Back into the swing of things

I meant to write a while ago, but I've been swamped by the work of my PhD. I've finished data collection in my research study (see my study blog: SYMPACT) to read about that milestone. I've also had the protocol of my research study published! This was a long and hard road as I have limited funding so I first tried in green access journal first (no publication fee, but an embargo period). This was harder than expected as the journals I went to while they loved the article and are interested in the results only publish 'Randomized Control Trial' protocols which wasn't stated on their author guidelines meaning I wasted time in sending them my article. It was still good learning though so in a weird way I don't regret it. Then my supervisors agree I could send it to a gold/open access journal and SUCCESS!

(Click on the image to go to the publication, open access)

I can't tell you how exciting it was to see this in print. But it tells a story as to how long and hard the publication battle is as I managed to get my protocol published very close to my data collection for the same study finished! Part of that was my own struggles to write it but a large portion of the time was also in submissions, rejections, peer review, and processing for publication. Why do I tell you this, mainly to say that publication is hard. It takes time. I hope I'll get a bit faster with more practice, but it is a skill, like so much of my Clinical Academic experience that needs to be practiced and refined. I've started the process for the next paper already, submitting my literature synthesis for consideration by a journal. While I now know that submission is not the end of the journey for that piece of work, at least I don't have to think about it for the next few weeks/months depending on peer review process.

Speaking of peer review, I'm now a peer reviewer! I've done two articles for two different journals. One I've had no feedback and the other I had fab feedback. I quite enjoyed the process and it has helped me look at how I write differently.

Covid... as numbers swell I'm so grateful that my data collection is finished! I am hopeful that this time round it won't affect me as much, not needing to pause date collection. I plan to settle into cleaning and the analysis of my data. Hopefully churn out a few more papers around my data. before I then (whispers) finish my PhD.