Seems like I'm on a roll lately (it's a slow roll, but a roll nonetheless). I just heard from a coauthor that a small paper of ours just got accepted. It's at a lower-tier journal, but at least we placed it somewhere (articles are like orphans - if they keep trying, they eventually find homes). The coauthor is a former student of mine who's done pretty well for himself - he started at a lower tier school and has published well over a dozen articles in four years (mostly at lower-tier journals, but one at a top-tier journal in a related discipline and several at just-below top-tier level).
A couple of years ago, my research was just beginning to fire on all cylinders when the Unknown Son was diagnosed with cancer. Then (not surprisingly) I got almost nothing out for the next three years (I was just looking, and there's gap in my vita that's exactly three years long). But over the last year and a half, I've gotten three publications and four other papers under review. It's not an earth-shattering output, and I'd certainly like to be publishing in better-quality journals. But since I was mostly cleaning out my backlog (and some of the ideas had gone stale while The Boy was sick), I'll take it.
At the school I'm at, quality is valued but numbers count too (after all, one definition of a Dean is "a person who can count but can't read").
Now I have some cover to work on longer-term projects that have a decent chance at higher-quality journals. I was just looking at my research file and I currently have four projects under way, and hope to finish 2-3 of then by December. If I do, and I get one or two more publications by the next fall, I should have a pretty good shot at tenure.
And since the Unknown Wife has told me in no uncertain terms that we're NOT moving again, I have a lot of incentive.
Like they say down South, "If Momma Ain't Happy, Ain't NOBODY Happy!"
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