If the criticism is good, embrace both the critic and the criticism. If the criticism is not valid, ignore it but do argue with the critic.

Well, there's plenty of ways to contribute to learning and understanding. There are even a few who might improve their contribution by keeping quiet! But seriously, if he criticisms are valid, they're valuable. Some minds are great at spotting defects, but no good in providing alternatives.

Of course, the suspicion is that the critic who offers no alternative is lazy if not ignorant. But, I'm not sure. A goo critic who knows their own limitations should be welcomed, I think.

Christopher NOCK

Indeed, you are absolutely right Christopher NOCK. Thank you for your great feedback.

I cannot agreed more than that!!!

If the criticism is good, embrace both the critic and the criticism. If the criticism is not valid, ignore it but do argue with the critic.

I believe it depends on the quality of criticism. "You have not published much! You don't know what you are talking about!" sounds a bit like brushing off criticism instead of dealing with it. Maybe they do know what they are talking about? First of all, we do not know what that person has done so far in research. Not all research is visible. Counting the number of publications might be easy, but in all seriousness we would need to take it all into account:

• Publications: where, what, how many?
• written expert opinion, eventually confident or for internal use
• teaching experience on the topic
• no researcher but working in the field (lab and such)
• researcher in a research team
• publishing based on the results of a research team

So if there is somebody who has been working your field and published a lot, but maybe in easy to get publications, his opinion is more valid than that of one who was mainly teaching? A teacher at university level might be in the position to decide on how useful your book is for teaching students, how easy it is to understand and whether the reasoning makes sense. If it was natural sciences we are talking about another individual might be so caught up with running tests at the lab that he has extensive experience when it comes to DNA-splicing (or whatever they do there), but no or few publications. Is his opinion less valid than that of his colleague who hardly does any field work but writes a lot?

Even a student of MA level and his ideas can help. You might consider him no professional at that level, but if his criticism indicates that he might not fully have understood what you were trying to say, you know that you might have to work on that. What I mean is: judge the criticism by the quality of criticism and refrain from judging those who express it and then decide on whether to take their pledges seriously or not. Of course assuming those who express criticism are from the same field and discipline.

If I'd disagree with whatever criticism had been expressed, I'd rather criticise the argument, not the person. Is the argument valid or not seems more important and will have the stronger impact on the long run.

Worth reading -

“CHAPTER 5

Writing Papers

Publishing Without Perishing”

from the below link -

https://biomath.usu.edu/files/Peter_J._Feibelman_A_PhD_Is_Not_Enough.pdf

There are many reasons why academics might not publish journal papers, seldom or at all, including, among others:

(1) They do not find publishing research papers appealing;

(2) they focus on teaching at all levels;

(3) they focus on administration at all levels;

(4) they focus on supervising students at all levels;

(5) they are involved in community outreach;

(6) they are engaged in private consultancy;

(7)) they are engaged in public consultancy.

None of the above precludes academics from providing critical analysis on any research papers, published or not.

They might be able to help improve papers, especially prior to publication.

Garsten et al (2015) described that the fraction of sole-authored academic papers has been declining for a long time, especially in the natural sciences. They pointed out that while sole-authored papers can produce highly creative and laudable individualistic approaches to fundamental questions, multiply-authored papers cannot.

The paper entitled “Single authors: an exterminated race” can be found at the link - http://junq.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Single_Author.pdf

Husin Sitepu - I suppose this one was to go into the "What do you think about single-authored papers" section?