My PhD advisor was SUPER stubborn about having our first author papers accepted for publication before she would consider setting a defense date. Now, I was only her second PhD student, and my friend was a year ahead of me as her first PhD student. Some of her actions I believe were a result of the lack of experience she had mentoring grad students. I do not remember the timing, but within the week before my friend defended, her paper was accepted for publication, and our advisor informed her that she was lucky. I pushed my advisor hard to defend, had a post-doc and was awarded a spot on the university's training grant, so she reached a point that she could no longer rationalize keeping me there. Also, I had a first author paper in my third year, so we were trying to get my second (and a communication short paper) accepted. She also tended to blame a lack of communication and timing of paper submission on us.
Okay. Looking at my email history. She sent me an email around Thanksgiving suggesting that we get my paper submitted before I defend. I sent her all the files in a single email clearly labeled and suggested she look through them before submitting. The paper was not submitted before I defended. A week after I defended (mid-December), I sent her a follow up email about this and the communication paper. She emails me two days before Christmas to tell me she has not had time to submit (the finalized files I sent her three weeks earlier). Then January 5th she emails me requesting a whole bunch of the files for submission and attaches three earlier versions of the figures.
After I cooled off, the next morning I forwarded her the email I sent her a month and three days earlier with all of the files she was now requesting and the finalized figures.
Fast forward past two rounds of revisions and finally getting my paper accepted. This morning I am going through the page proofs and some of the lines in the figures look funny. I am looking at a black and white print out though, so I pull up the file. Sure enough she submitted the older versions of the figures not the ones I attached to an email...twice. I fully admit that this is something I should have caught for the first or second revision submissions, but who else should hold some responsibility for communication and timing of paper submission, huh? I sent her all the files together - all she had to do was submit the files in that email.
Also, we only submitted the shorter paper because I happened to email her three days before she had a planned vacation that I did not previously know about. In this email I pointed out that I had sent her a draft of the paper a month earlier and that I thought it was ready to submit. Who can't read a 5 page paper in a month and submit it?
There are a bunch of posts on the science-y blogs I have been reading, so if you end up here and are in the sciences and are curious what type of publishing environment my PhD lab was: My advisor had one paper from the institution when she received tenure. The MS and two PhD students she had (including me) published four papers in the three years after her tenure. She submitted a grant on my project last summer because all PIs on a grant the department was submitting had to have individual grants in the agency's system in order for the department to submit the group grant. She was not ready to submit a grant on her favorite project, so she just whipped one up on mine, NBD. I actually confronted her because she did not show interest in my project and here she was submitting a grant when I was trying to finish and going on interviews even though she had previously said in lab meeting this grant would be on her favorite project. I think if she was as interested in my project or the possibility of continuing it, she would have been more interested in getting the papers out, but that is just me.
Back to looking for her mistakes in the page proofs.
7 comments:
I id not have my first author papers accepted before I defended. I just needed to GTFO before I went crazy in there. So I went through the song and dance of getting my papers accepted now during my Postdoc. The first was finally accepted, the second is under review. This, after I threatened to submit the paper myself. Not in so many words though. I simply "offered" to submit the paper myself since I knew he was oh so busy. That got the ball rolling quickly. So man, do I feel your pain!!
But luckily, my current adviser is waaay motivated and I know this will never be a problem with him.
I "offered" too, in the sense that I asked for her consent to submit it if she would not have time before vacation because it had been on her desk for a month. :-) Glad yours are getting accepted! It is certainly validating.
I had to take the lead in writing my papers, but at least by my advisor very good regards reading and submitting promptly. My papers have a distinctly different style to all the others that came out of that lab because they were the only ones my advisor did not write herself. However, I believe she does specify I wrote my own papers in letters of recommendation. I hope your advisor at least has the courtesy to do that!
It makes me angry to think about grad students and postdocs who do not write their own papers.
All you can do is keep pushing and double checking everything. If there are mistakes I doubt your advisor would think twice about trying to dumb that on you too. You might want to ask someone else in your department to give you feedback on the manuscript too. Good luck.
ergh. I feel your frustration.
I have said all along that your advisor's stance on requiring a paper to be accepted is extreme.
My stance, which (fortunately) was the stance of our department and my committee, was that a paper needed to be submitted or on the verge of submission. Of course, verge is a bit tricky. Luckily, I too had a couple of papers from earlier years in my grad career, or I know she would have tried to hold me there longer.
I don't know if you can contact the editor to get the figures changed, or if it is pretty much in press at this point (which would be my guess). Hopefully, the lines and such are not critical for interpreting your data.
Oh wow, that is super-frustrating. I have a boss who tends to not bother to read my e-mails, and then plays dumb later. If I have to forward an e-mail to someone that I've already sent before and then call them to ask them to read it, I get really annoyed. Such a time-waster.
Breathe! Breathe again! Ok, now proceed, and realize that each of these things you tick off your list means one fewer communication you need to have with your (and let me stress this next word) FORMER advisor. I still feel furious at my former advisor a couple of times every year for various reasons, and we got along for the most part.
Luckily, these were the page proofs so it was the last chance we had to make changes. I sent my co-author (PhD advisor) all the corrections including to correct the submission of figures. Soon, it will be published online and I'll be done. Thanks for all the feedback!
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