Swan Song

EPILOGUE

Let's start at the end.

Over the years, I have accumulated a number papers that have gone unpublished.  I and the boys and girls (my co-workers) put considerable effort and time into these projects and now, as my career fades to black, I would like to make a final effort to make this information available.  This would have been almost unthinkable a decade or more ago for many reasons, but the advent of internet blogging and easy information exchange has changed that.  Previously, the only way that 'non-peer-reviewed' scientific research could be presented was within the context of scientific meetings as a presentation or published abstract.  This is still largely available, but full written papers must still be filtered through full peer review in order for them to be published in traditional biomedical journals and these publications are coin of the realm in science, medicine, and technology.  There are problems with this system, but that is not the point of this blog.


In academic science and medicine, much weight is given to publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals.  The 'impact factor' for each journal determines how seriously the reports published therein are taken and these impact factors feature prominently in promotion and tenure decisions, funding decisions at NIH or NSF, and they eventually drive the perceptions and behavior of most investigators.

It is more than a little embarrassing to admit that any of your own work has ever been rejected by a peer-reviewed journal and mortifying to admit that it has been rejected by more than one peer-reviewed journal.  But let's face it, when a paper gets rejected by one journal, we revise it and submit it elsewhere.  With some writing skill and some reasonably good data and some luck, it will get accepted and published.  If one or two or three such attempts still result in failure, we just want to forget the whole sad affair, jam the manuscript and data files into the back of the file cabinet, and move on to less tortured pastures. 

So, at the end of your career when you are cleaning out your office and emptying your file cabinets you find these manuscripts.  What to do.  Painful memories.  Sit down and re-read them.  Eventually I begin to  wonder if they might not be of interest to someone.  It was good data and there were some useful ideas.  Were they before their time?  Were they misunderstood?  Judge for yourself.
 
I'll be re-formatting these unpublished (i.e., old) manuscripts and posting them here as I go through them.
I hope that you aren't as put off by them as the reviewers were when they were originally submitted.  If I really get up the nerve, I'll publish the reviewer's comments from each journal that they were submitted to (never end a sentence with a preposition).  That proposition hurts just thinking about it.

Perhaps this will be of some interest....

I'll have to think about how to list authorship.  I don't want to slight anybody by leaving their names off the manuscripts, but I don't want to inadvertently harm them by presenting the manuscripts in this non-peer-reviewed format.  Pervasive.



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