. I hope others find it useful.

Multidisciplinary and cosmopolitan: How openness influences the academic impact of a scholar’s research

What is the best way to produce impactful academic research? This question bears a great importance for business academics, because producing high-impact research is a growing expectation of business schools. Our study, recently published in Research Policy, focuses on explaining the yearly citations of over 30,000 business academics (e.g. accounting, finance, marketing, strategy, etc.) as a measure of academic impact.

How to annoy your survey participants in six easy steps

I’m not sure how much help I was to the people who put the survey out, but given the various problems I had with this survey, I’m hoping I can help you all learn how to avoid what went wrong for them. Thus, you have today’s look at how you can really annoy your survey participants in six easy steps:

Why I’d unfollow you

Most of the reasons are to do with consistently hitting my irritation threshold. There’s a rough formula here, and unfollowing only happens when the account starts irritating me more than I find it useful or fun. If it’s super-useful and only occasionally irritating, I’ll stay. If the usefulness (or fun in engagement) fades and the irritation becomes constant or increasing, I’ll likely go. Here are the top five reasons that would make me unfollow an account.