Publication turn-around

[annae]

I'm new here and just starting to chart my course back to school. I had a pretty weak BS (3.2) and MPA (3.4) and want to do a PhD in Political Science. I'm planning on enrolling in a 1-year master's and really working to go for all a's. I did a bit of research during my MPA with a prof who decided not to award authorship (after I did most of the work) and I've got lots of work experience, but I want to focus getting my name on something.

 

Lately I've been working with my supervisor at work who's a pretty big name in his field and he's helping me remediate my record. We wrote a paper together and expect it to be accepted and plan to do at least another. I want to try to use the next year to get my name on something independently though. He said that if you co-author something with someone really well-known the presumption is that you did little work on it. I thought previously the opposite - that a big name co-author is positive. I really want to maximize my access to him since he's willing to do multiple projects and give me credit, and he's going way out on a limb to help me, but I don't know what's feasible. One year is not a lot of time, so if it's unlikely to publish alone, it seems like it would be better to just assist as much as possible to get a good LOR.

 

My program doesn't have a thesis option, although I'm going to try to use my assignments to get started. Is it feasible to write and publish in a peer-reviewed journal in a year/year and a half? I thought about book reviews, but they all require a bio or to prove that your grounding is solid to critique someone and I don't think I fit that criteria.

 

Any guidance is appreciated!

[rising_star]

Honestly, it's not really feasible. Many journals publicly state how long it can take for papers to be reviewed and/or provide a timeline from submission to acceptance. In my field, journals that move from submission to acceptance in under a year are quite rare, in part because they have a backlog of papers waiting to be published that would be ahead of yours in the queue. It also depends on how quickly you could do a R&R (revise and resubmit) since your speediness in submitting revisions will ultimately affect how quickly decisions can be made about your paper.

[fuzzylogician]

In my field accepted for publication is as good as published, at least as far as admissions and hiring decisions go. Some journals have a backlog of 2-3 years of papers waiting in queue. You can sometimes get screwed for tenure decisions because of that, but the OP doesn't need to worry about that quite yet.

 

Whether you can go from submitted to accepted in one year depends to a large degree on luck. If everything goes fast and well - your reviews are back within lets say 3 months (=fast for my field, you need to find out about yours), with just one R&R with nothing too major you can't actually address (so say it takes you say one month to do all the revisions), then basically an accept after the second round, then under this timeline you are done in under 8 months. That is super optimistic. I'd say double that and add a cranky reviewer for a more realistic process. Also, this doesn't take into account the actual research or writing stages. Those can take anywhere from a few months to a few years, longer the more inexperienced you are.

 

So overall I'd say the chances of having a project you haven't even started yet accepted for publication by ~December are very close to zero. However, just having a serious enough project that you have been able to submit to a good journal will be helpful on its own. It'd allow you to have a strong LOR (and your writer can indicate exactly what you did on the papers you co-authored, so there shouldn't be any doubt about your contributions), and it'll help you write a better more focused SOP. Generally, having a submitted paper is not bad for someone who is just applying for grad school, even if it's not accepted yet.

[TakeruK]

This seems to be very field dependent! My last paper was 6 weeks between submission and review, I got my revisions back within a week and it was accepted the next business day. Then, there was a delay of ~4 weeks as we sorted out the proofs and payment. I put it on a preprint server as soon as I got notice of accepted (~8 weeks from submission) and the final version was published online in the next issue (monthly), which came out about 14 weeks after I first submitted. 

 

Also, my field's major journals publish online only (they did away with print journals years ago) so there is no "backlog". Every issue is basically everything that went through the entire proof/payment pipeline since the cutoff date for the last issue. And as fuzzy said, there is pretty much no difference between "accepted" and "published" in my field since any evaluator can read your accepted version on the preprint server.

 

However, it took almost an entire year to write this paper, from start to finish! In my field, I'd say it's generally feasible to get an entire paper published (or at least accepted) in 1.0-1.5 years, but it is definitely going to be tight/difficult, depending on your previous experience and depending on the nature of your topic. That is, it is almost impossible to do the entire thing in 1 year if you have an experiment or some data collecting phase -- there will be some inevitable delays due to something screwing up. If it's all theoretical though, it is more feasible!

 

Finally, as to credit/authorship, find out what your field's authoring conventions are (ask more people than just your advisor). In mine, a paper that is "Student & Big Name" is a great thing, as it signals both 1) the student did most of the work (first author) and 2) "Big Name" feels strong enough about this work that they are on it too!. On the other hand, "Big Name & Student" telegraphs that this was mostly Big Name's idea and work, but the student did help out in one or two key areas. But as fuzzy said, the best way to clear up confusion is for "Big Name" to write about your exact role in the paper/project in their LOR.

[fuzzylogician]

This seems to be very field dependent! My last paper was 6 weeks between submission and review, I got my revisions back within a week and it was accepted the next business day. Then, there was a delay of ~4 weeks as we sorted out the proofs and payment. I put it on a preprint server as soon as I got notice of accepted (~8 weeks from submission) and the final version was published online in the next issue (monthly), which came out about 14 weeks after I first submitted. 

 

Also, my field's major journals publish online only (they did away with print journals years ago) so there is no "backlog". Every issue is basically everything that went through the entire proof/payment pipeline since the cutoff date for the last issue. 

 

Oh man, where do I sign up for that? I have a paper out for review right now that I originally submitted in October 2013. It's been a hard and slow process. If it gets accepted this round (and my god it really should), it'll probably end up being published in 2018, judging based on another paper that came out with the same journal in 2014 and was accepted in 2011. In the meanwhile I post my papers in my field's archive, but it's not quite the same thing.

[zephyri]

Wow, a 3 year wait to be published is rough!  I am wondering about publishing now because I'm writing my first paper (not first ever, but first article based on my research) and am hoping to get it published by the time I graduate in 1.5-2 years.  Though looking at this thread, I should scale back my ambitions to 'accepted' at a journal, rather than published!  Thank goodness for advanced publishing on journal websites!

[fuzzylogician]

Wow, a 3 year wait to be published is rough!  I am wondering about publishing now because I'm writing my first paper (not first ever, but first article based on my research) and am hoping to get it published by the time I graduate in 1.5-2 years.  Though looking at this thread, I should scale back my ambitions to 'accepted' at a journal, rather than published!  Thank goodness for advanced publishing on journal websites!

 

3 years is particularly bad, I think. I chose this journal because it is known for having a fast (for linguistics) turnaround time for reviews, usually around 3 months as opposed to the more common 5-6, which I've experienced with other journals (so the slow process I described above is unusual for this journal). I wasn't aware of the backlog issue when I submitted. But for me, at least, having a paper sitting longer in the queue post-acceptance is better than having a paper be longer in revisions and then officially published quickly, since accepted is as good as published for my current job market related purposes. If these things are a concern, it is definitely something to consult with your advisor about. They will have a better idea about turnaround time and time to official publication for different publication venues that might be appropriate for your work.

[annae]

That is unfortunate, but thanks for the advice. I didn't realize how long this would take. I think in this time frame I would do well to get the one paper I worked on published.

[Humulus_lupulus]

The only new advice I have is that it isn't a bad idea to start drafting something up before you even collect data. You should have a solid protocol for methods down, an intro, and even several journal articles to use for a discussion section. All you need to do once you get the data in is fill in results, and round out the discussion. It's a good use of down time between experiments.

[TakeruK]

The only new advice I have is that it isn't a bad idea to start drafting something up before you even collect data. You should have a solid protocol for methods down, an intro, and even several journal articles to use for a discussion section. All you need to do once you get the data in is fill in results, and round out the discussion. It's a good use of down time between experiments.

 

Indeed. In my work, we often have to use followup telescope time to confirm a measurement or detection. We propose for telescope time in 6 month cycles (e.g. for time allocated between February and August of 2015, we propose in Fall 2014). Therefore, it might be ~8 months between knowing you need an additional data point and actually acquiring it. In these cases, it is very important to be able to write as much of your paper as you can while waiting for more time! (Or work on another simultaneous project).

 

In some cases, in my field, we even submit papers before we have all of the data and update numbers during the review process. For example, if you have two measurements of something and you want a third to get a better errorbar, but this does not affect the validity of your conclusions (or it would not result in an outright rejection), you submit the paper and then provide an improved measurement along with your responses to the referee report.