Journal Paper three update!

Well that was fast, we got reviews back on a paper we recently submitted and they were surprisingly good for us. It’s still considered major revisions, but they gave us ten days to make the changes. Ten days as of Monday, so were about a week away from needing to resubmit. There’s some work to be done for sure, but I think we can manage.

Okay, since we’re talking journal papers, I should recap because calling it paper three makes it difficult for my readers to keep up with (my apologies). Technically speaking paper one is work I did for my Masters degree. We submitted it months ago and we should be hearing back soon if the timeline of the last few submissions holds. This paper has been a pain since I wrote it, we have had zero luck getting it published and if it weren’t for my recent success I wouldn’t believe I could get a journal paper published. So no word on that one, but it’s been years of work… boo!

Paper two was the result of a class I took. We put a lot of time and effort into writing it, getting feedback, and just really nailing the thing down so it would get published right away and our efforts paid off. We went through two rounds of edits and it was published just a month or so ago (more here). This was my first paper in my new field so I’m very proud of it and it’s open source so if I ever feel comfortable enough to share it, you can read all about what I’ve been up to. Speaking of which, since I can talk about it now, we used EEG to predict seizure state using real-time applicable methods. It’s very cool work and just yesterday the school featured the senior author and myself in an article, so that’s kind of cool!

Paper four is for a project I did that I’ve been complaining about since we did the project. It turned out not to be as bad as I thought it would be and we had a pretty strong paper. We’re still working on editing it before submission, but that should be submitted soon and I hope published sometime early next year. To this point none of the work I’ve published is specifically the stuff I’m REALLY interested in, but I skipped paper three so I could recap the others, paper three is different.

Paper three was submitted about a month ago (here), or I guess judging by the date on the post almost two months ago now. This paper has been a lot of work that happened really fast. The data collection took a significant amount of time, but once that was done I managed to do the analysis very quickly. I created some cool figures, made some interesting observations and is EXACTLY the kind of work that gets me excited about doing research and is why I jumped to neuroengineering in the first place. It’s a very interesting paper with very cool results and implications. I CANNOT wait to have it published and while I’m on the fence about sharing paper two, paper three will be much harder to keep to myself.

Today will be spent doing most of the heavy lifting with the edits for the paper. Some of them are small things the reviewers thought would be nice. Most of of the harder ones want us to expand on some particular thing that we said in the paper or to simplify some things. Overall I’ve seen far more critical feedback given to a paper.

*nods solemnly to paper one*

In any case, this is great news for us and means we could have the paper published as early as the beginning of next year and that would be amazing for me. I really cannot wait to get this out and show off a bit. I did some really cool stuff with the figures. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I really think my figure making has gotten a lot better over the last few years.

That said I should probably stop writing this and start the edits!