Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Make it somehow all seem worthwhile

A few months ago I submitted a manuscript for publication in a scientific journal. For those of you who don't know how the process works, the manuscript gets an initial look to make sure the formatting requirements are met, and that the subject matter is appropriate for the journal. If both those things seem to be okay, then the editors send the manuscript to other researchers who are familiar with the subject for external review. Those reviewers will go through the manuscript, and produce a list of concerns such as problems they see with the analyses, problems they have with the conclusions that are drawn based on the results, etc. The reviewers then send those comments back to the associate editor who is handling the manuscript, along with a recommendation of whether or not they feel the paper should be published in the journal. The associate editor will also read through the manuscript and provide comments, and based on those and the recommendations of the other reviewers will make a recommendation to the journal editor. All of this usually takes a few months.

Last week I received comments for the paper I submitted, and they were all favorable. However, there are some issues that one of the reviewers felt needed to be addressed, so I've been revising the manuscript to deal with those. Some are more time consuming than others, and that's when I begin to wonder why all the comments can't be like some of those from the associate editor:

"Line 35: Please include references that support this statement.
Lines 311, 323: may be extra spaces at the end of sentences.
Line 408: Period at end of sentence is strange - possibly bold or larger font.
Line 415: large-water not large water
"

Those are the easy ones to deal with. That said, I'm almost done revising, and the paper will be accepted once I resubmit it to the journal (which will hopefully be in the next couple days) . The only bad part is that it's merely a side project that should've been published years ago.

11 comments:

Savannah said...

Years ago, now, in a few weeks....it doesn't matter Minnow. It's going to be published and that should make you so proud of yourself.

Damn I'm proud of you. Well done.

Inklings said...

I am very proud of you. You do know that, though, right?

Amber said...

Well that's still awesome, every time you're published it adds to your resume (especially if you eventually would like tenure somewhere)

Unknown said...

Argh. They could have made the revisions in less time than it took to write and tell you about them. Welcome to my world. I do revisions every day. Every single day.

Jenny said...

so the corrections are merely grammatical? I've had friends get theirs back completely "red lined", so well done.

Getting published is what it's all about, so congrats.

Native Minnow said...

Don't get me wrong. There were several more important revisions that need to be made. Some problems with me not justifying certain decisions well enough, as well as some issues with how I treated some things in the discussion. One is even causing me (on my own accord) to re-run some analyses just to make sure some slight tweaks in the settings don't change anything. That's the only thing I'm waiting on now, then it should be ready to submit. I just wish all of the comments would've been like that. Then I'd be done with it already, and moving on to more important things. Like my dissertation.

Lillie said...

I like: "large-water not large water."

Sounds sort of like Japanese poetry.

Haiku Master said...

Publish or perish
the thoughts left uncentered on
large-water pages.

2 Dollar Productions said...

Still, that's very cool & even though the submission/review process usually drags on forever and a day, it's worth it when it shows up in print someday.

Anonymous said...

Very strange period at the end?
WTF is up with that stuff?
Hilarious.

PsychDoctor said...

I am in awe...I struggle to publish anything and hate the tedium so badly that I don't even put in the effort...