Get published!

Another piece of good news - the manuscript I submitted to a peer-reviewed journal 'Energy Policy' is accepted for publication!

In academia, publications are very important to a researcher not only for job hunting but also promotion - as often said: 'publsih or perish'. My supervisor told me that when they recruited teaching staffs, those who did not have more than 3 publications before getting the PhD would normally not be shortlisted, let alone given an interview opportunity. 'Energy Policy' is within the top ten journals in the Environmental Studies category, ranked by impact factor. As a first-year MPhil student I think it is a big surprise to me. Hope that this will help my PhD application later this year.

The article is titled 'Merging electricity and environment politics of Hong Kong: identifying the barriers from the ways that sustainability is defined'. The idea and content are actually based on my MSc dissertation. I spent the later half of my summer holidy to get it finished. It's a bit more than 10,000 words, which is fairly long to read. It's a qualitative one based on secondary data only. This is a piece of comment from one of the reviewers of my article:

"Reviewer #1: I must commend the author for producing this excellent paper which provides a comprehensive review on the development of the electricity industry in Hong Kong. I concur with the views of the author as presented in the paper which faithfully reflect the status quo of the electricity policy of Hong Kong. Findings from the study are reasonable to help identify the barriers for sustainable development and reform of the Hong Kong's ESI in the future.

In conclusion, I recommend the paper be accepted for publication in the Journal of Energy Policy."

Actually, I have submitted another manuscript to another journal (but is of lower grade), again based on my MSc disseration. Hope that there will be more good news soon.