Publish Faster Without Burnout Using Leverage (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, Professor Stuckler here. Today, I want to share with you how you can publish faster, high-quality papers without flaming out. And the real secret to doing this, to scaling as an academic, is leverage, is to build systems, collaborations, and pipelines. That's well and good, but I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. I'm Professor David Stuckler. I've published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and I got tenure. I was a full professor at Oxford in my early 30s. So I know a thing or two about how to scale research fast and achieve that kind of leverage. The thing is, most researchers aren't really taught how to do that. A lot of the people who watch my channel are serious researchers or are aspiring to be, and this video is going to be particularly beneficial for early to mid-career researchers who are trying to get to that next level. So this conversation came out of a consultation session I was doing with an early-stage professor who's really stuck in that velvet ghetto. She was in the position kind of being ping-pong, bouncing from fixed-term contracts one to the other, not really getting on a tenure track. And she was publishing about one to two papers a year, getting kind of mid-level citations. She was just on the cusp of, she might have been able to get to the next position, but she wasn't really ever going to get on that proverbial fast track. And so we did a deep dive together, and we figured out the instant tweaks that she could make and deploy immediately to help her get to that next level to not only scale her output, but get more citations, higher quality papers, and be more competitive for promotions and funding. So let me dive straight in. So the big trap she was falling into that I suspect many of you might fall into, and this is just natural because it kind of fits with how you evolve from your PhD, is the one-to-one trap. So most researchers I see at their early stages have one project, one paper, and the end result over time is you get one exhausted researcher. And not only that, this system is inherently a bit unstable and weak. It's like a three-legged chair. Just one chair falls out, and the whole thing collapses. So you get a delay in getting feedback from a colleague or a co-author. You have a delay in the data. One thing goes wrong, and your whole flow and system for publishing just crashes. Say you get sick. That's another common one that I see. So what's going on in this one-to-one trap is that your output is directly dependent on your time in. And so it's this old cliche of, oh, I just work smarter, not harder. But that's really true here. We want leverage so that your output is multiplying. It's a big multiple, like a 5 to 10x multiple of your time in to producing high-quality papers out. So OK, well and good, Professor Stuckler. How do I actually do that? So three shifts that I want you to think about and apply. Be critical. Take a moment. Use this video as an opportunity to self-reflect on your process and maybe things you can do to get that kind of leverage. Just as a side note, leverage is really the secret of how the rich get richer. Most people, again, there's a cliche you'll see on Instagram going around that nobody got fantastically rich by just having a salary job. And they did it through leverage. And it's usually investors and entrepreneurs in some way. A side note, I digress. But usually, successful people are scaling through leveraging other people's money, expertise, or time. As an academic, we can actually learn from some of those principles ourselves. So the first shift I want you to make and apply in your own work is to not think of yourself at this stage of your career as being the main researcher, but being a project lead. That you start directing others. That you start building teams and building the field. Now, I know a lot of fields have this kind of great man or person myth that, oh, this towering intellectual figure who can do everything themselves. But in this day and age, that's a bit antiquated. It's not like that anymore. And especially at this stage of your career, you've already done the rite of passage of publishing some papers. Maybe doing that one, two, three sole author papers just to tick some boxes, well and good. But now is the time to build teams. To start establishing a research agenda. To start cementing your name in a field. Plant a flag that you are known for something. So you need to drive a research agenda. And in the past, you might have been taking branches off the tree from somebody else's research agenda. But I want you to have that trunk of the tree established. And I want you to start sprouting out branches that other team members, co-authors, colleagues can pick up and start running with. So how does this play out? Well, this researcher was looking in her project at development outcomes. She was looking at the effect of a policy on development outcomes. And what she could really easily do is instead of smushing all that into one paper, she could bifurcate, trifurcate, not even sure that's a word, but look at specific development outcomes. And she had almost a copy and paste model that she could hand off to more junior researchers in her orbit who she wasn't deploying effectively. So where she might do one paper focusing on health outcomes, which coincidentally have helped to tighten up the causal logic of that paper and also make it more citable. She could then hand that off to a researcher to look at similar outcomes with a similar design, similar framework. And instead, this was changing the chain from one project, one paper, one exhausted researcher, to one project, multiple papers, multiple researchers engaged. And so that if somebody got sick, one bit of data got delayed, the whole house didn't collapse like a house of cards that just crumbled under an unsteady foundation. So I want you to make that shift to project lead and start thinking in terms of pipelines of your papers and define a research agenda for what you want to be known for, not just a few scattered papers here or there. Quick interruption to today's video from our sponsor, me. If you want to work with a real person, and not AI, I would encourage you to check out our elite mentorship and support programs where we work directly together in a one to one capacity to help you develop a personalized plan that's going to get you from where you are to defining a winning topic all the way through to successful publication. We go so far as to offer a publication guarantee that if you show up, you do the work, we don't do it for you, that would be unethical, just like AI doing it for you is unethical and just not a good idea. We work together each step of the way so you never feel lost, you never feel stuck, so that you optimize your chances for success and we guarantee we're not going to leave you hanging if you show up and do the work, we are going to see you through to the finish line. That's a big ask, that's a big offer, and no one we know of can match this level of commitment with the real results that our students have had. If you're interested, book a call with the link below and see if you could be a good fit for us working together in an intimate way. The second thing you need to do, really important for leverage, is to build systems. That is really critically important. One thing I noticed in my career, I just started to have research assistants working for me and even in some postdocs, is I was repeating the same things over and over. So I would explain, here's how to do a natural experiment, here's how to handle something banal, like references with Zotero. Get Zotero if you don't have it already guys, come on, what are you waiting for? But these systems meant I was just repeating the same things over and over again, and I realized this is not just inefficient for me, it's inefficient for them. So what I learned to do was to create my own, almost like you'd learn business, standard operating procedure. But what I did is I made templates for, say, how to handle a revise and resubmit with our two-step revise and resubmit method, which I then codified as a template I could hand to researchers along with some videos that I share. Now, all these templates and systems we've already made available, if you'd like to tap into them, check them out with the link below. Let's see if we're a good fit to work together. I'll drop one on that revise and resubmit template that you can drop and use today. We have a fantastic acceptance rate on our R&Rs by following this two-step workflow. It works great with co-authors, but the point is for you to build systems so you're not constantly repeating the same message over and over again. And again, that link between your time and your output, well, you're getting many researchers in your orbit benefiting from this, multiplying their productivity through your support at the trunk of the tree that's sprouting out, creating more output. And really, it's one of the things you see. I've got some close colleagues, some of you whom you've seen on this channel, Professor Martin McKee, who's really a master at these kinds of systems. And I had the great fortune of learning from him as a mentor, seeing people actually accused him of being a fraud, like how can you publish this many papers? I mean, I think I'm great. I've got 300 to 400 papers. He's got over 1,000. And they even tried to accuse him of saying, well, you can't possibly be publishing this much. But he was just incredibly effective at driving teams and injecting the value at the right points in the chain that helped the team scale. And that leads me to the third point, and something I directly learned from him. And that's the importance of always keeping things moving. So you get revisions back. I see sometimes researchers just sit on them for months. Well, not only does the paper get stale, you forget things, you don't act. You want to clear things off your desk. I work with a lot of international colleagues. So maybe when I'm going to bed in Italy, somebody is in the middle of their day in California. And I might aim to get to a stopping point and hand that draft, hand that analysis wherever I'm at off to a colleague so that when I wake up, I can keep things moving. But really, that's the general principle. You don't want to let things stagnate. You always want to keep that momentum going. And you probably noticed yourself, if you stepped away from a research project and you come back to it after a while, it's just so much harder to get into. And this does relate to another element of perfectionism. That cliche, perfect's the enemy of the good, really just doesn't have a place here. In my PhD, I really tried to polish and perfect things, and I was just so slow. Often, 80%, 85% is good enough for your paper to go to peer review and start getting that critical review. And often, the things that you might think are going to get criticized aren't even the things that the reviewers are going to hark on and ask you to do. So you start hitting that curve where the returns from all that extra effort start diminishing. So when I talk about leverage earlier, I was talking about how can you kind of scale and take advantage of other people's and other resources that are available. Well, you can do that by creating systems to amplify your productivity. You can do so by effectively developing projects that are pipelines for a unified research agenda that can sprout out so that you can effectively supervise, and by learning how to just not doing everything yourself and effectively delegate to others. Again, as researchers, we're often not taught how to do this or shown. I just had the good fortune of working with others who are tremendously effective at scaling their own research themselves, and not just paper mills producing junk, but producing high-quality, consistently over and over, highly cited research. So listen, if you're interested in learning how to scale yourself and you like what you see in terms of our templates and want to shortcut your own path to publishing success and get to that next level, click the link below. Get on a one-to-one call with me or a member of our team, and let's see if we're a good fit to work together. In the meantime, you're not going to want to miss, if you haven't had any writing training and you're not working with an actual system yourself for your writing, check out this video on our peer system. It will, I often say, give me five minutes of your life, I'm going to transform your writing for forever. All right, see you in the next video.