How Your Academic Success Can Clog Your Publication Pipeline

You’ve become very good at making decisions that have paid off for you in your career. For example: you can recognize and take advantage of opportunities, you are an excellent collaborator, and you pride yourself in being excellent in teaching, research, and service. Colleagues want to work with you, they want your brain on their projects because you are innovative, thoughtful, and you can hustle to make a deadline. 

But all of these wonderful characteristics–which have gotten you here–are now EXACTLY what is holding you back. In episode 160 of the podcast, I’m talking about the classic “what got you here won’t get you there” problem of successful academics who are trying to clear their publication pipelines.

Why We Get to the Point of Feeling Defeated

We may think we don’t have enough time, energy, or resources to publish consistently or successfully, and while some of those things may be externally true, the main reason for getting to the point of frustration in your publication pipeline is not for any of those reasons that are going on in your head, it’s actually because you’ve been successful.

Positive ‘Ways of Being’ as an Academic

You have likely become a professor at a university, by developing ways of working, and habits of being that are very positive. 

You Can Recognize and Take Advantage of Opportunities

You’ve honed this ability to see an opportunity, act with your brain and energy on it, and turn it into something beneficial for your career. You make your way through your PhD, move into your career, collaborate with others, write grants, etc. There is nothing bad or wrong about any of that until you are so overloaded with projects that you can’t make the time to write, which is what you need to do to publish on those projects.

What to Do Unclog Your Publication Pipeline

We don’t want to lose all of your wonderful abilities, we just want to start thinking about boundaries and curation, and keep them in check.

You can change strategies and begin to choose to slow down and you can be much more selective in the projects you take on so that your impact on your field and that change you want to see in the world will be able to happen because you are more curated in your choice of projects.

This is a situation of “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” because what got you here will get you to burnout.

We need to begin to refine those habits that got us here in order to make room for more curated publication pipelines that are not dependent on chasing every possible opportunity. Ultimately, the more curated your career is, the more impactful it is.

If you sit with a clogged publication pipeline for years, you will feel frustrated, your self-confidence will be low, and that most important thing, your Scholar’s Voice, will be muted. 

Next Steps:

Making new choices and developing new habits and new ways of being is hard. Our Navigate Program is a different way to approach your career. Our first step is Navigate, and we help you navigate the academic world in a really different way than you’ve been conditioned to do. 

If you’re ready to start that journey of refining your academic habits with a team of coaches and community around you, check out the link below to join the waitlist for our next Navigate cohort.

“That success that you’ve been able to achieve and those ways of being that you’ve developed so that you can be where you are, are now the ways of being that are clogging your pipeline.”

“When you are intentional about the projects you take on, you will choose the most impactful projects for your career, and you will then be able to get impactful publications out.”

We’ve opened the waitlist for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details here and sign up for the waitlist to be notified when applications open:  https://scholarsvoice.org/navigate/

Continue the conversation:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors with a disruptive perspective on their field to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing, and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. Want to train with us for free on your campus? Now you can when you recommend our Scholar’s Voice Faculty Retreats to a decision-maker on your campus! Download the brochure with the retreat curriculum and both in-person and online retreat options here.

Read the full transcript.