Student SPHere 2008-09

Sometimes, the vaunted system of peer-review can put a real damper on one's enthusiasm for a research project. Right now, I am struggling with motivation to work on papers from my last RA, in Epidemiology. I submitted this paper back in October (this was its fourth submission, so I've been shopping it around for much longer) and just heard back at the beginning of this month from the reviewers. Some of the revisions were easy re-writes, but for others, I had to write to my old team, ask for data sets and code files to do additional analysis. Which means dragging my brain back into SAS mode. Not an appealing process, as I have been working exclusively in R and WinBUGS for a year or more.

We also heard back on the main paper on that study; the ensuing process will require all kinds of conference calls and a million emails to coordinate amongst the four+ departments from which the authors hail. In the end, it's worth it to notch another one on the old CV, but by the time things actually get out into the world, they often seem like old news.

Physicists don't do it this way, as I've learned from observing Tom and his colleagues. They have an online site called arXiv where papers are "pre-published" before they go into a peer-reviewed journal. It's a way to get thing out there quickly, hear back from people in the comments, and possibly post revisions, all without entirely sacrificing the standard publishing paradigm. I know some journals are trying to shorten the time line, especially the new crop of online journals. There's definitely something to be said for re-examining the way we disseminate findings.