Donald T Campbell once told me, “Academic life is the struggle for citations.” More prosaically, the person who dies with the most citations wins! But is it sensible to set your writing goal as achieving fame through citations reaped? I think it is an unrealistic and distracting goal, and in this post, I’ll argue for a different approach.
For decades, I have taught workshops on social science writing to graduate students and junior faculty. In those workshops, I have focused on the