bringing old studies at the bottom of the drawers to life

[Marasme]

crap title but basically: what do you do with the bits and bobs of half done projects, 99% finished projects, offshout projects - e.g. the stuff that got started by phd students who left without wanting to publish, the stuff which got rejected a few too many time with asks for new experiments that you cannot afford etc?

there are loads of these studies, some with a bit of a timestamp (e.g. studies with people) some not, which would benefit from being "out there" as potentially useful to someone?

For me, it depends.

Its a case of considering how enthusiastic I am about a project, what benefit it would have for me to finish it off, what else I've got on, and how much time (or resource) it would take.

There isn't a fool-proof formula for figuring it out though. A lot of the time for me, its about gut instinct - if its a project I'm excited to finish, I'll carve out time and make it happen. If I'm non-plussed about the project, I won't bother.

I've become very comfortable with just binning things off, especially papers or grants that've been through several rounds of rejections. In the past, I'd have just kept on going indefinitely and those papers/grants would just take up headspace. Now I don't - after a few rejections if I'm struggling to see where they'd neatly fit, I just give up and move on.

This is all contextual though. For me, I'm a social sciences SL at an RG. I'm not seeking promotion. Redundancies aren't yet on the horizon at my institution. Even if they were, I could afford to lose my job. I'm coasting along and enjoying it. So, I make my decisions about long-forgotten work in that context. For example, I'll dedicate two weeks to writing a 'useless' (i.e. non-REFable) but fun book chapter, instead of working on a potentially world-leading but boring journal article. In other words, I'm not being strategic in my decisions.

In terms of actually getting down to it and finishing off long-forgotten work, I have a few strategies:

1. Fundamentally just carve out time. I'll block a week or a fortnight or a month in my diary just for one task. That relies on saying "no" to a lot of people and things, and being strict with things like meeting and email schedules but it works for me.
2. Hiring a research assistant. This year, I've used some of my personal research fund (that we get each year for conferences etc.) to hire a PhD student to work on data analysis and paper write-up with me. It's been amazing - I simply wouldn't have had time to even look at the data and paper without help from her.
3. Smushing things together. Where I have projects or data or bits of writing that could be coalesced, I do so. This gives me more to write about, more data t draw on, and decreased the number of things to finish.
4. As I said, also just being comfortable to get so far into a long-forgotten project and just go "Nah, actually I can't be arsed".

I can't really speak to the issue of resource for experiments and the like because that's not really a thing we run up against in social sciences. Is there potential to get a summer student or final year project student (assuming they come with an adequate consumable budget) to finish off some of the lab work needed?

I have a physical notebook where I write about all of these. In the summer I make an effort to read through my notebooks and see if any of the data can be used in new projects, or if a new MSc student could continue them

otherwise they remain in the notebook until the next year!

Shove them on a pre-print server or your institutional repository as non peer-reviewed reports (ours will give a DOI so they get indexed on Google scholar if nowhere else)? Especially the "been rejected a few times but fundamentally sound and I'm not going to make substantive changes" papers. Means the results are out there but requires almost zero work for you.

At the slightly more work level, does your institution have any read and publish agreements with publishers? A couple of times recently I have gone for low impact open access journals which have a pretty good acceptance rate and acceptable but fairly light touch peer review. But this only works for publishers where my institution has these agreements because I wouldn't have personal funding to do this.

But there is stuff I am not doing, and I agree with the above I only really do research or write about stuff that either a) I am paid to do (and I work quite hard not to be funded on stuff I don't want to do) or b) I want to do