Paper Submission
17/08/07 16:15 Filed in: My Research & Experiments
Ah to be in Paris and in love...
Finally... Finally... we submitted my first paper from my work as a post-doc. It's been a little over a year now (and was a large leap in terms of science), but we've got our first paper sent off. It's far from time to really celebrate though. It will be a month or two before it comes back from the referees and they'll certainly have some things we need to fix. I say "certainly" because we submitted the paper to Physical Review Letters. This essentially assures us of having negative comments from the referees. It's almost a given. The question is how negative and how we respond.
The trade off is that this is (aside from perhaps Nature) about the best place for a physicist to publish research. Because of that, they're pretty selective about what makes it through and the referees are supposed to be tough on the authors. The converse is that we've got (I think) a really good paper with some very interesting results (interesting to a wide variety of people). Nothing is certain, except that it will never get published if it's never submitted.
This is particularly exciting for me as it will be my first paper with Hoydoo and my first in the realm of surface physics. It's been quite a big jump between my thesis project in graduate school and the research I'm doing here. However, I'm glad to have made the transition and be contributing in a second field. I suppose that's part of what I like about being a physicist. Despite some difficulty it's very possible to switch between different interests with some degree of fluidity.
We had some extra time today when one of the facility scientists abruptly (and obscenely) took the beam down. He needed to do some work on a piece of equipment we use and that required us to stop working. The best situation would have been if he'd informed us in the morning that he'd need to do his work in the afternoon. Or... since he didn't warn us at all, to allow us a few minutes to finish our work (ball-park, at most 30 minutes of time). Or... he could have stressed the urgency of what needed to be done and apologized, but taken it away. Instead he got in a fit, stormed off to get a supervisor/coordinator person, and came back to curse and yell at us.
You know... if you're going to curse, you've got to do it well enough that people will be impressed by your ability curse instead of being offended. His... eloquence with 4-letter words was somewhat lacking. Anyhow, he acted quite childish and then took the beam down. sigh... So we used the spare time to finish our paper and send it off!
Finally... Finally... we submitted my first paper from my work as a post-doc. It's been a little over a year now (and was a large leap in terms of science), but we've got our first paper sent off. It's far from time to really celebrate though. It will be a month or two before it comes back from the referees and they'll certainly have some things we need to fix. I say "certainly" because we submitted the paper to Physical Review Letters. This essentially assures us of having negative comments from the referees. It's almost a given. The question is how negative and how we respond.
The trade off is that this is (aside from perhaps Nature) about the best place for a physicist to publish research. Because of that, they're pretty selective about what makes it through and the referees are supposed to be tough on the authors. The converse is that we've got (I think) a really good paper with some very interesting results (interesting to a wide variety of people). Nothing is certain, except that it will never get published if it's never submitted.
This is particularly exciting for me as it will be my first paper with Hoydoo and my first in the realm of surface physics. It's been quite a big jump between my thesis project in graduate school and the research I'm doing here. However, I'm glad to have made the transition and be contributing in a second field. I suppose that's part of what I like about being a physicist. Despite some difficulty it's very possible to switch between different interests with some degree of fluidity.
We had some extra time today when one of the facility scientists abruptly (and obscenely) took the beam down. He needed to do some work on a piece of equipment we use and that required us to stop working. The best situation would have been if he'd informed us in the morning that he'd need to do his work in the afternoon. Or... since he didn't warn us at all, to allow us a few minutes to finish our work (ball-park, at most 30 minutes of time). Or... he could have stressed the urgency of what needed to be done and apologized, but taken it away. Instead he got in a fit, stormed off to get a supervisor/coordinator person, and came back to curse and yell at us.
You know... if you're going to curse, you've got to do it well enough that people will be impressed by your ability curse instead of being offended. His... eloquence with 4-letter words was somewhat lacking. Anyhow, he acted quite childish and then took the beam down. sigh... So we used the spare time to finish our paper and send it off!