The Academic Career…
Frederic Adam
Head, Graduate School, College of Business and Law
Department of Accounting, Finance and
Information Systems
University College Cork
Ireland
Foreword
The academic (borrowed from R. Hirschheim)
• Historically, a balance of research, teaching and service
• Jack of all trades, master of none?
• Different cultures, different schools have different views
on the appropriate mix
• Over time, research has taken ‘center stage’, at least in
certain areas.
• In Business and Law, uncertain what the right balance is –
research is important, but funding models rely primarily
on teaching and other key elements of the academic
“profile” [This is changing fast!!!]
Elements of the Academic Profile
You can enhance your profile through:
Internal
External
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“Excellent” or “novel” Teaching
Curriculum development – new courses / new degrees
Research supervision
Contribution to the institution (eg: committees, course direction)
Seeking research funding / lead projects (eg: PI, collaborator)
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Published work
Conference / research presentations
Journal, reviewing, editing and production
Conference and seminar organisation
Participation / leadership in international forums
Lead international projects (eg: FP7)
Engage with industry
Public profile events – media events
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Blogs and websites
Covered together
Teaching Duties and Experience
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Lectures and tutorials
Course design and curriculum development
Teaching aids / technology
Examining
Student contact – formal and informal
Reflective practice and self-improvement (portfolio)
Formal qualifications
• Doing well is not the same as spending loads of time
• Necessary but not sufficient in 2013
Postgraduate Supervision
• Can take a variety of forms (and we are different here)
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(final year projects)
Taught Masters dissertation
Masters by Research
PhD
 Even if you have little or no experience of supervising, have
some thoughts on your experience of being supervised and
on what makes a good supervisor
 Begin with co-supervision
 Seek to move towards the “3 year PhD”
Pick the topics
Pick the candidates
Keep the pressure on
 Don’t neglect the essentials – in time, you will NEED
completed PhDs to do anything
Administration
• Universities are a case of “death by committee”…so think
about how you can show:
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Organisational skills
Team-work
Past experience
Responsibility
Initiative
• Sometimes, learn to say “No”…in any case be ultra
efficient (or stay out of it)
Practical example - UCC
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Faculty meetings
Research committee
Mentoring of students
School visits
Board of studies
Interview / promotion boards
Programme direction
Industrial placement opportunity seeker
Academic council
Governing body….
Objectives:
– Go with your strengths and interests
– Understand “value for time”
– Don’t neglect the essentials – you need your institution
Seeking Research Funding
• Why? What kind of projects? What kind of projects?
• Funding your research
– Assemble a team
– Recruit PhDs and post-Docs
• Becoming a PI
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Understand that the PI does not do the work
Become an expert on schemes, deadlines and application
Become an expert on FP7 or EI accounting rules
Get to know everyone in the VP for research office and in
Research Finance (and in HR!)
Research Publishing? What is it?
Science!
• Contributing to Scientific Progress
• Participating in the emergence of the New Ideas that
will Shape the Future
• Writing papers / reports about research one has
carried out
• Send them to a variety of forums
• Build the profile of your lab so it gets richly funded
• Build up a profile for yourself so you can get a job,
tenure and timely promotion
• Boost your ego and line up trophies on your
mantelpiece
Personal Interest
{These factors are not always correlated }
Notion of Publication Profile
• Right balance of publications – where and what
• Types: journal papers, book chapters,
conferences, edited books and authored books
• Topics and methods
• Which ones are the most important? The “best”
ones?
• How do you decide where you send your stuff?
• How much does the shape of the outcome
matters in terms of profile? Mintzberg’s
“intended” versus “realised” strategy
A profile...1994-2010 = 17 years
total per year
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
A closer look at the “realised” Strategy
9
conferences
8
journals
Book chapters
7
books
short publications
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
Appearances can be deceiving
• Dissertations are not always dissertations
– Thesis by publication
• Journals are not always journals
– Electronic journals
– “A”, “B” and even “C” (!) journals [or grade 4, 3, 2, 1 journals]
• Conferences are not always conferences
– Peer reviewed
– Selection rate
– Published proceedings
• Books are not always books:
– Publisher
– Reading committee
– Distribution
• Need to SPEAK THE THRUTH! [at least to yourself!]
• Have a clear strategy dedicated to a specific rating scheme
– WHOSE SCHEME?!?!?!??!
• Understand the importance of “fashion”
What are rankings?
• With so many rankings, pick the one most favourable!
– Aston (RAE) http://www.abs.aston.ac.uk/newweb/research/documents/mar08.pdf
– Association of Business Schools
– Specialised rankings
• ACPHIS (Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems) or “Basket of
IS journals”
– Other rankings / bibliometric analyses
• Eg: ISI listings
• In practice rankings may mean little – see where the best researchers
publish! But you are not a leading researcher yet…
• If it were about the Truth, we would be discussing the methodologies used
by these rating schemes
– Do you know how the RAE works?
– Do you know how ISI select their publications?
• But they are critical when it comes to rating publications and therefore
when it comes to rating your record. SO KNOW THEM
Impact factor
A = the number of times articles published in 2008-9 were
cited in indexed journals during 2010
B = the number of articles, reviews, proceedings or notes
published in 2008-9
impact factor 2010 = A/B
(note that the impact factor for a year is actually published
in the following year, because it cannot be calculated until
all of the 2010 publications had been received. Impact
factor 2010 will be published in 2011)
Examples
Rank
2007 Impact Factor
Impact 2003-07
Impact 1981-2007
1
Acad. Manage. Journal
(5.02)
Admin. Science Quart.
(9.80)
Admin. Science Quart.
(81.86)
2
Acad. Manage. Rev.
(4.37)
Journal of Marketing
(7.0)
Acad. Manage. Rev.
(59.93)
3
Marketing Science
(3.96)
Acad. Manage. Journal
(7.43)
Journal of Marketing
(49.41)
4
Journal of Marketing
(3.75)
Acad. Manage. Rev.
(6.90)
Acad. Manage. Journal
(45.66)
5
Admin. Science Quart.
(2.91)
Marketing Science
(6.22)
Strategic Manage. J.
(40.52)
6
Strategic Manage. J.
(2.83)
Strategic Manage. J.
(5.90)
J. Consumer Research
(37.97)
MISQ (4.731)
Feed back
• Publishing is only one side of the coin
• In future years feed back will be what matters
– Number of citations
– Where
– With whom
– How quickly?
– scHolar Index
(http://insitu.lri.fr/~roussel/projects/scholarindex
/index.cgi)
A scHolar Index analysis (in Google Scholar)
Papers:150, Citations:822, Years:20, h-index:17, I10: 23
Title / Author
Lessons from enterprise resource planning implementations in Ireland–towards smaller and shorter ERP projects
F Adam, P O'doherty Journal of information technology 15 (4), 305-316
The enterprise resource planning decade: lessons learned and issues for the future
F Adam, D Sammon Igi Global
The status of the IS field: historical perspective and practical orientation
F Adam, B Fitzgerald, Information Research 5 (4), 5-4
Benefit realisation through ERP: The re-emergence of data warehousing
D Sammon, F Adam, F Carton, Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation 6 (2), 155-164
11 ERP Projects: Good or Bad for SMEs?
F Adam, P O'Doherty, Second-Wave Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Implementing for Effectiveness
A framework for the classification of DSS usage across organizations
F Adam, M Fahy, C Murphy, Decision Support Systems 22 (1), 1-13
Project preparedness and the emergence of implementation problems in ERP projects
D Sammon, F Adam, Information & management 47 (1), 1-8
Developing practical decision support tools using dashboards of information
F Adam, JC Pomerol, Handbook on Decision Support Systems 2, 151-173
Mentoring Distance Learners: An Action Research Study.
K Neville, F Adam, C McCormack, ECIS, 1410-1421
Understanding the impact of enterprise systems on management decision making: an agenda for future research
F Carton, F Adam, The Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation 8 (2), 99-106
On the legacy of Herbert Simon and his contribution to decision-making support systems and artificial intelligence
JC Pomerol, F Adam, Intelligent Decision-making Support Systems, 25-43
Encyclopedia of decision making and decision support technologies
F Adam, P Humphreys, Information Science Reference
Towards a model of organisational prerequisites for enterprise-wide systems integration: Examining ERP and data
warehousing
D Sammon, F Adam, Journal of Enterprise Information Management 18 (4), 458-470
Cited by
Year
164
2000
59∗
2004
43∗
2000
35∗
2003
34∗
2003
30
1998
26
2010
26∗
2008
25∗
2002
23
2005
21∗
2006
19
2008
19
2005
Finding homes for yourself
• A good working group – tightly focused
– Specialised topic / smaller group / more dynamic / easier to prove
yourself
• A large international conference
– Big payback / harder to get in / even harder to get up top
• A journal where you have contacts
– Become a reviewer, then an AE, then…
• Forums where everyone wants to publish
– If you are that good!
• A “friendly” publishing house
– IGI never says “NO”!
• Prestigious co-authors
• The criteria for selection are: how much time do you want to invest
in maintaining these relationships / how many horses do you want
to back / how much funding can you invest…
What it means
• Publishing is messy and erratic
• Success rate is variable
• Two (3)prong
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Need material -> doing research [or supervise]
Need papers -> writing publications
Need great co-authors
Need luck ?????
• If you don’t submit you won’t be accepted of course
• If at first you don’t succeed, recycle...
• If you want to play the citation game, go for:
– Methodology papers
– Active forums
– Faddish / hot domains where there is interest but little research
Key Lessons (borrowed from Hirschheim)
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Work with others … coauthoring rules
Start early… takes a long time to publish
Keep up a pipeline of work
Have multiple research areas but focus on
becoming a true leader in one area
• Stay visible … give talks, be a reviewer, write
papers, be on program committees
• Learn the value system of your institution (school)
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Lesson learnt over 20 years as an editor,
author and reviewer (Hirschheim)
• What often makes or brakes the case for a
paper
– notoriously vague or missing purpose of the paper:
what is the contribution to knowledge of the paper?
What are the research questions?
– the likely community interest of the paper’s point
– literature positioning and bridge building
– believability and intelligibility of the paper’s arguments
• the problem of breaking new ground vs. incremental
point
– conclusions are not mere summaries: the need to
address the ‘so what’ issue
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Leading international research projects
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Don’t try this at home
Cannot do without institutional backing
Cannot do without very substantial record
Need deep pockets to travel in and out of
information days (eg: Brussels)
• Your goal can / should be to become a partner –
small, then bigger:
– Participant
– Task leader
– Work package leader
Engage with Industry
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Because we are Business and Law
But different from the “Sciences”
Critical to think about what we can do for them
But be convinced that:
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We have much to offer
We can do it is an economically viable way
We can have a very tangible impact
We can generate good will and surplus ($)
• Need to know what you are talking about before you go
and try
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Contract for services
IP
NDA
Co-fund initiatives
VAT!!!
Community Outreach
• Have you, or do you intend to, use(d) your
expertise to make an impact outside of the
academic environment?
• Submissions to Government consultations
• Working with NGOs
• Media analysis
Conclusion
• Prima facia, it cannot be done so the approach
needs to be professionalised
• Devise a strategy and be receptive to its impact
• Learn and revise on a regular basis
• But be persistent
• Understand the trade offs between your personal
interest and what your record will look like on
paper
• Learn speed and right-sizing