Enhancing Research & Publication Success by Cultivating your Mentoring Network

In this workshop (2hr), participants will have the opportunity to: 1.  Assess their professional development needs related to research and publishing. 2.  Identify gaps in their mentoring networks that, if filled, could contribute to research productivity and career development. In the WEPAN and ADVANCE communities, mentoring as a process, practice and concept is obviously valued. The empirical evidence demonstrating the particular value of mentoring for women and underrepresented minorities has been shared in our meetings. However, conversations among members of the proverbial choir (those of us that don’t need to be convinced mentoring is important!) often are decoupled from important, contextually relevant dialogs that bring the outcomes of mentoring to the forefront. This workshop will be useful to participants interested in developing their capacities as researchers and scholars . Thus research and publication will be the context that will be utilized by participants to discuss how mentoring could best benefit their professional growth. First, participants will use rubrics to assess gaps in their knowledge related to how research is conceptualized, implemented, and disseminated. Many rubrics for researcher development have been produced in the United State and United Kingdom over the last several years, as educational and governmental organizations are recognizing the economic and strategic importance of having a world-class 21 st century scientific workforce. Sample rubrics will be shared with workshop participants, and they will have the opportunity to modify and enhance these rubrics to make them most relevant to their institutional and disciplinary contexts, as well as career stages. Second, the participants will be encouraged to think about how their professional development needs related to research & publishing could be satisfying through their cultivation of their own mentoring network. Traditional conceptions of mentoring (a one-to-one process that occurs between early career and later career colleagues) are giving way to more expansive ideas of mentoring, including peer-to-peer mentoring, technologically mediated mentoring, external mentoring, and interdisciplinary / cross-industry mentoring. Participants will be guided through the process of developing a map of their mentoring network as it relates to their current professional development needs. Participants will walk away having developed a “plan of action” to take advantage of their newly identified mentoring networks. This workshop is for faculty, doctoral students, and postdoctoral students who want to identify priorities for their own scholarly development, and develop a plan to take responsibility for energizing and building their mentoring networks in support of these goals.