One

There were many ‘swimming’ events studied in the latest issue of J. Phys. Condens. Matter. See the preface by the guest editors.

Two

I have been mute here for long. So, I have devoted most of my time in experiment, haven’t I? No, I haven’t. Do you have some ‘graduate criteria’ in your countries? Here, one criterion is that the journals of your published papers should have a total IF greater than 2. What’s the IF’s of Rheol. Acta, J. Rheol. and J. Non-Newt. Fluid Mech., respectively? These are the major journals in my field — polymer rheology. I remember none of them has IF>2. My supervisor therefore needs me to publish a piece of crap on Progress in Chemistry (Prog. Chem.), an English review journal based in China, so that I can earn some additional IF. So I’m busy preparing a ‘review’ on large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) for Prog. Chem.

Prog. Chem. is a good place for Chinese grads to earn IF points. It is indexed by SCI, having an IF of around 0.5, and generous in acceptance. Therefore it is a common practice that reviews are written and published by graduate students just like class assignments.

I wish my ‘class assignment’ on LAOS can look more like a review, by trying to answer such questions as ’what’s the core issues of this field?‘, ’how did people solved them previously?’, ‘were they successful?’, ’what’s new?‘, etc. Of course my answers are never important because as a humble student I’m not engaged enough in this field. But who care, after all? It is just Prog. Chem.!

Preparing this review is meaningful for me, at least. It provides me an opportunity to have a complete bird-eye view on the playground I’m in. So it’s not so time-wasting.

And I’m also starting some experiments now. They haven’t provided me any suggestive results yet. But the other day my boss murmured ‘it would be nice if we can have a PRL (Phys. Rev. Lett.) from it’. I believe he totally overestimated my luck. And, if he believed I could have at least one paper on PRL (whose IF (6.9) is enough for me to graduate three point five times), why did he ask me to write one more for Prog. Chem. (which only enable me to graduate four times)?

Anyway, ‘the more the better’ rocks, if not ‘publish or perish’.