Hate writing papers, hate writing papers, hate, hate, hate writing papers.
I feel the more I have to work at them, the more they churn unto mud....and the less the point I was tryign to make gets put across.
4 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Poor Jenny. :(
I am trying to wrestle a big muddly pile of data into three papers which has turned out to be too much to think about all at once, so I am procrastinating here instead.
I find it helps to hand a straggly horrible draft to anyone who has any vague acquaintance with the work, as long as they make *some* comments you can feel like you are accomplishing something going back and going through the document and implementing their suggestions/queries.
Worst paper-writing experience thus far:
(1) Handed first draft of paper written by overseas postdoc who has gone home and does not answer his email.
(2) Wrestle paper into some kind of shape.
(3) Supervisor adds huge new slabs of text without bothering to read existing work closely.
(4) See (2).
(5) Supervisor thinks up new experiments that have to be done and gets a student to do them.
(6) Argue with supervisor about relevance of new experiments, come to some consensus, incorporate new experiments in text.
(7) See (2).
(8) Supervisor rewrites conclusions at last minute.
And sadly, the actual writing is less stressful than the rewriting for reviewers - which is what I'm actually doing. How did your worst experience go, reviewer wise?
Maybe I have just been very lucky until now, but I have always found rewriting for reviewers relatively hassle-free...
I have one paper in a dental journal that just came out- it was oddly rejected by the house journal of the local body that funded the work and was eventually accepted with minor revisions by an overseas journal with a higher impact factor, and- here is the relevance of this story to bad reviewing experiences, please stop me if I've told you before- it took eleven months between when I uploaded the manuscript and when I got any comments back from reviewers!
4 comments:
Poor Jenny. :(
I am trying to wrestle a big muddly pile of data into three papers which has turned out to be too much to think about all at once, so I am procrastinating here instead.
I find it helps to hand a straggly horrible draft to anyone who has any vague acquaintance with the work, as long as they make *some* comments you can feel like you are accomplishing something going back and going through the document and implementing their suggestions/queries.
Worst paper-writing experience thus far:
(1) Handed first draft of paper written by overseas postdoc who has gone home and does not answer his email.
(2) Wrestle paper into some kind of shape.
(3) Supervisor adds huge new slabs of text without bothering to read existing work closely.
(4) See (2).
(5) Supervisor thinks up new experiments that have to be done and gets a student to do them.
(6) Argue with supervisor about relevance of new experiments, come to some consensus, incorporate new experiments in text.
(7) See (2).
(8) Supervisor rewrites conclusions at last minute.
...
- Chris
And sadly, the actual writing is less stressful than the rewriting for reviewers - which is what I'm actually doing.
How did your worst experience go, reviewer wise?
Maybe I have just been very lucky until now, but I have always found rewriting for reviewers relatively hassle-free...
I have one paper in a dental journal that just came out- it was oddly rejected by the house journal of the local body that funded the work and was eventually accepted with minor revisions by an overseas journal with a higher impact factor, and- here is the relevance of this story to bad reviewing experiences, please stop me if I've told you before- it took eleven months between when I uploaded the manuscript and when I got any comments back from reviewers!
ooh, this paper took 2 weeks to come back - I'd been hoping for a bigger break.
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