President’s Column with Terry Palisch: The Value of Publishing Technical Papers for Your Career

Abstract

This transcript is an excerpt from the podcast episode. Hello, I’m Bryan Hibbard, senior editorial operations manager for SPE, I’m pleased to join 2024 President Terry Palisch as he continues his discussion about the ways we connect our members to technology by focusing on SPE papers, JPT, and other SPE publications. Terry, thank you for inviting me. Thank you for joining me, Bryan. I appreciate you taking the time to be the host. I thought you would make a good host for this topic. In December, I talked about regional sections and how I think that they are the face of SPE, and similarly when I think of reading and writing SPE papers or reading the Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT), and the SPE Journal, these too are some of the key aspects of being an SPE member. It’s also front and center to our mission statement connecting our members to technology, serving as one of the primary ways we do that, and it also plays a role in connecting our members to other members. So, I thought it would be important to spend this episode talking about the importance of SPE papers, JPT, and continuing our focus on how members can get the most out of their SPE membership and in turn create their energy future. SPE papers mean a lot to me. I manage the journals, as well as the conference papers at SPE. I know they are very special to you as well. When you and I did the How to Write a Good Abstract webinar together a couple of months ago, we got to hear a lot about your opinions on how to write a great abstract. So why do you think SPE papers are so important? Let me just tell you a quick story to illustrate the importance of papers. When I was a member of the Dallas Section several years ago, Danny Bell (SPE Dallas Section Education Chair) said his committee thought that writing papers was very important, so they asked me to put on a seminar on how to write SPE papers. That is what led to the webinar that you were just talking about. If you think about technical papers, engineers in all industries write technical papers, they do it to disseminate information and to memorialize their ideas and their discoveries. It is important to any profession that we write and document. When it comes to SPE I think papers are critical; without them we don’t have conferences or symposia. They enrich the multisociety library, OnePetro. In the end, it’s the way we disseminate technology and information to our members. But it’s also important to authors because they do the heavy lifting, they are the ones who do the writing, and sometimes they do it in their off time. More information about this is available from our webinar, mentioned earlier.