We must know where we stand

".... if not we would be in the loser's end...."

It's a jungle out there, even WF said so. In the world of academia, where others seen as "Ivory Tower", it has a ecosystem of its own, there are "food chains", "food webs", we MUST know where we stand, if not we would be in the loser's end. There are competitors, there are "old hands", there are "new birds".

One of my hobbies in my leisure time is to surf the web and look up other Universities websites for people doing similar research as mine. Sometimes, they post their CVs, and you can trace that to see if they made any progress over the past few years, and whether they change their areas of interest too. And if you see someone with a list of publications you wish to have you papers published in and if they are of similar research as you, they might be a good role model to follow.

One can also look for "new birds", the new academics who are in the same stage as you, and you can see what they published in. More importantly, you can judge their "potential" by how they published their work, whether they do joint research or single authored their research. One would tend not to be so sure about joint work as the reason for inclusion of the names on the journal article can be mixed.

The best judge of potential is looking at the single authored journal article, one would then be sure that the whole of the research is done by the single person alone, so what reflected on the paper will be 100% the level of knowledge of the single author one can assume. One strategy I learnt is to have a portfolio of them, so that you can assure of your own expertise being utilised (as in the case of single authored paper) or never lack of new ideas (as in the case of joint work).

Interestingly, today I have had good findings about my search on the web of my "competitors". I had managed to find some academics embarking on similar areas and I see possible "positioning" of my areas I like to pursue for future research, that way, one can better justify one's contribution if it materialise in the end. We all worked hard, but we want this to get paid off, and therefore, the more we have to know our "positions" as we don't want to be in the losers' ends.