I have been feeling disturbing (or disturbed? Participles always confuse me) these days because I thought I had been absent from blogging for months, until I finally had the courage to enter the first letter of this post. But it was revealed that the last post was only one week ago. Though this fact released me a lot but I still wonder why I felt so urged. Nobody urges me, nor do I care about my readers. Yes, sorry, I don’t care about you guys. I don’t care what to blog so as to stimulate your motivation of comment or subscription. So why do I start to feel urged once I have nothing to blog about for some days?
The answer may be that, well, actually I do care about you…
2007 has passed and the chance to say ‘happy new year’ has passed either. Where did science blogs reach after a year of development? Is there any top-10 lists of science blogs, among the many of other things? I don’t know other blogs much. The Best Science Blog(s) 2007 are about climate change and astronomy, while chemistry bloggers that I know have slowed down in the past year. Most of them are graduate students and started blogging chemistry about two or three years ago. So it may be time they paid more attention to their experiments instead this year, leaving their blogs aside. I, too, confront great pressure from my project. The third part (of three) of my project has to be finished in 2 month. And by rules I have to publish one paper on one of the journals listed somewhere. My first paper was rejected twice by different in-list journals and is now waiting reply from a third. My second paper was just prepared. Without at least one paper published I cannot enter the thesis defending phase and will have to delay my graduation. This is terrible so I must not let it happen.
It is too hasty at least for me to complete a three-part project and have one paper of solid work published in 3 years, of which one year I have to take classes and half another year I have to prepare for the thesis. So actually I have only one and a half year for experiment. This means I have to be quick and am not allowed to fail in my experiment. The period from submission to acceptance of a paper in a listed journal is about 1 year in China (full article), although some rubbish journals can reply you in less than 3 months, faster if you pay them more. So, considering also chances of rejection, unless you are doing rubbish research, to assure graduation in time you have to submit your paper at least one year in advance. That is the end of the second year, when in my case I have no enough ‘positive results’ to pile up for a full article. My first year being the year of classes, I generally spent my second year on trying out the reported procedures and my ideas. The success of this year is that I can repeat some of the reported experiment and assess the feasibility of my idea, based on which I can do my own work in the next step. So I don’t have new things to publish at this stage; I have to publish a ‘me-too’ paper on a Chinese journal. Now I wish after all the work is done I will be able to publish a paper in an international journal, which I can put it on my publication list. But this depend on my results.
Consequently a decrease in frequency of post may be witnessed in my blog. But I still expect changes to take place in science blogosphere. I’m waiting the change, if I am not creating it. At least I’m waiting Nature Network to allow HTML embedding feature in blogs so that many Web 2.0 application can be pasted on posts via the HTML embedding scripts provided.
UPDATE: What is a me-too paper