is that the self imposed kind are very hard to keep.
I've been working on a paper for awhile, it may have appeared in other posts referring to the difficult time I've been having with my collaborators. We planned to have it done by June 1st. Then there was a visit from some other collaborators and a mini-course to teach, so it was July 1st, which came and went, then I knew I was going on vacation and so I gave myself a hard deadline of the end of the summer. Paper ready to submit by August 30th. That is today you might note, and as you probably guessed, the paper is not ready to submit.
It's not that I've been neglecting it, or slacking or anything like that. I've been working on it, working hard on it. All the text is there, nice intro, justification, lit review, data description, and then bam. A big fat empty results section. Numbers have been crunched, plots have been made, but there are some problems, and things I don't understand that have required...well let's just say a lot of work, including contact with the manufacturer of the equipment to reprocess the data from scratch, and lot's of waiting for decisions/opinions from my co-authors. And yet, I still have no results. I don't think that there really is anything more to say about this project. We've already published 2 papers on it, and a 3rd is under review. So, I have decided to abandon this particular paper, and move on. That was my answer to the hard deadline, no point beating a dead horse, count it as lessons learned, etc, but time to move on. I made my peace with it.
But, whoa, collaborators don't like this, suddenly there is help, there are opinions, there are thoughts on changing the focus, blah blah. Thoughts that are all three months behind. Thoughts and ideas that I have visited, and revisited and I'm entirely sure will lead to nowhere on a third visit. There is a let's give it one more month kind of attitude. I want to scream.
When does my opinion as a scientist get to count? When does my career path get to become my decision? I'm well aware that as a post-doc I'm supposed to be publishing papers like mad, but that doesn't mean I'm going to write a sucky one just for the sake of it. I also understand that the post-doc is that in-between stage were you still need "some" guidance, but .... hrrumph.
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