Last Friday, just a few hours before our Christmas party at work, I finally submitted the “stupid plant paper” to the “journal of stupid plant papers”. You would think I would be jumping with joy over this accomplishment, but mostly I was just immensely relieved to be done with Microsoft Word – tracked changes in all colours of the rainbow, and with the manuscript submitting software.
The paper went through a metamorphosis when I was in the US, when Ian deleted all the things I’d written and filled the manuscript with power-words and mild insults to other plant-scientists. I then changed all that into more polite prose, and send it to the 2 overseas co-authors (whom I have never met, and had never heard of before starting the paper). One of them had some very good comments, and suggested another graph, and so a few more weeks (months?) went by in which every few days someone else would add some words to the document or remember that they had a second and a third affiliation or a new paper came out that needed to be cited.
Well that was all fine actually, basically what you expect when writing with 4 other authors. However, the last 2 weeks I struggled with the cover letter to the journal. The cover letter had to be extremely good as well. Not just your please-consider-my-paper-it-is-very-novel-and-exciting. I made a draft, and Ian said “it needs to be more direct, and more powerful. I’m off to S-America now, but will email you from there”. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen (it is a pretty intense work trip). So I asked Sarah for help. She had some good ideas and phrases, but also kept repeating “we need an alpha male for this!”. For some reason it took me 2 weeks to realize that a) for whatever reason they choose to have me as first author on this, so b) it is ultimately my decision what I write in the cover letter and when I decide to submit without alpha male input and actually c) the alpha male thing is really, really appalling. If the plant world is not ready for to-the-point, polite, informative, female cover letters, then the plant-world is not for me.
So off the paper went. As usual it took me 2 days of intense struggles with the submitting software. Although 3 authors work in the same institute, because we all individually filled out our profile with the journal, we now all work at slightly different institutes. The other two had apparently too long institutions names, so that they are cut off at the 10th character. Adding a Polish second affiliation went fine, but the Australian one was painful. Although MSWord said the summary was 198 words, the summary field in the journal software said it was 2 words longer than the allowed 200. After deleting 1 word, it was then under 200.
Anyway, it is gone now and I hope I’ll never get to see it again.
Next little annoyance. I started working on new data. The data were in a specific dtabase. I could extract the data to use in other software. Basically the only realistic choice to export was into Excel. From the above my dislike of Microsoft may be obvious. (Especially since we were forced to upgrade to MS 2010. I hate it when software “waves at you” when you start it, and when it links to HR database to show your staff-photo and the best times to arrange a meeting for every document/email you create) Opening the data in Excel it became clear that it had noticed everything was “text”, which it was not, and so there was the damned “apostrophe(‘) before every single item in the 3500 row data sheet. Interestingly it could not be removed at all, neither by telling excel “this is not text, stupid, this is a number”, nor by finding-replacing. Not to be caught for 1 hole, as the Dutch saying goes, I googled “stupid excel apostrophe”. Magic. You will be surprised, or perhaps not, by how many people use the word “stupid” for Excel problemshooting. I was extremely surprised that apparently Excel has a function, clean(), specifically to get rid of the ridiculously unnecessary stupidity that they have so painstakingly programmed their software to do. Why not just import raw data, instead of importing data assuming wrongly you know what format it is and then writing a function to get it right again???
Well, what do I know, I am sure there are plenty people happy with Excel, Word and Wiley manuscript central. I converted my data and submitted a paper so I shouldn’t complain.
The paper went through a metamorphosis when I was in the US, when Ian deleted all the things I’d written and filled the manuscript with power-words and mild insults to other plant-scientists. I then changed all that into more polite prose, and send it to the 2 overseas co-authors (whom I have never met, and had never heard of before starting the paper). One of them had some very good comments, and suggested another graph, and so a few more weeks (months?) went by in which every few days someone else would add some words to the document or remember that they had a second and a third affiliation or a new paper came out that needed to be cited.
Well that was all fine actually, basically what you expect when writing with 4 other authors. However, the last 2 weeks I struggled with the cover letter to the journal. The cover letter had to be extremely good as well. Not just your please-consider-my-paper-it-is-very-novel-and-exciting. I made a draft, and Ian said “it needs to be more direct, and more powerful. I’m off to S-America now, but will email you from there”. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen (it is a pretty intense work trip). So I asked Sarah for help. She had some good ideas and phrases, but also kept repeating “we need an alpha male for this!”. For some reason it took me 2 weeks to realize that a) for whatever reason they choose to have me as first author on this, so b) it is ultimately my decision what I write in the cover letter and when I decide to submit without alpha male input and actually c) the alpha male thing is really, really appalling. If the plant world is not ready for to-the-point, polite, informative, female cover letters, then the plant-world is not for me.
So off the paper went. As usual it took me 2 days of intense struggles with the submitting software. Although 3 authors work in the same institute, because we all individually filled out our profile with the journal, we now all work at slightly different institutes. The other two had apparently too long institutions names, so that they are cut off at the 10th character. Adding a Polish second affiliation went fine, but the Australian one was painful. Although MSWord said the summary was 198 words, the summary field in the journal software said it was 2 words longer than the allowed 200. After deleting 1 word, it was then under 200.
Anyway, it is gone now and I hope I’ll never get to see it again.
Next little annoyance. I started working on new data. The data were in a specific dtabase. I could extract the data to use in other software. Basically the only realistic choice to export was into Excel. From the above my dislike of Microsoft may be obvious. (Especially since we were forced to upgrade to MS 2010. I hate it when software “waves at you” when you start it, and when it links to HR database to show your staff-photo and the best times to arrange a meeting for every document/email you create) Opening the data in Excel it became clear that it had noticed everything was “text”, which it was not, and so there was the damned “apostrophe(‘) before every single item in the 3500 row data sheet. Interestingly it could not be removed at all, neither by telling excel “this is not text, stupid, this is a number”, nor by finding-replacing. Not to be caught for 1 hole, as the Dutch saying goes, I googled “stupid excel apostrophe”. Magic. You will be surprised, or perhaps not, by how many people use the word “stupid” for Excel problemshooting. I was extremely surprised that apparently Excel has a function, clean(), specifically to get rid of the ridiculously unnecessary stupidity that they have so painstakingly programmed their software to do. Why not just import raw data, instead of importing data assuming wrongly you know what format it is and then writing a function to get it right again???
Well, what do I know, I am sure there are plenty people happy with Excel, Word and Wiley manuscript central. I converted my data and submitted a paper so I shouldn’t complain.
