Tedium of Finishing Off

This week has been a finishing off week, two papers were coming up to that line which means they are ready to be sent out.At the surface you'd think that they were both the same but the feel was very, very different. I also saw a PhD student who is planning to submit next week, I sincerely hope that he gets through his viva without major reanalysis. I have come to dread opening his data set as there is always some more errors in it. However I prefer not to think about that.

So lets take the first paper, it was a short communication of a piece of analytic work. The problem was that despite the fact we had written reports and such from the data, we had always been so constrained that we have never played with the data. So we had to sit down and check what we were finding. We actually took a very specific route and the statistics suddenly started giving useful results. This is a data set that by the standards of quantitative work was messy and likely to have a lot of recording error in it because of the collection techniques. So it was with some surprise that things started to make sense. Although it took us some time to get our heads around things (inverse correlations always seem to be more difficult to interpret) but once done we were able to write in a very short space of time.

The other paper was a fairly simple qualitative paper which had been to one journal and had been rejected thus needed quite a bit of rewriting. It felt completely different, the work involved was a lot more about balancing our analysis against the findings in the literature, we regularly had to take a sentence ask what was being said and then revise it into something that actually was of academic standard. There was also a need to update all the references. We did go back to the analysis, but when we did it was simply to the output files from last summer. Much nicer much easier and means I know I am using a consistent version of SPSS. So no new analysis but plenty of detailed writing.

Anyway hopefully both papers will be off to the journals in the next week or so. I hope we have some success.