I realize sometimes I don't appreciate others' hard work. When I'm looking at what others are doing, at least half of the time, I would be thinking "That's easy, no big deal." "Ah, nothing special, I could even do better than them."
Way before I'm into this academic research business, I was never aware of the difficulty in getting a scientific paper published. Isn't it easy just to work on a few experiments and then write up the whole thing and send it off to publish? Well, ideally yes if everything works perfectly well...but in reality, truth to say this is almost highly unlikely. If it's that easy, AIDS or cancer would have been cured by now and no one's suffering from deadly and uncurable diseases.
I never know getting your work published is actually not that easy until I am getting it done by myself. The whole process takes a lot of time, energy, effort and resources. From the start, you have to think of a direction for your research topic and do heaps of readings to check out what's happening in the field. Formulate your hypothesis and then design the scope of your project and setting up the experiments. When you finally get your experiments started, there'll be another set of problems waiting for you. And you'll realize some of these problems have never came across your mind before. Then you'll need to dedicate a large proportion of your time and energy trying to identify where has gone wrong, how to solve them and what other alternate strategies you have. After a whole lot of sweat, pain and tears, you finally get some results and then you'll need to analyse, verify and interprete them. At this stage, perhaps you can compliment yourself a little "Well done!". But that's not it yet. You still have to write out the whole thing and try to get it published!!
Getting it published is another tough stage, if not any tougher than the ground work. The process of writing up and constructing figures/tables/graphs can be difficult for beginners. During this stage, you need some skills in bonding all your collaborators and your coauthors. You need all their part of job get to your hands in time. Most of them have other commitments too and they never put yours top in their agenda because of their overwhelming schedule. After a whole lot of hardship, you manage to bundle all work from various personnel. Now your manuscript is finally ready to send out. Still, this is not the end of the process yet. You'll have to be patience to wait for the response from the editor of the journal/magazine you submitted. It's not uncommon to hear scientists having pit of their stomachs when they receive an email from the editor or reviewers saying something negative like this. "We regret to inform you that your manuscript has been rejected because of lack of convincing data." or "We may consider your manuscript if you could prove your cells have ..........." Blah. It just basically means, "Your work is not good enough, more experiments need to be done. Folks, better luck next time!!" So by the time your work's been accepted and published, it probably will be another few more months later, at least. And it's worth to know that this is just a general process for a small research work. It's not even considered as a masterpiece of the decade or the Nobel price award nominating work!
Why is it so important about getting a paper published? Isn't it what you discover that matters more? I didn't understand it until I'm in the field. It's extremely important to get the research work published because of MONEY. Scientists need to get grants (money) to do their research. Everything costs money. Money doesn't drop in front of them. They need to demonstrate to the funding agency about the importance of their research fields. They need to further convince them by showing results to them in their applications. Having publications is one of the criteria in the applications. Plus, you want your work to be recognised in the field. Getting your work published means your work is somehow recognised and your other counterparts in the field will be aware of it and hopefully will use your findings as a reference too.
I'm relatively new to this business. I could remember when I was introduced to this field, the idea of scientists or researchers (including other non science related professions) getting their work published was kind of crap to me. As I'm opening up my exposures, I gradually understand its significance. But still getting a paper out would sure enough be easy, right? I didn't realize I had such fallacy until I have to start writing my own paper. It's not a great work, but this small study has already taken for more than a year. Still, I'm in the process of improving the manuscript since it was first fully drafted 3 months ago. I've been passing different versions of the manucript back and forth to my coauthors. That's right, I've been spending my weekend in working on another improved version of my manuscript to be sent of by Monday. Okay, I admit I wasn't working on it full time, half of the time I was fiddling around with other things i.e. blogging. *lol*
While sitting here, some random thoughts cross my mind. This makes me recall a few words of wisdom by someone in an organization I was volunteering 3 years ago.
"Many people criticised and complained about how disorganized this organization was. Some even said more things could be done. But they never understood it's not easy for the committee who are in charge to stand up here. They have to hold immense responbilities to get the organization running. No one will be able to see all the hurdles/obstacles/difficulties until they themselves come up here and take over the tasks."
"If they think the people on top are not good enough. Instead of complaining and criticising, why not volunteer yourself and take over the job. This will improve the situation and the organization."
I find the thought really enlightening but I couldn't grasp it fully at that time. While sitting here working on my paper and this random thought appears, I decided to blog it here to share with you.
By the way, today is midfall. The chinese celebrate midfall (mid-autumn/mooncake) festival today. No mooncake celebration for me here *sob sob*. Ah never mind, I can still celebrate in style with this celebratory thought, manuscript and appreciating the bright full moon outside the window. Wonderful huh? *wink*
♥ every page of my imagination
