I Am A Published Author?

It has happened! My thesis has been published in Behavior Research Methods!

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01582-w

I began writing my thesis for the Concurrent Degree Program back in 2019. It was pretty surreal when I think back to 2019, the thesis started out as a blank word document with barely any words. Back then, I was struggling to piece together coherent sentences to form the introduction as I had to parse through the highly technical literature with little knowledge of the field. Luckily, my supervisor was supportive and gave me ample assistance for me to catch up within a short time span. I kept going back and forth between textbooks, journal articles, lecture notes and websites, in fear that I misrepresent the sources and wrote something inaccurate.

After submitting my thesis as part of my graduation requirements, I embarked on an ambitious journey to publish my thesis in a journal, egged on by the people around me. When it all started, it felt like an impossible task. “Would any journal really want to publish my thesis?” was my initial thought. There were numerous points in time when I wanted to give up, such as when the manuscript got rejected by the first journal that we submitted to.

After the first rejection, two things drove me to continue my attempts, encouragement from my supervisor, friends and family, as well as the sunk-cost bias. The argument was that: Since I already had the manuscript ready, the subsequent applications should be quicker and less effort intensive. And so, my supervisor and I made our second attempt.

Our second attempt was with Behavior Research Methods and it was actually really close to being rejected, but the editor saw potential in the manuscript and gave us a pretty long revision period to make big changes to the manuscript. At first, I was kind of daunted, the suggested revisions amounted to redoing almost half of the entire thesis. I was working full-time at the time and the thought of juggling the manuscript and work scared me. Luckily, I decided to bite the bullet and made the revisions, sacrificing some weekday nights and weekends for the revisions. I thought that since the reviewers gave me a chance, I shouldn’t waste this chance. Plus, they gave me solid and actionable feedback.

After we resubmitted the first revision, we went through a few minor revisions for typos and inconsistencies. The entire process took close to a year or so, but it was finally done. It took a few months for the article to actually publish after it was accepted.

Long story short, it was tough and there were numerous times when I wanted to give up. But I am glad that I persisted, seeing my work published as a journal article really makes me proud. In hindsight, the effort that I put in was well worth it.

Busy Life

It has been a year since I last updated the blog. The last year has been really busy for me as I transited to a new job and was trying my best to stay afloat. But I will make an effort to come back periodically to pen down some reflections.