Success in Astronomy? Some Surprising Strategies by Stacy Kim.
Kim reviews How long should an astronomical paper be to increase its impact? by K. Z. Stanek, saying:
What do you think it takes to succeed in astronomy? Some innate brilliance? Hard work? Creativity? Great communication skills?
What about writing lots of short papers? For better or for worse, one’s success as an astronomer is frequently measured in the number of papers one’s written and how well cited they are. Papers are a crucial method of communicating results to the rest of the astronomy community, and the way they’re written and how they’re published can have a significant impact on the number of citations that you receive.
There are a number of simple ways to increase the citation counts on your papers. There are things you might expect: if you’re famous within the community (e.g. a Nobel Prize winner), or are in a very hot topic like exoplanets or cosmology, you’ll tend to get cited more often. There are those that make sense: papers that are useful, such as dust maps, measurements of cosmological parameters, and large sky surveys often rank among the most-cited papers in astronomy. And then there’s the arXiv, a preprint service that is highly popular in astronomy. It’s been shown that papers that appear on the arXiv are cited twice as much as those that aren’t, and furthermore—those at the top of the astro-ph list are twice as likely to be cited than those that appear further down.
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If you need a quick lesson from the article, Kim suggests posting to arXiv at 4pm, so your paper appears higher on the list.
For more publishing advice, see Kim’s review or the paper in full.
Enjoy!