Planning Your Academic Research Time for Maximum Success

Planning Your Academic Research Time for Maximum Success

Oct 01, 2024Rene Tetzner

Planning Your Academic Research Time for Maximum Success

Most academics and scientists employed by universities enjoy enough time free from teaching that those in other occupations might think such scholars have all the time in the world to complete their research and writing projects. As any scholar knows well, however, this is simply not the case, and whether the research time you have each year is a couple of weeks, a couple of months or more, it is likely that you have far more to accomplish in that time than can reasonably be done. In order to achieve as much as possible and make that research time a success, careful planning is therefore necessary.

With online access to so many documents and other resources a fact of modern life, many research projects will require less planning than they once did, but there is still a great deal to think about if your research time is to be put to the best use. The schedules and availability of any colleagues with whom you will be working must be considered, and so must the hours of research institutes, museums and the like if your research requires access to their facilities, equipment or artefacts. In many cases you will have to contact particular individuals to arrange the access you require, so this should be done well in advance of your break. If any letters of recommendation or other documentation is required for access, those, too, should be arranged beforehand.

If writing up your research and submitting it for publication are among the goals you have set for your research break, it can be helpful to put together a timetable that outlines when each stage of the process will be completed. Remember that many of the activities involved in writing and publishing tend to take a good deal more time than many scholars expect they will. Drafting a paper, for instance, will also involve preparing references, tables and figures, and the document will then require careful proofreading. If you have co-authors, extra time will be needed for reading each other’s material and discussing the paper as a whole. You may also require extra time if you want a colleague or mentor to read your work and offer feedback, and do not forget the time it will take you to consider and incorporate that feedback in your text. Finally, extra time should also be allowed if you intend to use the services of a professional proofreader or editor.

Submitting your writing to a journal or publisher as early as possible in a long research break offers the best chance of receiving a response while you are still available to give any necessary revisions your full attention. Later submissions often result in requests for revisions arriving when a scholar is busy teaching, which is less than ideal, but sometimes unavoidable. Remember that your best insurance against receiving such requests at any time is to take great care in preparing your manuscript exactly as the publisher indicates in the author instructions. There is therefore a delicate balance to be struck: on the one hand, submitting as quickly as possible is beneficial because waits for publisher responses can be lengthy; on the other hand, taking a little extra time to get everything perfect will increase your chances of a positive response that requires less work once you are back to your normal and quite possibly overloaded teaching schedule.

Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.

Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.

If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.



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