Officially published: from start to finish.

Today my first peer-reviewed manuscript was finally published in the open-access journal Water. You can scan the QR code below or visit this website to view the article in its entirety and download it as a PDF. Being published in an open-access journal means anyone can read it, so please, download away.😊

If you're interested in some "behind the scenes" on how this all went down (from you guessed it, start to finish), keep reading below!

I want to first say, this was a long time coming.

I started working on this project seven years ago when Jake (second author) was developing the project for his Master's thesis at American University. Dr. Knee (third author) was my instructor for an Environmental Methods course and asked at the start of class one day if anyone was interested in helping out with the project. While I was definitely interested in research someday, I had no idea which sub-disciplines/topics/ecosystems I was leaning towards studying. I also didn't necessarily feel qualified for field or lab work yet (I was only a sophomore), but what's that quote again... "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" or something like that, so I threw my hat in the ring after class.

I started with field sampling once a week, where I wrote down concentrations from the YSI probe (e.g., temperature and pH of the stream) or counted "clicks" as the wheel of our stream discharge meter spun (the total number of clicks, which were the sounds the wheel made as it turned one full rotation in the water, could then be entered into a formula equating to velocity). I weed whacked through spider webs and ventured into knee-high stream water, even during the freezing cold months, and learned more about how science works than I ever could in the classroom.

Here's a picture of Jake & I measuring stream velocity at one of the streams in Meadowood. The headphones Jake is wearing amplify the sound of the wheel clicking beneath the surface of the stream. The faster the stream is moving, the more clicks he will count. As he counts the clicks, I'm keeping time, so that he stops counting after exactly 30 seconds (this standardizes the measurements). You can imagine that on really heavy stream flow days (e.g., during or after a storm), the clicks might be too close together to accurately count. To limit error, we took measurements at least 10 times across a transect of the stream (shown by the meter tape in the photo) and occasionally more than once at each transect sampling point. We additionally were working in smaller streams. There are more sophisticated (and expensive) methods of velocity measurements for larger streams.

Not long after I began working with them in the field, I expressed interested in helping with some of the lab work and data analysis. Again, I started slowly by just entering data from the field into the spreadsheet Jake set-up. Luckily I was familiar with Microsoft Excel from earlier courses and could easily input the data and construct some simple figures to look at preliminary trends. (You can read more about the project's key research questions and predictions here.) Both Dr. Knee and Jake then began training me in the use of the lab equipment like the EasyChem, which analyzes water samples for key nutrients like nitrate and phosphate.

At this point, I was putting in maybe 10-15 hours a week of work between the lab analysis and field sampling and even though I was learning incredibly valuable research skills and developing relationships with people who could write me recommendations for more research or funding opportunities in the future, the hours I was putting in were unpaid. I worked another 10 hours at the on-campus gym to afford transportation to and from the field sites, but these experiences can be out of reach for many people who need to spend whatever time they're not in classes paying for their degree as they go or supporting their families. Being in a position where I can now recruit undergraduates to work on my dissertation research, I try to be very aware of these potential barriers as ways that STEM fields are limiting diversity.

Thankfully, after two semesters working on the project, Dr. Knee offered me a full-time lab technician position to continue sampling and analysis for Jake's project as well as some other projects going on in Dr. Knee's lab over the summer. The following semester, I continued in a lab technician role (reduced to 10 hours a week) and Jake defended his Master's thesis. Though this could have meant the project was over, Dr. Knee and I began working on a grant offered by American University's College of Arts & Sciences to continue funding the project for another year and to add-on some groundwater sampling, something I was passionate about including after reading through the literature Jake cited in his thesis. The grant was funded for the following Fall semester (2016) and we got back to work after a gap of about a year in field sampling.

This time, I was the senior lab member recruiting younger undergraduates to participate in field sampling, which allowed me to further develop leadership, communication, and teaching skills. I presented this work 6 months later in March of 2017 (two months before I graduated with my B.S.) at American University's annual undergraduate research symposium and by then I was accepted into graduate school at USF.

Another year passed before Dr. Knee and I discussed the project again — I had been busy with my teaching and coursework at USF and Dr. Knee was working on manuscripts for other projects. But by then, all field sampling for the project was completed, and we both wanted to start writing this up.

What was holding me back?

In the "get moving and publish this thing category" was my knowledge that this work was fairly timely and important: "urban stream syndrome" (more about that here) has been a regular topic of discussion among scientists since the early 2000s and as more areas become urbanized, more streams (which most places rely on for drinking water, recreational use, or ecotourism) are at risk. This publication would definitely add to the conversation and consensus about some of the key impacts to streams (e.g., increased salinization and nitrogen export from streams). More selfishly, I also knew that publishing this paper would help my career (ever hear of "publish or perish?"). I had barely started, but I looked around at my graduate school peers at USF, all published, and felt overwhelmingly inadequate.

However, in the "this manuscript is going to take up way more time than you have available" category was the knowledge that this manuscript would be complicated: we had to extend what Jake started in his thesis to include the additional sampling I completed after he graduated AND another 3-4 months of sampling completed by the undergraduates I helped train before I graduated. This meant looking through multiple data sets that were not all as organized as we would have liked. It also meant that Dr. Knee and I had to find time to coordinate writing and data analysis from a distance (this was pre-Covid when Zoom was far less mainstream). I was also already feeling incredibly overwhelmed with my dissertation: I needed to find a committee, write my proposal, take more classes, have a life.

For those reading that have become so enamored with my journey that they forgot I already spoiled the ending by citing the paper above, we decided to pursue the manuscript.

We spent another year cleaning up and analyzing the data, creating figures and tables, and writing before it was ready for our (first) submission to Freshwater Science in October 2019, five years and one month after my first day of field sampling. I suppose I keep stressing the timing of this because, to me, this felt like a lifetime. Maybe this is exactly as long as manuscripts are supposed to take though...? These memes make me think, maybe, yes?

Credit: Carlos A. Scolari (@cscolari)

Credit: Roshni Joshi (@Roshnijoshi)

One can only hope their manuscript ages as well as Mark Hamill or Leonardo DiCaprio.

In any case, Freshwater Science respectfully passed (without sending it out for peer review) as the manuscript lacked novelty. This was very disheartening to say the least. We had worked really hard to get this submission ready and the editor even stated that he thought the manuscript was "technically sound" and "a very thorough piece of work." Yet this wasn't enough?

Dr. Knee convinced me this was not wholly uncommon and we could try again. She had a friend in the chemistry department with an ICP-OES, which could analyze our samples for dissolved metals, something less commonly studied in urban stream syndrome papers that could set our paper apart. (Side note: never dispose of your samples until your project is published and even then maybe keep them frozen for fun for another 10 years or so). It took another four months to run and analyze that data before we resubmitted to Water, Air, & Soil Pollution just as the pandemic shut downs began.

They took much longer than Freshwater Science to respond as this time the paper went out for peer-review (another step closer!!), but was ultimately rejected again. Did I say I was very disheartened before, because now I was considering dropping the profession entirely.

The first reviewer's comments were very kind and offered some insightful additions that you'll see in the paper today (like the concentration-discharge analyses), while the second reviewer was not as forgiving.

We had gone too far now to give up though, so we revised YET AGAIN!!! Oh, I'm sorry are you sick of hearing about this paper yet, because, SAME.

Our third submission was to River Research and Applications. This journal had a smaller page limit compared to the others, so we pared the manuscript down quite a bit to focus on only our key, and most novel, results. Several months passed again both before and after resubmission only to be rejected a. third. time. This time, the editor only sent the paper out to one reviewer (possibly a product of the pandemic limiting the availability of people for peer-review?), who, we believe, misinterpreted some of our stated limitations to mean that the paper was entirely invalid (yes, that did sting quite a bit).

We tried not to take this too personally, and reached out to the editor to clarify. Unfortunately, we were ghosted. This, I took a little more personally.

We decided not to revise the manuscript this time except to reword the limitations and submitted to our fourth (and yes, final) journal. We miraculously heard back from Water within two weeks saying our manuscript was accepted with only minor revisions. Can you believe it?!?!?!?! Because we couldn't.

Leo was ready to celebrate with us though!!

While I would like to say this story has now come to a very happy ending, we still had those pesky minor revisions to contend with and after reading through them, they did not feel very minor. While Dr. Knee took on the comment of "re-organize your entire results section," I handled "revise Figures 2–5 and Tables 3–4". No biggie?

Two more weeks.

Ready for the final proofing!! Oh wait, we need to completely rework our reference list to be numbered instead of in-text citations? Oh wait, when I started this project seven years ago, I didn't know what a citation manager was and had been editing the references by hand? Oh wait, there are 84 of them...

A very hectic weekend.

PUBLISHED: February 28th, 2021. My new favorite day.

For those who read to the end, I hope you found this journey as frustrating, yet ultimately satisfying, as I did. For those who are publishing your first paper, I hope the peer-review process treats you well and maybe, just maybe, you find some comfort in my process. For those who read this hoping I would summarize the paper so you didn't have to read it, the link is at the top.

Just kidding, you can read a summary of the results here. But also, I spent seven years on that manuscript so like... could you at least download it and skim...?

Sending good vibes,

Jessica