Paper three resubmission!

This was quick even by my standards, but we’ve managed to make the changes we needed to the manuscript that came back just a few short days ago (here). I’ve got to come up with a more descriptive way to talk about these papers than numbering the order in which we did them, but that’s what I’ve been using for the moment. In any case the paper has been submitted, so what now?!

Now we wait. Seriously, we wait to see what the reviewers have to say about our feedback. Typically that won’t take too long. I doubt even if it gets accepted after this round that it will be done before the end of the year, but assuming we don’t get another round of edits (always a possibility) we should see this published within the month of January, which is exciting for me.

While the first paper that was published (here) was the first in the neuroengineering world, it’s not what I want to be “known” for if that makes sense. One thing I was warned about right away when I started my journey was to do the things I want to do because you’ll be “known as that person.” So if I publish a lot on one type of disease or condition, you become known for that thing.

This paper is in the field I want to be known for so I’m excited to get this published. Somewhat selfishly, I’m really looking forward to not having to do anymore work on this particular project since I have about a million other things going on right now. So much that it’s hard to keep up with everything and with yesterday’s post (here), I’ve made a ton more work for myself. It will be worth it in the end, but that’s why I want to get as much done as possible so that I can keep up with the inflow of new things.

From the journal publication side of things, we’re not really getting stuff off our plate, we’re just setting it aside until more work comes in (namely editing). Thankfully we didn’t get reviews asking us for more work, we had one reviewer who actually said the paper may benefit from being shorter in length, but with the amount of work we did for the experiment, we had to politely explain that the paper couldn’t be shortened. We also managed to get the edits done so quickly because the suggestions were minor, we spent a lot of time writing and preparing the manuscript, so it’s nice when the reviewers don’t have a whole lot to critique because we already thought of everything (or most things anyway).

Basically right now I don’t have to worry about the paper, so that’s nice. Unfortunately, it’s not completely off the table. It’s just a mini-work timebomb waiting to go off, or it could be accepted, I don’t know for sure. With how fast we got the first round of reviews, I’m excited to see how quickly we hear back this time. The first paper we had first and second rounds of feedback given to us within weeks of submitting and this journal is much faster.

All this to say, now we wait.