Moving Ahead.

OK. Things are proceeding apace. Even though the academic aspects of my new job are sort of minimal, I take them seriously because I enjoy them and they matter to me. It’s strange how I never cared about getting papers out when I was in grand school, and neither did my advisor. But now, I really love it even though I’ve had barely middling success at it. It’s one of the ways my ambition comes out.

And my academic productivity has been pretty good here of late. Well, sort of. Two old papers have been resubmitted. One to a little European journal that I’m hoping will publish this paper out of pity. One to a major glamour publication that would, if I were in a professory-type position, be a potential career-maker. Considering the history of these papers, I’m looking at two rejections.

Two new papers have been submitted too. One is a research paper based on the first simulation that I did here at my new work for MECMC. It’s a good paper with a strong result, I think. We submitted it to a very high second-tier journal (i.e., a leading specialty journal). The kind that is considered “high impact”. It made it past the editor’s desk and is currently under review. The other is a strange little piece, that I discussed here. We submitted it to a well-regarded specialty journal in quality.

For this piece, I decided to make myself last author and put one of my co-workers as first. He’s got strong ideas about how to perform the kind of work we do, and so I sat down with him and we hammered out the paper after I wrote a short first draft. He wants to go on in administration, and this piece may help him do that. I want to have something out there that shows I know how to integrate myself into a QI department in case I ever have to change hospitals. And this does that too.

My other motive was to put my manager’s names on the paper. They have been supportive but unenthusiastic about my academic ambitions. I had them edit and comment on the manuscript, and participate in content organization, so that I could legitimately include them as authors. I strongly suspect that once they see their own names as authors on a published paper, they’ll be more excited about letting me pursue academic work a little more aggressively. Similarly, once they see how nice it is to have a little more money in the budget, they ought to appreciate my grant-writing.

So, of the two papers I’ve written since joining MECMC, I’m hopeful that they will both make it into journals on first submissions. I don’t know. It’s been a while since that happened for me. But it’d be nice. I have 4 papers out there under review. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll actually hit a couple of these this time. I don’t know. But I’m moving ahead.