Publications, part 3: Stage presence

I went 2 years without having much going on in the publication department. And that’s not good. We had trouble getting data for my thesis project, and while 3 different people said they could fix it, none of them had any luck. I started to get worried after my prelim when each of my committee members told me what a great presentation I’d made, but that the project was huge and it would be difficult to complete. One of them approached me, patted on the shoulder and said “You’ve set yourself quite a challenge. Let me know if I can help – you’re going to need it.”

So I did what you might suspect I’d do if you’ve gotten to know me at all here. I panicked. I quickly emailed students who had graduated to get an accurate assessment of my situation. I had learned quickly that they were observant and honest and would tell me whether I was in a bad situation. I was clear from the beginning – I needed a first-author publication. I was ending my third year of grad school and hadn’t exactly been prolific in the realm of writing.

Whether she felt sorry for me or truly needed the help in her post-doc research, Carrie offered me a solution. She had a multi-faceted project and was committed to doing a tremendous amount of analysis as well as responsible for designing and perfecting the method. I knew she was stressed – we were a matched pair in terms of freaking out when considering the tasks we faced. But we balanced each other – listening to her reminded me that I too overreacted to circumstances that ended up being fine.

There was a large body of work that could be done remotely, she said. If I could take over certain pieces of the project, she would have time open to do some optimization that had been delayed. I happily accepted, unconcerned with putting off working on some major sections of my project. Apart from the lack of data, I was stalled – not knowing how to bring everything together in some sort of cohesive unit. So I stared at all my data a lot – an organizational nightmare and a methodological question mark. I knew where I wanted it to go – where I still hope it ends up. But I had no view of the path to get there.

So a distraction seemed in order. Carrie was concerned that my advisor would see a problem with my spending work hours on other projects, especially those centered at another institution. Unwilling to let a chance at a publication slip away, especially when my future in print was extremely uncertain in my current environment, I decided to work from home. Putting in the requisite hours at the office – doing reading, helping younger students, serving on various committees in the graduate school as well as my own department – I would go home to more work.

My fourth, and last, year in grad school was by far my most productive. I did eventually tell my advisor that I was doing another project and was warned that he expected progress on my work for him as well. I agreed, and since he saw no problem with my work ethic, I was allowed to complete parts of Carrie’s project. We talked relatively often toward the end of the work – exchanging up to 20 emails each day, several phone calls, and faxes. I felt it was collaboration at its best.

We knew each other’s strengths and used resources – journal subscriptions, software licenses, contacts – not only to make the work possible, but to increase efficiency. I had several ideas that aided the projects tremendously. It was, I thought as I was exhausted from lack of sleep and mental resources, the perfect solution. I had taken primary responsibility for one project, and had contributed largely to a second. In addition to the publications that would result, I had found an idea that would eventually complete my thesis research. The initial idea that Carrie had refined could be taken in a different direction and applied to a completely different idea. Thrilled with the prospect of solving all my problems – the lack of publications and lack of a clue on where to go with my project – in 5 months of work, I was eager to wrap up with this project and move on.

After writing all but the discussion, Carrie and I faced a problem. We didn’t have enough of a grasp on the literature to make a complete determination of what our results meant to the community. Understanding this, her post-doctoral advisor suggested having well-established authors in the field write the papers. It would give them initial acceptance where young authors might be greeted with some skeptism, he reasoned. And faced with the daunting task of reading another 100 papers, understanding them and creating some reasonable explanation, I decided that was a more reasonable course of action. I had stepped outside my comfort zone and learned a lot. But I was willing to let someone else be responsible for the paper in order to publish in a more respected journal and allow the data, which I found to be compelling, to find the audience the suggested author would provide.

So it was with some regret that I passed along my text, graphs and tables to another remote location. I once again completed revisions and repeated some analyses for another first author. Had I not been confident in my thesis work, which was moving forward quickly and with great initial success, I might have clung to this work. I would have written a decent paper, and been accepted to a mediocre journal. It seemed selfish though – a decision that would serve only myself when the community would undoubtedly benefit from a beautifully-written paper from a different author. So I’m pleased when I look at the next 2 papers on my list. The first, one that I guided and felt complete ownership of until a time when I gave it away, was met with a great deal of approval. We completed some minor revisions after review and went on to publish easily. Likewise with my other contribution to Carrie’s work.

So there are 2 papers where my name sits second. I’m pleased with both of them – I felt I did good work, made good decisions and gained some experience with concepts and people outside my major focus of interest. In addition, they are in the strongest journal of the ones I have listed. And they've been widely read and discussed in a little niche field, which pleases me to no end.

It was a critical lesson for me as well – someone knows how you should solve many of the problems you encounter in your research. So listening to talks and working on projects which may seem irrelevant to your own work can yield amazing benefits. If you keep half a mind on what you want to know and let the other half be engrossed by new concepts, you’re sometimes able to bring disparate ideas together to create some sort of novel solution.

The other point from these 2 papers is that Carrie is incredible. A wonderful friend, we’ve laughed and talked over countless hours since I met her. Always roommates at conferences, and the donor and recipient of many silly emails sent only to make a friend laugh, this project gave me a way to relate to her experiences after leaving grad school, and gave us a reason to keep in close touch – to provide a continued support system and give each other breaks, share contacts and ideas, and provide some much needed impressive text to the “peer-reviewed publications” sections of each of our CVs.