illuminating science

Well, I submitted my paper today. Finally! Fingers crossed that I get good reviewers (My supervisor and I recommended several which I hope will like the paper…) From here, my paper gets sent to the Editor who makes sure that it’s relevant to their journal and has at least some chance of being published. Then, they select several reviewers (possibly using my recommendations, or possibly not) and sends a copy of the paper out to each of them. The reviewers read it, comment on it, and eventually decide whether they think it’s worth publishing. Finally, the paper gets sent back to the editor, who makes a final decision based on the reviewers’ comments, and passes it on to me. If they say yes, then it gets published! If no, I might have a chance to argue my case (and discredit their arguments against me!) and try again. We’ll see.

For this journal particularly it was quite a lot of work to get it into a form they could handle. I, like most physicists, write my papers in LaTeX, which is vaguely like HTML, in that instead of just selecting italics and typing, you actually tell it: \emph{some stuff in italics}. Then, you “compile” your paper, and LaTeX converts all those things you told it into the correct visible interpretation. While it might sound like a lot of extra work, it means that you don’t have to stuff around with Microsoft Word’s fonts or picture layout ridiculous paragraph indenting procedures. You just type your text, tell it what what different things are, and then it makes it look right. (E.g., I tell it that this is a new section called “Results”, and it automatically starts a new paragraph, does the right indenting, and heads it “Results” in bold.) It’s also great for maths - you write out your maths in “English”-style language, and it converts it to the proper symbols. Cool!

Best of all, you can very quickly change the entire look and feel of your document - every publisher has their own “style file” which tells LaTeX how it should typeset section headings or paragraphs, whether it should be one column or two, etc. So to switch journals, simply recompile your writing with that new style file! I can’t recommend LaTeX enough - I only use Word now for when I’m knocking up really quick documents that don’t need to look good.

Anyway, the point of all this was that this Journal made me jump through ridiculous hoops to get a single LaTeX file I could upload (for those in the know, I had to put my extra style files and my bibliography file all into the one…gah!) Then I had to separately upload separate files containing info about my paper, who I’d recommend as reviewers, a cover letter telling them they should definitely publish my work because it’s wonderful (ahem)…I’m exhausted!

And on that note, I’m going to go home, have some dinner, and then head out for some dancing! (Swing dancing, that is, for those of you who’ve just joined us…) Looking forward to my weekend…