Publishing fame

[KEV67]

Did I ever tell you I had a PhD? Yeah, well, I do, but I don't like to mention it. It would be like a retired military officer referring to himself as Captain or Major. My PhD was something to do with solar panels and heat pumps. During the course of my PhD, I eventually had two papers published, although in a relatively crummy journal. The first was a literature review of similar projects to the one I was working on. I think that was published in a paper entitled Sustainable Engineering. The second was about my own research, which I first tried to submit to a high impact, Elsevier journal. After writing the paper, and replying to the criticisms of the referees twice over, the editor rejected the paper as being too much like a report. After that, I submitted the paper to Sustainable Engineering. After responding to the criticisms of another two referees, which involved almost a complete re-write, the paper was accepted. Then for years nobody read it. At least nobody cited it. Then I think Sustainable Engineering included it in some sort of book or compendium. After that people seemed to read it more. I recently got an email from www.academia.edu to say 422 people had mentioned my name. The thing is there are other academics who share my name. When I first started getting emails from this site, quite a few were for papers I had not written. I went into the website to disclaim my ownership of the papers I had not written, but since then I have left it alone. To find out about my mentions, I have to pay the Academia website £1, but I am not sure I want to. Of course, my supervisor's name is also on the two papers, but I did most of the actual writing. It took me a week just to copy out some diagrams from other papers I was citing. They have to be in incredible, high resolution.