The research pipeline – tips on productivity

By Fonti Kar

Have you ever had a lull in productivity? Days where you feel like you are not achieving very much? You are not alone. In my first year of my PhD, the thing the stressed me most was not knowing whether I was productive enough. How do I track my progress? A few weeks ago, I went to a workshop on ‘A novel framework for research productivity’ run by post-doc Khandis Blake from the Sex Lab, UNSW. Inspired by Khandis’ productivity (she completed 16 studies during her PhD in 2.5 years!), I decided to blog about this and hope someone will find this helpful with their own project management as well.
 
Pipeline thinking
 
Khandis has a background of business coaching. In her workshop, she drew parallels between sales pipelines and research projects (Fig. 1). She discussed one can increase customers, revenue and profits or in research terms – the number of completed studies, submitted manuscripts and publications by working on factors that affect these key things. 

Fig. 1: The sales pipeline (left) and the research pipeline (right). By working on the things in blue that are upstream to the things in red (completed projects, the number of manuscripts and publications), you are ultimately increasing your productivity.

​For example, a business can work on converting people that walk in the store (‘leads’)  into paying customers, which will ultimately increase store revenue/profits. Think store promotions or sale assistant greetings as you walk in. You can do the same with the number of completed projects by working on your leads. This can be the number of collaborations you have or own ideas you’ve identified from reading. You can focus on converting these ideas into completed projects by recruiting help with data collection (e.g. interns and student volunteers), or use a more efficient way to test your idea (e.g. theoretical models), or perhaps the data already exists and all you need to do is to put these together (e.g. meta-analyses).
 
Now, once a business has converted a lead to paying customer, one can increase the number transactions per sale, which will increase revenue. Think “Would you like to have fries with that?”, a line we are all too familiar with. The research equivalent of this is the idea of publication frames i.e. number of manuscripts one can address in a single project. Can you partition your data in multiple ways to test multiple hypotheses? Can you collect just a little bit more data (with minimal effort) so you can address another interesting question? Depending on the of results, can you segment these to tell more than one cohesiveness story?
 
Finally, to ultimately increase the number of publications– your manuscripts need to be submitted. Your success rate depends on a range of factors, some of which are not in your control (e.g. time in review) but you can increase your chances by making sure the story is clear, concise and well written; stick to journal guidelines; a fast turnaround with revisions or resubmissions to another journal.
 
But there is a catch with the research pipeline…
 
The lag in research
 
Khandis emphasised that the research pipeline is long one. The time from a conceived idea to data collection, to manuscript submission and submitted and acceptance is LONG. For example, I started the data collection in early December 2014 for a paper that was accepted earlier this month (3-year pipeline!!!). This means that there is always a lag in productivity and in order to avoid lulls, here are some tips:

1. Khandis’ top tip is to always keep that pipeline full. Network for collaborations, read for new ideas, collect and analyse data and always be writing something. It is that uncomfortably simple.
2. Have a mental reminder of the current state of your pipeline (See mine as an example in Fig. 2).
   
   
3. Backwards plan your tasks, e.g., if your goal is to have a study analysed, written up and submitted in 18 months, then data collection needs to start next month, but you need permits which need to be applied for this week! 

Fig. 2, My research pipeline. Huge influx from starting my PhD, still wrapping projects I worked on pre-PhD.

​Research projects – especially PhDs – can be long and demanding journeys, but with a clear pipeline in mind, one can hopefully navigate this path with a bit more ease and come out on the other side with a few more papers under your belt. Good luck!