The Lepidiad
My paper has been accepted! Finally! Preparing it has really been quite an ordeal.
I wrote my first draft of it over a week in September. True to form, my advisor had minimal comments on it and said it was close to being ready to submit. When I sent her my second draft soon afterward she had started a sabbatical in New Zealand, had much more attention to devote to it, and was much more critical. Which shouldn't have been surprising at all. She always has more and more feedback to give the closer something is to completion. I guess she doesn't take first drafts too seriously, and mostly just skims over them. Once things get closer to being submitted, she realizes she needs to pay more attention. It's a strategy that is frustrating and disheartening to the rest of us, and can't possibly be the most efficient approach.
Somewhere in the middle of sending drafts back and forth to New Zealand, I got some feedback that my results were a little too conservative from the organization I was doing this for (for free). Ok. So I redid and strengthened my analyses. That took a few weeks. Then my advisor decided that I should add a third site for the sake of comparison. Yuck. I had really been avoiding that third site because it's been nothing but a bane to my existence for 3 years or more now. I have tried and tried and tried to analyze it, and it has never worked. And even though the fact that things are unsuccessful there would actually be the point of including it (to contrast successful from hopeless cases), I was a little reluctant because there are some inconsistencies between that site and the others. But I went ahead and included it.
Still, my advisor didn't like the paper. She pointed out one weakness that I was really hoping nobody would notice. (It took her that long after all.) But it wasn't actually that hard to address. Or at least, I thought that I addressed it in a logical and elegant way. But she wasn't happy with it. I tried a new approach. She liked those results, but still wanted me to go farther. She kept making suggestions that didn't really make any sense. But I didn't want to point out to her that maybe some of the methods she was suggesting didn't really work the way she thought they did for fear that maybe she could be on to something by thinking outside of the box and I was just too limited to see that. So I used one of her suggestions to appease her, adapted another to a technique that would actually work with my data, and collected some leaf angle data. This took quite a while because it required some very slow processes to be run. But finally I got the results and finally I got a draft of my paper (something like the 7th) that she liked.
It was so frustrating, partly because I really needed to be done with that work so that I could move on to other things, partly because it really wasn't in bad shape all along, and partly because all of this additional stuff really only contributed to a paragraph or two of the discussion. She always thought that the paper was "ok", but she was convinced that it could be "very good" and would accept nothing less. Plenty of other people in my lab get away with ok papers, so why should I be held to a higher standard?! I tried not to be ungrateful. Really, every round it went through improved it, and I will, of course, be glad to have a very good paper to my name, but how can I be expected to finish my research and graduate if every manuscript takes 8 months to complete?
Finally, in mid May I submitted it. Both my advisor and I were very happy with the final draft. Yet, a week later, I was informed by the editor that they're tired of publishing papers on that topic and that he had decided not to send it out to review. I was extremely dismayed, not the least because it highlighted just how subjective the peer review process (which I hadn't even gotten to!) really is. I agree, in general, with his argument, but I don't think it applies to my paper, which he clearly hadn't actually read. Most work in this area is nothing more than case studies. I believe they should be published, to add to the overall literature, but not in the top remote sensing journal. However, I really went above and beyond with my paper, approaching it from a novel angle and providing a unique discussion that really should contribute much more to the field than a mere case study.
So I resubmitted it, along with a nice letter to the editor explaining why my paper is valuable and why it should at least be considered. (I also noted that I had quite recently been asked to review a much worse paper on this topic for the same journal quite recently, and that mine deserved the same treatment as that one...) The editor did an about face (fortunately). It was extremely gratifying. Not only did he really like my paper now, but he was very glad that I had resubmitted it since now he believed his journal would get a very good paper that another (lesser) journal would miss out on as a result.
The peer reviewers' comments, when I received them, were all very positive as well. They all thought it was a very good paper, but they unanimously agreed that it was a very long paper. They were right; it was. All of those rounds of back and forth with my advisor added more and more to it. The final manuscript that I submitted was 70 pages long! I managed to cut about 5 pages out, addressed the other minor concerns of the reviewers (such as the inconsistencies of the third site), and resubmitted it. The revised manuscript was accepted without any difficulty. Yay!
So who wants to buy me ice cream to celebrate? ;)
I wrote my first draft of it over a week in September. True to form, my advisor had minimal comments on it and said it was close to being ready to submit. When I sent her my second draft soon afterward she had started a sabbatical in New Zealand, had much more attention to devote to it, and was much more critical. Which shouldn't have been surprising at all. She always has more and more feedback to give the closer something is to completion. I guess she doesn't take first drafts too seriously, and mostly just skims over them. Once things get closer to being submitted, she realizes she needs to pay more attention. It's a strategy that is frustrating and disheartening to the rest of us, and can't possibly be the most efficient approach.
Somewhere in the middle of sending drafts back and forth to New Zealand, I got some feedback that my results were a little too conservative from the organization I was doing this for (for free). Ok. So I redid and strengthened my analyses. That took a few weeks. Then my advisor decided that I should add a third site for the sake of comparison. Yuck. I had really been avoiding that third site because it's been nothing but a bane to my existence for 3 years or more now. I have tried and tried and tried to analyze it, and it has never worked. And even though the fact that things are unsuccessful there would actually be the point of including it (to contrast successful from hopeless cases), I was a little reluctant because there are some inconsistencies between that site and the others. But I went ahead and included it.
Still, my advisor didn't like the paper. She pointed out one weakness that I was really hoping nobody would notice. (It took her that long after all.) But it wasn't actually that hard to address. Or at least, I thought that I addressed it in a logical and elegant way. But she wasn't happy with it. I tried a new approach. She liked those results, but still wanted me to go farther. She kept making suggestions that didn't really make any sense. But I didn't want to point out to her that maybe some of the methods she was suggesting didn't really work the way she thought they did for fear that maybe she could be on to something by thinking outside of the box and I was just too limited to see that. So I used one of her suggestions to appease her, adapted another to a technique that would actually work with my data, and collected some leaf angle data. This took quite a while because it required some very slow processes to be run. But finally I got the results and finally I got a draft of my paper (something like the 7th) that she liked.
It was so frustrating, partly because I really needed to be done with that work so that I could move on to other things, partly because it really wasn't in bad shape all along, and partly because all of this additional stuff really only contributed to a paragraph or two of the discussion. She always thought that the paper was "ok", but she was convinced that it could be "very good" and would accept nothing less. Plenty of other people in my lab get away with ok papers, so why should I be held to a higher standard?! I tried not to be ungrateful. Really, every round it went through improved it, and I will, of course, be glad to have a very good paper to my name, but how can I be expected to finish my research and graduate if every manuscript takes 8 months to complete?
Finally, in mid May I submitted it. Both my advisor and I were very happy with the final draft. Yet, a week later, I was informed by the editor that they're tired of publishing papers on that topic and that he had decided not to send it out to review. I was extremely dismayed, not the least because it highlighted just how subjective the peer review process (which I hadn't even gotten to!) really is. I agree, in general, with his argument, but I don't think it applies to my paper, which he clearly hadn't actually read. Most work in this area is nothing more than case studies. I believe they should be published, to add to the overall literature, but not in the top remote sensing journal. However, I really went above and beyond with my paper, approaching it from a novel angle and providing a unique discussion that really should contribute much more to the field than a mere case study.
So I resubmitted it, along with a nice letter to the editor explaining why my paper is valuable and why it should at least be considered. (I also noted that I had quite recently been asked to review a much worse paper on this topic for the same journal quite recently, and that mine deserved the same treatment as that one...) The editor did an about face (fortunately). It was extremely gratifying. Not only did he really like my paper now, but he was very glad that I had resubmitted it since now he believed his journal would get a very good paper that another (lesser) journal would miss out on as a result.
The peer reviewers' comments, when I received them, were all very positive as well. They all thought it was a very good paper, but they unanimously agreed that it was a very long paper. They were right; it was. All of those rounds of back and forth with my advisor added more and more to it. The final manuscript that I submitted was 70 pages long! I managed to cut about 5 pages out, addressed the other minor concerns of the reviewers (such as the inconsistencies of the third site), and resubmitted it. The revised manuscript was accepted without any difficulty. Yay!
So who wants to buy me ice cream to celebrate? ;)
posted by Meg at
1:55 PM
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