Community Forum – Encouraging Publications

How do you encourage publications?

We are looking for best practices from peer companies. We are a regulated industry where peer reviewed published scientific information has great value. Traditionally, most of our scientists (with or without Ph.D’s) have been busy carrying out scientific activities, writing internal reports, and making management presentations. They did not write scientific manuscripts that could be peer reviewed for publications in the prestigious journals. The majority of them published less than 5 papers in peer reviewed journals even after a career of 20 years.

We are trying to encourage publications since it is a business necessity and we want to establish a mechanism to recognize our scientists who are able to publish in peer reviewed journals with good citation indexes. We would like to know how other companies encourage submission and publication of peer reviewed manuscripts by their scientists. Are there any mechanisms to recognize scientists and engineers for their unique scientific contributions based on the number of papers per year or based on the number of publications in a decade or life time, etc.?

We appreciate your help in this regard. – Director, global consumer products company

Community Responses

Ibrahim Sezan, CTO and Director, SHARP Labs of America Inc
It is not clear from the question whether or not researchers are currently publishing conference papers in reputable conferences that perform high quality peer reviews. I do hope that they are, as writing internal reports and management presentations only must be far from satisfying for scientists. Scientists are hungry for feedback and recognition from the leaders in their fields, and eager to critique and give feedback to their peers’ work.

If scientists in your organization are attending conferences but they themselves are not presenting papers, they should realize that the interaction with peers in a conference is much deeper and valuable when they present their own work. Active presentation provides a richer context and framework for better exchange of ideas, better questions, better networking, and better learning. This very fact should be a motivator for scientists to publish their work in high-quality conferences.

If the main issue is journal publications, the concern could be the time; it takes much time to prepare a journal paper as they require more extensive evaluations, interpretations, comparisons with prior work etc, compared with conference publications. Journal papers also involve a longer review process with multiple stages of reviews and revisions addressing referee comments. If the scientist is already busy with regular work liabilities, especially with extensive reporting and reviews, this “time” factor will be a barrier. You may then want to somehow lift this barrier by e.g., providing time for publishing journal papers.

Indeed, you should also recognize the desired behavior and outcome. Celebrating the acceptance of a paper for publication in a high caliber journal will go a long way in making the scientist happy. A company wide email anouncement by the manager and providing a link to the paper/journal on the company web site, or displaying the
particular issue of the journal in a public place in the company (if possible) are great ways of recognition.

Finally, I also suggest explaining (or demonstrating by examples) to your scientists why it matters for your company if/when they publish in refereed journals, and what the expected positive impacts are on your business.

In closing, I like to say that you have a pleasent problem in your hands. Working for a company that values journal
publications must be good thing for many scientists out there.

Cheers!

Larry J. Howell, Executive Director (retired in 2001), General Motors Research and Development Center
We encouraged participation in technical societies, attendance and oral presentation at technical conferences, and publication in reviewed journals.  The only incentives we provided were the cost of travel to such meetings and of course, attendance or publication fees.  But it is also important to allow time to prepare papers and presentations. 

We would celebrate peer recognition in the form of advancement in the technical society, specials awards for outstanding papers or presentations, and so on.  Further, one metric used to recommend advancement to senior technical positions in the organization was based on peer recognition outside the company.  Focus was on quality of external effort, not quantity.

We felt the organization benefited when our staff collaborated with technical experts worldwide.  Knowledge garnered from external participation of this type often was of benefit to our researchers in advancing their own internal research projects.  External recognition also enhanced the reputation of researchers and the organization itself.  Technical reputation was of value in technical/policy debate.

Management reviewed external presentations and publications prior to release to ensure that proprietary information was not released to the public.

VP, global power company
In our company we recently decided to make this more of a priority.  So we created an annual target for the organization – a certain number of external publications – which corresponds to goals for the leaders of the organization.  That goal was flowed down among the staff.  Now they know this is something expected of them, just as with other goals we have.  It gets their attention and indicates that we are taking it seriously – both they and us will be evaluated against this goal.