Writing a paper is hard. Submitting a paper is a nightmare. Every journal has its own specific requirements: maximum number of words, reference style, statements to be included in random places in the manuscript, etcetera. Once you’ve done all this, there’s the online submission system to deal with, which demands all kinds of additional, hard to find information, as well as all of your co-authors’ work and home addresses, phone numbers, favourite colour, car they drive… But I’ve gotten used to all this, and am even getting over my submission phobia, which made me press the “no” button time and again when the system asked me “this finalises your submission - are you sure?”.
Anyway, you can imagine my sense of achievement when I pressed the “yes” button after a morning’s preparing the submission of my cost-effectiveness paper for the British Medical Journal. Happy to have it off my desk, I went to lunch… only to return to a message in my inbox from BMJ, regretting to have to reject my paper, sent a mere 85 minutes after submission! (yes, I had a very long lunch break) This is my saddest record ever.
To save the day, I submitted an abstract for the European Congress of Radiology, who will not inform me about their decision until November. Something achieved today after all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 6:49 pm and is filed under decision making, radiology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.