Slogging on

I just submitted a paper for publication! It's my first paper (unless you count the one they kindly listed me as an author on when I worked in a molecular biology lab) and I'm first author. I'm so excited! It's the first baby step of my project, and yeah, it's kind of dull. But it's a step that had to be done and the results are very promising. If this hadn't worked, it would guarantee that my project wouldn't work, and then I'd be stuck searching for a thesis project again. You've heard about this work before; it's what I presented at the conference in Oakland in October. Hopefully it will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Weed Science (fingers crossed!). (Yeah, it's not the most exciting journal, but my paper's not the most exciting article! ;P And no, it is not about that weed...)

The whole process has really been an ordeal, however. First there was the formatting. The entire manuscript had to be double spaced. This sounds like it should be a trivial task, but no! There were the heads of many brave knights littered around the castle of double spacing! It was scary, but I was strong and persevered. The hitch was that the tables had to be double spaced too. (At least, that was my interpretation of the author's instructions. If it turns out that those would be ok single spaced, I think I'll flip...) Still, you might think, how can double spacing tables be so hard? Well, you're absolutely right. It shouldn't be so hard. But that's where microsoft word (that evil dragon) comes in... Somehow, whenever I tried to double space a table, it would chop the table up, start the table halfway down the page, put the last few rows at the top of that same page, with the caption somewhere in the middle. Or it would overlay the top of the table on the bottom of the table, so that you ended up with a big mess. And when you tried moving a table around to get it back where it belonged, it would change things at random, like the column width. It made no sense! Finally I got everything straightened out (there were plenty of muttered imprecations, but fortunately noone was here yet) but a blank page had magically appeared between two of my tables, and any attempts to get rid of it sent everything haywire all over again. Eventually, by creating a new document file and copying things over in pieces, I finally managed to get everything shipshape.

Then came the submission process. I understand now why my advisor usually makes someone else do this for her. It was a pain as well! Especially the part where you're required to suggest 5 possible unbiased reviewers for your manuscript. Eek. Maybe this is simple for some old professor, but how can I come up with 5 reviewers? I ended up choosing authors of studies I've read about remote sensing of weeds and a few other people who are kind of local so they'll be super familiar with my weed and think that it's an important one to study. I hope they're unbiased! Or at least, if they are biased in any way, hopefully it will be in my favor! Although, who knows how many of them, if any, will actually be asked to review it.

Then you have to upload your files, it converts them to a pdf, and numbers all the lines. This was a little interesting too since the line numbers got shifted over at one point and went down the middle of one of the tables. I was able to fix this relatively easily, however. So it seems like everything is submitted fine and it is now entering the review process. Let's hope it survives! =D If not, there's always Weed Technology.