- https://appliednetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s41109-021-00379-2
After a long and gruelling review process, our paper is finally published! 3 things I learned from publishing for the first time.
1. Don’t publish a paper if your EQ is low! Reviewers will tear your study to pieces (it’s their job)! Be prepared for intense scrutiny, as the reviewer comments are in fact quite valuable—but also be unafraid to stand up to comments that are unfounded, after all you know your work more than them. I can’t count the number of times wherein I told my co-author (and thesis adviser) Taha that I’m discouraged by the reviewers’ comments, and he’s always the cheerleader saying “but these comments are positive, we have a good chance!” and I’m left thinking, “are we reading the same comments??” 😀
2. Patience. It takes forever to get it over the hump! This paper was submitted in mid/late 2019 as my thesis, it won best dissertation and yet it took over a year of revisions (mostly because both Taha and I have moved on to other things i.e. work) to get it in the publishable state that it is today. As a paper in computational social science, the paper had an identity crisis due to its multi-disciplinarity (should we submit to a networks journal, or a social science journal?). And related to that:
3. Be open to pivot (and learn through the process). Even when you think the paper is already great, we still ended up rewriting important portions of the paper to make it relevant to the journal where we’re publishing. Condensing a 15,000 word essay to 7,000 words is one thing. I learned that you need not explain the methodology step-by-step like a cookbook (which you do in a thesis) but instead assume that the journal readers know what we’re talking about and just jump right to it. We also changed an entire section—our robustness methodology—which taught me something new about networks (using eigenvector centrality to rank) and as it increased the accuracy of our study to 94%, it made me more confident about the validity of the study!
PS: We will be presenting this in the “Public policy” session in the joint conference by the International Network for Social Network Analysis & Network Science Society, learn more here: https://networks2021.net. #networkscience#socialdatascience
