I just wrote a post to the Constraints Google Group that managed shamelessly to plug both this blog and the constraints Resources website in one short post. Which reminded me that one of my “mentoring” topics, that I haven’t posted on here yet is “marketing”.

The head of a company that I was trying to interest in funding my lab once wrote to me: “You’re very unusual, you’re not only a good researcher, you’re a good marketer.” I took that as a compliment. In my youth, I suppose I might have taken it as an insult: “we ivory-tower academics are above such things as marketing our wares”. But in fact there is nothing wrong with marketing. You do great work; you don’t want the world to be deprived of it because you “hide your light under a bushel”. Of course, you don’t want to be a shameless self promoter either, but sitting in a corner expecting the world to come to you might be a form of hubris as well.

Ben Schneiderman is one of the founding fathers of the field of human-computer interaction, and also wise in the ways of human-human interaction in the scientific community. Here is an example of what I would call a “marketing tip” from his book The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations:

10.7 Send Five and Thrive
When completing a research paper, one approach to gaining attention from relevant researchers is to extract five key authors from the list of references.  Then, send them an email that has a fact-based introduction, such as “Dear Dr. Rockstar, I’m a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, working with Prof. Ben Shneiderman, who sends his regards.” Then, the heart of the message has two points: “(1) Your work was an inspiration for this paper, so I wanted to check with you to see if we have been fair in citing your papers, and (2) know if you have published any more recent work on this topic.”  While young researchers may be daunted by the idea of writing to senior researchers, such emails usually produce helpful responses quickly.  Even senior researchers are pleased to know that their work inspired new efforts, thereby validating their contributions. 

This “Send Five and Thrive” idea has additional benefits, such as compelling authors to consider whether they have cited the key previous papers and encouraging them to think about whether they have given fair and positive descriptions of previous work.  For example, shifting from a negative comment such as “previous work by Rockstar failed to. . .” to positive ones such as “the pioneering work by Rockstar can be extended by . . .” increases the likelihood of making a favorable impression.

The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations

So, of course, right after I post this, I’m going to send it to Ben and ask if I’ve been fair in citing him.