Graduate students are told (often repeatedly) to write early and often, and to start submitting manuscripts as soon as they are ready. Yet, it is all to common for grad students to fall into the illusion of safety that is being a student, and put off writing until all projects are complete and the Great Tome of the Dissertation/Thesis can be written in its entirety. This usually results in a flurry of writing within the last semester, trying like mad to finish a complete draft before first deposit - which also results in high blood pressure, stress eating, stress drinking, anxiety attacks, insomnia, heartburn, nausea, and many many existentialist crises. But hey, that's grad school, right? To be fair, even if the Great Tome is finished with time to spare, the pressure of an impending defense will also cause all of the above symptoms.
So what? Either way the Great Tome gets written. The defense, when all is said and done, is just one day of your life. Then it is parties, graduation, job, and sweet sweet relief as the great beast that was the Great Tome becomes a thing of the past. Not quite...
You see, the problem is that most people who go through the meat grinder of a Ph.D. end up in a career that requires them to continually prove themselves - in writing. This is particularly true in Academia, and even more so in the sciences. The fall out of the mad-dash to the Great Tome finish line and the fairly short few weeks until the cap & gown and hooding of commencement is a reinforcement of the short turn around time we had for our written work in grad school: write a paper, turn it in, a few weeks later you get it back with feedback/grade and then it's over. This is a farce, a cruel deception of what writing post-graduate school will be.
How you write, and the time it takes you to complete a manuscript will likely not change very much over the course of the average person's career. Speed and style may improve, but there will always be set backs and delays during a project to offset any speed obtained in the actual writing portion. No, it is the turn around that most often hits the new grads by surprise.
Here's how it works: write a paper, submit the manuscript, have it instantly kicked back to you for a minor formatting error, fix the error and re-submit; the manuscript goes into admin processing. Now you start waiting; after a few weeks to a month (or more), the manuscript is sent to professionals in your field for review; now you can eagerly change the pub reference on your CV from [submitted] to [in review]. Wait some more. Within a few weeks or a month (or more), you get a decision letter from the journal, you will then most likely be requested to do some revisions - which can be minor and take only a few days to complete, or extensive and take several weeks to months to complete - your manuscript can also be outright rejected at this point, or accepted with no revisions (this last one almost never happens). After your revisions are complete you re-submit your manuscript, and start waiting again. Depending on the journal and the revisions you were requested to make, the manuscript will either be accepted or sent back out for a second review. Wait wait wait. After a second review you may have more revisions, or have your manuscript accepted (some manuscripts go through 3+ reviews). Hooray, you made it to an accepted manuscript! - now you can change the CV from [in review] to [in press] - but you're still not through with the paper. You can go back to waiting now - but at least you are waiting for actual publication. You may be requested to provide additional images for the journal (cover photo or online content). Once the issue is in press, usually a few weeks or a month before, your article will be sent out electronically as an advance online release - you are now widely available to be cited, and soon after the official publication is printed, reprints are delivered and you live happily ever after (well... until the next submission).
Depending on the journal, this entire process can take only a month or two, or up to a year or more (this is the norm for several journals). Turn around time may not matter to many tenured professionals, but to someone just starting their career, this can be ghastly. Until tenure is secured, there needs to be a flood of your articles hitting the journal pages - this means that journals with long turn around times can truly be a hindrance. This is something early career workers should weigh carefully along with impact factors and appropriateness when selecting a journal. And it's not just tenure-review that will demand lots of publications in a short amount of time post-grad school - funding agencies will also judge your grand proposals by your publication record, and even landing the tenure-track job to begin with requires a healthy pub record. And that Great Tome you spend so many years bringing to life? It only counts in your CV's pub section for about 6-12 months after graduation. After that, it only matters what is published in the peer-reviewed literature.
"Publish or Perish" comes to early career folks first. And continually having multiple manuscripts at some stage in this process is really the only way to survive. If you can get a jump start on your pub record in grad school, you will be ahead of the game. Sadly, reading this post and agreeing with it, and doing it are separate things. Get motivated, keep your lab mates motivated, and get your ideas down on paper. Every publication is essentially a progress report on what your research has told you so far - the book never closes on good research. Too many grad students (myself included) get tripped up in the concept of a glorious, perfect debut manuscript into the field, and drag out perfectly publishable results by fussing over a tiny bit more data that in the end doesn't change the results or conclusions by all that much. And if it does? Well, that's another paper (so, win-win). The first publication can be intimidating, but once you've done it - you sit back and wonder why you were so nervous in the first place. Pop that publishing cherry and claim your spot in the world. After all, isn't it about time your colleagues knew your name?
~ JB McHugh
