Flaky Advisor

[mithrien]

Hi,

I'm trying to publish several papers with my advisor. I came up with the ideas myself, did all the work the past few years, and wrote up papers which are honestly quite good and fairly innovative for my field. I gave my advisor the papers 1-3 years ago to submit.

Since then, they have made well over 10 commitments to different deadlines by which they planned to edit and submit them, and have missed all of the deadlines. I have tried to set my own deadlines where I would submit by a certain date regardless of the state of their edits, but they say that they aren't okay with me doing this - they want the papers to be perfect prior to submission, because they want to avoid any negative reviewer comments and possible rejections.  

I have graduated and started work and don't have the time to track down my advisor anymore to get them to work on edits with me (the primary way I could get them to give feedback or work on my papers was by sitting in the office with them). I'm not really sure what to do at this point, because I would really like to publish my work.

Does anyone have any advice or ideas?

[Meraki]

Are you first author on these papers, assuming you're in a field that uses author order as a signal of contribution?

If so, and since you've graduated, it is likely your call on when a paper is ready to submit to a journal. I say likely, because the specifics of your field may differ a bit from mine. But unless they are the lead investigator, I see no reason to expect them to follow through if no progress was made in 3 years, so communicating a decision to them may be best. However, I wouldn't submit anything to a journal that hasn't received feedback in some form, such as through a presentation, either. They do have a point about making a paper the best it can be to improve its chances of publication.

Edited November 7, 2019 by Meraki

[jujubea]

I was gonna write a response to the OP but are they even around? 

[Sigaba]

1 hour ago, jujubea said:

I was gonna write a response to the OP but are they even around? 

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