Yet more papers!!

Well if it isn’t the week of every single thing that needs to be written needs to be done today, I don’t know what week it is. For those keeping score, I’ve successfully had one paper accepted for publication, had a random update and submitted a second paper for publication, and now I’m working on two other papers while I’m waiting to hear back about a third. What a week.

Where to start? I’m writing several first author papers, I have one that was just accepted, one that is about to be submitted, one that was just submitted, and a fourth that is still being reviewed by my co-authors. For those keeping count, we’re currently at four first author papers and we’re rushing to get them all published like now. I don’t know why everyone wants a paper done this week, but that’s where I am.

The interesting thing about all this is that the paper that was accepted came back to me. The typesetter sent out an draft version for the final paper that had several questions that needed to be addressed, within 24 hours. No, I’m not kidding they needed a response within 24 hours of sending the email so I had to drop everything I was working on to focus on that. Luckily it was 10 questions and most of them were super simple to answer/deal with. So after about an hour worth of work I had a draft response sent to my collaborators for review before we send it back to the senior author for approval.

I had finished the second paper I’m working on (this one) and sent that off to my Co-PI for review a few days ago. Yesterday I got a text about 20 minutes after the typesetter news asking to meet with me. Yes, it was one of those days. We agreed to meet virtually right then (literally just minutes after he text since I was at my computer) to go over the paper. He wants to get this done this week for our collaborators to review, so he’s made a lot of changes and basically tore the whole thing apart, or at least most of it. He hadn’t finished reviewing the paper yet.

He sent it to me last night to make more edits (which I somehow did) and I now have a nice list of things I need to get done this weekend to make sure everything gets buttoned up nicely. Figures need to be adjusted, font sizes, things like that. Nothing super major, yet anyway, but enough that it will be a busy weekend for sure.

As if that wasn’t enough, I got an email asking me to review yet another paper that I’m an author on. I don’t even count it in my list of papers to write because I’m second author and I already have way too many papers to keep track of. He asked to have edits for that paper back to him today at the latest since he wanted to submit it Monday. If I didn’t have enough to worry about, I had to go through and make edits to that paper. Thankfully it was already mostly addressed, so I added some minor things, pointed out one mistake that needed to be addressed, and sent it off to him just moments ago. Yes, I just finished reviewing that in between my class stuff today.

For those keeping count, I have finished basically all the stuff I need to do for the one accepted paper (maybe, that may change depending on the response from the senior author). I have one paper that we’re about to submit that I will be working on over the weekend. One that is in review now (for roughly the 2349283473232748723290183749827649876214639-th time) and one that will be submitted shortly (even though I don’t count it since I’m not first author).

That really just leaves one first author paper that I’ve drafted and sent to my collaborators for review. My main-PI has already given me his feedback so that’s done. The rest of the authors are working on it now and I suspect I should get feedback within the next few weeks. That paper will be submitted almost right away once I’ve finished making the suggested edits to it.

With a little luck that means by the end of the month I’ll have at least two first author papers in review, one second author paper in review, and one paper that will be either submitted or about to be submitted. If that sounds confusing, trust me when I say I agree. Hitting that point will hopefully free up some time for me to write my IRB for my research so I can finally collect the data needed for my degree and if all goes well I’ll have several papers to my name very soon. It’s exciting to finally see some progress!