March Research Thread

[Parasaurolophus]

Finish checking, then gotta make a start on finding commentators for a conference.

Sent it off! Also did some housekeeping and read my assigned readings for next week; commentators tomorrow.

[Parasaurolophus]

Right, well, I suppose I need to deal with those commentators now. Ugh.

[Parasaurolophus]

Right, well, I suppose I need to deal with those commentators now. Ugh.

Well, I did that distasteful task. And then I did the equally distasteful task of preparing my taxes.

[Parasaurolophus]

Nothing today, I'm afraid.

[Myword]

 writing first draft of my reply to article--(how did it pass peer review?)

 made corrections to proofs for my long awaited article
submitted over a year ago, and re written over seven years
innumerable times. I hope it is read.

[Parasaurolophus]

writing first draft of my reply to article--(how did it pass peer review?)

 made corrections to proofs for my long awaited article
submitted over a year ago, and re written over seven years
innumerable times. I hope it is read.

Congratulations!



For my part, today I got a rejection for a paper that started life as a reply piece. It's hard to un-reply it, because there's virtually no other literature on this subject. Even so... Anyway, R1 says I should cut it down and send it to the original journal as a reply piece. That was, of course, the first place it went, where it was rejected for not going into the weeds of some phenomenon at full paper length (which the present paper now does). Damned if you do, and damned if you don't .

I swear it's harder to publish a reply than a full-length paper. Every time I try, I get dinged for criteria appropriate for a full paper but not a reply, and then the paper is stuck trying to expand its scope enough so that it doesn't look like a reply any more.

Anyway. I'll send it to one last reply-friendly journal today (after that, I'll have to do some rewriting), and then work on lecture prep.

[Parasaurolophus]

Didn't have much time, but made a start, at least.

[Parasaurolophus]

Report:

Monthly goals:

• Generate and give conference presentation.
• Submit contracted translation manuscript #2.
• Finish straggling book chapter.
• Start on the intro for translation project #3.
• Comment on an acquaintance's projected reply to a paper of mine.

Since translation #2 required an additional 10k words of introductory material, I'm gonna say that was good enough, in the end.

[Myword]

writing first draft of my reply to article--(how did it pass peer review?)

Congratulations!



For my part, today I got a rejection for a paper that started life as a reply piece. It's hard to un-reply it, because there's virtually no other literature on this subject. Even so... Anyway, R1 says I should cut it down and send it to the original journal as a reply piece. That was, of course, the first place it went, where it was rejected for not going into the weeds of some phenomenon at full paper length (which the present paper now does). Damned if you do, and damned if you don't .

I swear it's harder to publish a reply than a full-length paper. Every time I try, I get dinged for criteria appropriate for a full paper but not a reply, and then the paper is stuck trying to expand its scope enough so that it doesn't look like a reply any more.

     I would think that writing a reply is easier to publish. Shorter and narrow focus. I never wrote one before because I thought they would be unread. Mine is very critical because the author's arguments are very bad, a graduate student.  Are replies sent out for review?  Maybe you should read other journals. It is easy, I bet, to publish a positive supportive reply which validates the editor's decision and values the article. Writing a whole article is ambitious, daunting to me.

[Parasaurolophus]

I would think that writing a reply is easier to publish. Shorter and narrow focus. I never wrote one before because I thought they would be unread. Mine is very critical because the author's arguments are very bad, a graduate student.  Are replies sent out for review?  Maybe you should read other journals. It is easy, I bet, to publish a positive supportive reply which validates the editor's decision and values the article. Writing a whole article is ambitious, daunting to me.

The challenge is that most journals only accept replies to work published in their own pages, so you have basically one chance to publish it--and the original author is usually one of the referees, and many don't care for criticism. Once you fail to publish in the original journal, you have to find a way of justifying the reply's publication elsewhere. Usually that means expanding it into a full-length paper. That's fine, but harder to do, especially when it comes to narrow topics that only have one or two things published on them; the end result still looks like a reply, so gets desk-rejected a lot.