What is the best article publishing strategy for early career scientists?

Yajie Zhang () and Qiang Yu
Additional contact information
Yajie Zhang: Northwest A&F University
Qiang Yu: Northwest A&F University

Scientometrics, 2020, vol. 122, issue 1, No 18, 397-408

Abstract: Abstract To date, it remains unclear how different approaches to early career publishing behaviors (e.g., publishing papers in the same journal or in different journals) may benefit a young scholar’s career success. In this paper, we develop a quantitative understanding of this question, analyzing 2982 qualified authorships who have academic ages ≥ 5 years and publications ≥ 3 during the first five years of their careers from 37,542 publications in three fields of science. We defined author categories by three particular publishing behaviors, and determined how authors performed in their subsequent academic careers by using six bibliometric proxies. From the results of Welch’s ANOVA and Games–Howell multiple comparisons test, we found that the best publishing choice included publishing some of the author’s papers in the same journal. This early career publishing choice may produce a dramatic increase in career success as seen in higher numbers of publications and collaborators, and a higher h-index, with different magnitudes for different scientific fields and authorships. Our findings illustrate the role that early career publishing behavior plays in relation to future career success and indicate that in order to maximize career outcomes, an advantageous publishing strategy for early career scholars is to publish some of their papers in the same journal.

Keywords: Publishing behavior/strategy; Career success; Early stage; Bibliometric analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-019-03297-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:122:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03297-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03297-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().