Well folks, it is the final push of the semester before winter holidays! I have high expectations of what I want to accomplish over the next several days before I am homeward bound and enjoying the coastal mountains of British Columbia. The halls are quite, as undergraduates are finished with their classes, so fingers crossed I leave with at least a little bit of self-fulfillment.
Over the past two weeks, I have put my Masters project on the back-burner and have been working on revisions on a manuscript I had submitted to a journal for publication. The manuscript details my undergraduate directed studies project, which was conducted in the Southwest Yukon Territory, when I was working as an undergraduate field assistant. Recent observations, across the circumpolar, have found that the range limits of deciduous, tall shrubs have expanded, moving up-slope and to greater latitudes. A change in plant community composition from small, statured tundra plants to shrub land will likely effect both ecosystem function and composition. My directed studies project asked how plant community composition and alpine tundra ecosystem properties varied along a shrub density and altitudinal gradient. You all aren’t plant ecologists so that’s all the technical detail I will get into (but after looking at the picture of the beautiful view from my study site, maybe you wish you were). In this post, I want to address the journey of my first submission to an academic journal. Of course, this experience is unique and perhaps lots of things I experienced are not common place so take it as you will.
1) Things take a time.
My coauthors and I first submitted our manuscript in spring of 2016, it was 8 months later we received a ‘resubmit with major revisions’ from the journal. We resubmitted the manuscript and 6 months later, we heard back that our manuscript was rejected. We addressed remaining issues that the 1st journal had, reformatted, and submitted the manuscript to another journal. Another 6 months lapsed and we are currently revising the manuscript to resubmit to journal 2. The manuscript has been in the peer review process now for a year and a half, when you add in the time it took to collect and analyze the data and draft the manuscript we are close to 3 years.
2) Importance of staying organized.
With three years since the project inception, recalling what, why, and how no longer comes easily. Keeping clear notes, well organized data files, and well annotated analyses, is crucial. This lesson, perfectly corresponded to a lab meeting I attended about good data practices. We concluded in our lab meeting, that if something was to happen to you today, you want your data and analysis to be organized and annotated in a way so that a stranger could pick-up and continue your project with ease. Well it is safe to say that when I went back into my data to respond to a reviewer’s point, I myself, the person who created the files, had to squint and scroll through and dissect what I had done a few years ago to find what I was looking for. Definitely not clear, definitely not easy. It perfectly illustrated the conclusion of our lab meeting, it is easier to take the time to well document things from the start then it is to sort through things in the future. It was a really good lesson for me and a goal I am going to strive to stay on top of during my masters.
3) It is hard to not take poor reviews personally.
So we all made it to grad school or are thinking about attending grad school, we clearly were competent undergraduate students who were used to excelling in our respective fields. The first reviews I received were numerous and addressed issues that hadn’t even crossed my mind. After already investing so much time into the project, I was disappointed, somewhat embarrassed that the manuscript I had submitted had so many flaws, and felt really overwhelmed with thinking about how to start revisions. I took a few days to let emotions subside and started on revising. I found myself trying to alter the manuscript to address every point the reviewers made but struggled on a few because I didn’t agree with their statements. My coauthor, a tenure track professor, quickly told me it is okay to respectfully disagree with reviewers. As a junior in the field, I needed to surpass the imposter syndrome hurdle, in order to disagree with confidence; who am I to tell expert reviewers that I didn’t agree with aspects of their review? It has been an emotional roller-coaster, from embarrassment, to self-doubt, to feelings of pride. In the end, every round of revisions, no matter how hard they are to initially internalize, have made the manuscript a stronger piece of work; where it is now is leaps and bounds better than the original work.
The manuscript will be ready to resubmit to journal 2 within the next few days, I am proud of the work I have put into it but also now recognize some flaws that I cannot fit but can only acknowledge. Of course, I hope that this process will lead to my first publication but in the end if it doesn’t it has been an invaluable learning experience.
Cheers,
Anna
