Research recap, or: why I haven't had time to post this month

It's been pretty quiet on the blog front here this month, though not because things have been quiet for me. I realize now that I never mentioned it, but around the end of May (right when I had COVID-19) I received referee reports for the two papers I'd submitted back at the beginning of April (which contain basically all the work from my PhD project). After recovering from COVID I started working on making changes and writing our responses to the referees (one for each paper) at a leisurely pace. While I was certainly intending to be faster than the six-month deadline, I also wasn't in huge rush during the few-week recovery period where I still felt less able to concentrate or think hard. (Especially in the evenings after a full day of working my day job!)

At least, I wasn't in a rush until a few weeks ago. See, in addition to my two papers, there was a third (primarily written by my advisor but with all of us in my research group as co-authors) which we had submitted to the journal Science, with the intention that all three would come out at the same time. (If you don't know, Science is one of the two premier journals [along with Nature] in the physical sciences, so it being published there would be a big deal for our combined research.) Around the beginning of July we finally got the referee reports back for that paper, which were…mixed. Two out of three recommended the paper be published, while the third had some reservations and didn't recommend it for publication. One of their sticking points was that the Science paper relied on my papers for further details, and my papers hadn't been accepted for publication yet. Fortunately, the editor at Science in charge of our paper was inclined towards the two favorable reviewers, and after some back-and-forth indicated that my papers being accepted would go a long way towards resolving the unfavorable reviewer's qualms and help tip the balance in favor of our Science paper being accepted.

This had the immediate effect of turning my sedate response-generation process into a mad-cap dash to get the responses to the referees back and the papers accepted. In some good news, the changes needed for my second paper were quite minimal, I was able to submit it last week, and a day later I got the news that it was accepted for publication. Which is a big milestone, considering it's the first paper I've written that's been accepted; it's also the one which the Science paper primarily references, so its acceptance means that paper can move along as well. I've had no time to rest on my laurels, however, since my first paper still needs editing, and in order to have all three papers come out together it'd be good to get it resubmitted and (hopefully) accepted as soon as possible. So my free time has been in pretty short supply so far this month, as the first paper had a lot more comments to reply to than the second. That doesn't mean I haven't done anything else (I still have to rest and recuperate sometime), and I'm looking forward to sharing some of what I've been up to in future posts. (I originally meant this post to be about something different, but realized I needed to explain what I've been up to first.) But if those posts aren't immediately forthcoming, well, you'll know why. I'm optimistically projecting I'll be done with the first paper response by sometime next week, and then hopefully I'll once again have more free time on my hands. But we'll see! A hui hou!