Early in the morning on January 28, 2020, I returned to work after an amazing week of hiking on the Cape Verde islands Santo Antão and São Vicente. That vacation was perfect for refueling my batteries after some stressful months, and I came back from it full of energy.
Soon after my arrival, however, my supervisor invited me to his office for a short discussion, which concerned an article he was writing at that time and which needed to be submitted that week. Well, let us say that he had prepared a framework for this article and that nearly all of the writing still needed to be done. Because many months before, he had accepted an invitation to write this review, but it had slipped his attention, partly because all further e-mails had ended up in the spam filter of his e-mail account. On the evening prior to my return to work, he just happened to check this spam folder where he found those e-mails, and he started working on the framework for this article right away. Right away, he also realized that he would not be able to meet the deadline without asking for help, which he did the following day when he asked me to join in on the work. Naturally, I was willing to contribute to this task, and we both cleared our agendas for the rest of that week to work on it fulltime.
And fulltime for me meant that I locked myself up in my room and worked straight from early in the morning until after midnight for several days in a row. Luckily, I had just refueled during my trip to Cape Verde, and I could pull off those long days quite well. At least, I could pull them off for six days in a row, until I sent my final contributions to my supervisor on Sunday evening February 2, 2020 at 10:44 PM. I do not know what happened afterwards, but I remember that I woke up the next Monday around three o’clock in the afternoon with the feeling that I could use another hiking trip to Cape Verde to refuel my batteries.
So, we managed to submit our paper in time, and then the waiting game began. Regarding this waiting game, article submissions are initially evaluated by editors who decide whether they find it good and relevant enough to send it out for ‘peer review’. The latter process involves critical evaluations by experts in the field who will inform the editor about whether they find the text good enough (“accept as it is”), not yet good enough (“minor/major revisions required”) or not good enough (“reject”) for publication. The editor subsequently needs to take a decision based on its own evaluation of the work as well as on the opinions of multiple peer reviewers, which hopefully is a positive decision from the perspective of those who submitted the article. The entire process typically takes somewhere between one and eight weeks, depending on whether the editor sends out an article for peer review and whether the editor can find people to evaluate the paper easily.
Well, for the manuscript that we submitted in February 2020, it took one year, seven months, and nineteen days before we were informed that some minor revisions were required in order to justify publication of our work. Of course, this e-mail also got stuck in our spam filters, so we read it twelve days later, thereby giving us a mere two days to resubmit a revised version that needed to satisfy all improvements put forward by the peer reviewers. Fortunately, this task could be performed in time, and three days later we received the joyful news that our article was accepted for publication, thus one year, eight months, and seven days after we submitted it.
There is no need to discuss what went ‘wrong’ here because basically everything went wrong that could go wrong. Technical issues, life events, COVID-19-related issues, just name anything, and it probably applies to this situation. The important thing here is that it got published in the end, that I heard about this great news right after waking up on a sunny Monday morning in October 2021, and that I immediately bought some cake to celebrate this acceptance with my colleagues.
With respect to the latter, work-related celebrations have become an important aspect in my professional life, whereas before, I used to struggle with enjoying ‘the highs’ in my work. When taking grant applications as an example, results are typically communicated more than six months after grant submission, and these results are negative most of the times. When furthermore looking at research articles, these are mostly submitted multiple months after conducting the last experiments, and you typically receive more rejection than acceptance letters. These fairly long time lags and low chances of ‘success’ often bring along some form of frustration which eventually may become inseparable from a grant idea or research project. And when you finally are successful, you are more likely to shout out “ooh, finally” than that you start jumping around with a big smile on your face. Admittedly, an “ooh, finally” is oftentimes well in place, and do not be afraid to let these words pass your lips. Please try, however, to celebrate your achievements as good as you can, for example by having cake, because these could help in increasing job satisfaction which could lead to more happiness and success in the long run.
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