Each journey to the publication of your
first peer-reviewed paper for a PhD student can be wildly different.
So in an act of relief or perhaps
frustration I thought I would share with you the journey mine took.
I think it would be fair to say that the language
I use is a reflection on the emotions I went through at the time but as we all
know hindsight is a wonderful thing, so hopefully I manage to round it off with
a more level view of the ordeal. See there I go already.
Over a year ago on July 9th I received
my first set of data from the large Hubble Space Telescope program headed by
P.I David Sing, my supervisor. The data is near-infrared low-resolution grism
spectra of the hot Jupiter host star HAT-P-1 from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.
My job is to see if we could identify any
chemical signatures in the atmosphere by producing a transmission spectrum, a
measurement of the planets radius at a number of different wavelengths.
After reading a lot of papers in great
detail and dissecting a few codes so I could write my own, I had my preliminary
results in place. Just in time for my 2nd year assessment
presentation at the beginning of October to the whole college of Physics. As I
am still here I am going to assume it went well.
Next is when the delusions start. I
remember thinking great I have results. I had the models from the theory
fairies and it all looked great. We had water!
The hard part was over; I could now go on
my holiday leaving my first draft with my supervisor to look over.
I know what you are thinking, poor sad
naive/delusional student, don’t worry so am I now.
I remember arrogantly wondering how other
people had such trouble and that it all was very easy - I had my transmission
spectrum, I had a pipeline to reduces the data quickly, and the paper is
written – it will be out in no time.
You will be glad to know my internal
monologue and ego have been taken down a few pegs since then.
Over the Christmas break I received similar
results from a few of our collaborators, which nicely backed up my own. So 6
months after the data was received I sent off the paper to the CO-I’s, people
whose names would appear on the paper who either directly contributed to the
content of the work or were part of the group who acquired the data used.
Now as a lowly PhD student you are on the
lowest of the unevenly distributed rungs of the academic ladder and with an
increasing number of CO-I’s the percentage of responses you will receive
reduces considerably. So deploy your patience and give it some time it will
more than likely be worth it. By the middle of February I had naively named my
LaTeX document ‘final draft’ and vowed to never have to run my seizure inducing
code again - in hindsight perhaps removing all of the plotting commands would
have been the best idea but seeing exactly what is going on in your code is
very useful.
Of course this bout of confidence would not
last long and just 3 weeks later I was on ‘final draft 7’. Which turned out to
be the lucky one that once again got sent around to the CO-I’s; this time with
a two-week deadline, which of course they frustratingly defied.
I think it is safe to assume that this was
when my housemate learnt to not respond to my external monologue as I paced
around the apartment with pen and paper in hand endlessly checking for mistakes
or searching for clarity. Only one problem, now I can never get him to respond
as he assumes everything I say is my brain externally questioning itself and
the world around it – to be honest it is scarily a more accurate assumption
than it once would have been.
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| The Trumps card for our observations |
Finally on April 4th I uploaded
the manuscript to MNRAS and satisfyingly clicked submit.
I wish I could tell you that were the end,
I truly do, but peer review rightly requires a peer response. Now when I say
peer I mean someone else on the academic ladder, and as I am a PhD student and
this is my first paper, that peer will be several seemingly unattainable rungs
above me on that ladder.
Once you have submitted your paper and a
reviewer has been selected you just have to sit and wait. We were lucky to get
a response within a month and quickly got back to work. The reviewer
recommended moderate revisions before it could be reconsidered for publication,
which is the middle ground between major and minor revisions. I was really
happy with some of the comments, I remember printing them out and highlighting
them according to how much work needed to be done. There were a few that would
require a lot of work and it took over a month with over 100 program re-runs
before the responses were diplomatic and constructive enough to send back with
the revised version of the manuscript.
The comments and the revised manuscript
then are sent back to the reviewer for them to look over your changes and are
given an additional 3 weeks to respond. They can then either then recommend
more revisions or suggest to the editor that the manuscript is ready for
publication. Just before the 3-week deadline we received a second report again
with moderate revisions, something I would have been again happy with if only
the response was logical and correct which, as I am sure you can guess by the
tone it was not. I was having my first lesson in scientific politics.
After taking the evening to calm down in
the pub with a glass of wine and some friends I sat down to write the response.
Luckily my friend was on hand to moderate my responses before I could even show
them to my supervisor. Let’s just say that the phrase ‘it appears the reviewer
has misunderstood …’ was used in the response more than once. Which is a far
more diplomatic statement than I could conceivably come up with myself. But the
changes were quick and trivial so to appease the reviewer we made them and
re-re-submitted it the next afternoon.
Four days later we got on a plane headed
for St Andrew’s and this years RAS National Astronomy Meeting where my work
would be presented as a poster and through a press release along with a
colleagues work.
Three weeks later at the end of the
reviewer’s deadline we received another set of comments and a re-re-re-revision
was made. This time with some more trivial corrections, adding plots, tables,
and references, I waved it goodbye and revision III was submitted.
But we have still not quite reached the end;
I did warn you it was an ordeal.
Another three weeks passed and we received
our 4th set of comments from the reviewer, thankfully this time with
only ‘minor’ revisions suggested before consideration for publication was
suggested. Those minor suggestions, ‘Please add in reference XX and reference YY
to the manuscript’ and guess what, those papers had an author in common with
all previous papers suggested by the reviewer in previous comments – it is safe
then to assume whom it is at that point.
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| Water, water, everywhere - well at least in HAT-P-1b's atmosphere |
And it is here that you find me over a year
since I first received the data to the day that it is up on Astro-ph/ArXiv.
Although it has been an incredibly frustrating journey, for which I am forever
marked with my first grey hairs, I am truly grateful because although patience
is most certainly still not in my nature some aspects of caution have been
added, and the paper is now far better than it was before.
See I told you I could end on a happier
more leveled view of it all.
Thank you for joining me on the journey
let’s hope the next one is not so stressful as I would very much like to keep
my brown hair just a little longer.
Hubble Space Telescope hot Jupiter
Transmission Spectral Survey: detection of water in HAT-P-1b from Wide Field
Camera 3 near-infrared spatial scan observations à H. R. Wakeford, et al. 2013
