In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

135 & WILL I RUN OUT OF PUBLISHABLE IDEAS? 8 The short answer to this question is, “Almost assuredly no.” When I was just finishing graduate school and beginning to publish, I wondered whether I would run out of ideas for further publishing. I had done a couple of articles, and had a couple more in preparation, and I was finishing my doctoral dissertation and had a publisher for that work. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, whether, when all of this was done, I would be able to think of anything further to write on. What if I couldn’t? What would I do then? I continued to work on the projects that I was involved in, and one idea led to another, and soon I got a couple of invitations to write on something, and then I set some further goals for myself. Soon other invitations started to come in, and my curiosity got the best of me and I started to explore areas that branched out from my initial interests—until one day I realized what I very much know now. I have so many good ideas for publishing projects that there is no way that I will ever finish all of them unless I live a lot longer than I expect to. The problem is not whether I will run out of ideas, but whether I will run out of time to do all that I currently have planned, to say nothing of completing other projects that keep coming my way. The more work that I do, the more ideas come along. One time not too long ago, I surveyed one of my bookcases to peruse some books, and thought that I would write down ideas for a couple of potential articles that were related to this group of books. I filled an entire sheet of paper with viable ideas after only looking at one shelf of books, and turned away disheartened, because I realized I had set my sights far too low—there were far more ideas than I could ever get to researching and writing. 136 Inking the Deal You may be thinking that it is easy for me to be saying this now, but there was a time in the past—as I have admitted above—when I was not sure that I would be able to keep the ideas flowing and the pace of publication going. I have several recommendations to make to help generate new publishing ideas. I am assuming that your dissertation has been written with the idea of publication in mind and has become the first major book that you have published. Finding other sources of new ideas can involve many different means, including the following: (1) the use of graduate research papers, (2) delivery of conference papers, (3) spinoffs from other projects, (4) solicitations, (5) edited volumes, and (6) the exploration of new areas. Graduate Research Papers As graduate students, most scholars have had to write a lot of academic papers. In fact, they probably have written at least one major paper for each of their graduate seminars. In the course of their graduate career, this probably means they have taken a minimum of somewhere around six to twenty different courses, depending on the number and type of degrees earned. If you were a fortunate graduate student, you studied with professors who challenged you to undertake new and frontline research in your courses and pushed you to write papers suitable for publication. I am still surprised at how many graduate-level faculty do not encourage their students to start looking to publish the papers they produce in their courses. I was fortunate that I had a couple of first-rate professors who did encourage me in this way; however, some of my colleagues were not so encouraged, and others simply did not take advantage of the opportunities as they came along. My first published article, as I have mentioned above, was a form of a revised paper from a course that I took. The professor had very strict guidelines for the presentation of the paper to the class, but the demands of the course meant that we were definitely doing work on the forefront of the discipline. This time was the advent of the use of computer databases for our field of study, and so each student was required to do a project that utilized such a database. Quite clearly, with a little thought and ingenuity, each student would...

Share