Paper (back) Writer

The more observant amongst you out there will probably have noticed that my posting on here have been either a) rather sporadic, b) somewhat delayed or c) a combinatin of both. As you can probably guess, the blame for this is going to lay squarely at the feet of work - which has been more than enough to occupy my time - well, at least until very lately (cell contamination issues again - lovely!). Anyway, on top of the lab meeting (see last week's posts), i have also been deeply mired in the writing of a review for/with my boss. Thankfully, the whole thing has now been written (save for minor corrections and compiling the reference list) and will hopefully be sent off either by the end of this week or, for definite, the start of next week. With luck, this will likely be my first publication.

Of course, writing papers is nothing new to me - before i left Manchester (and, indeed, subsequently), i had written two manuscripts that were submitted last November, and annoyingly rejected - the reason being that one of the reviewers and the editor thought that the two papers should be combined into one. Given that both these papers were close to the 6000 word limit of the journal and again with the figures and tables, how they expect us to combine them as one paper is somewhat beyond me. I suspect they want us to offer some figures as supplemental figures online - although i think it's ridiculous to do that. I mean, what was done before the Internet?? Anyway, last i heard of those, my old boss was considering how we could combine the two and, also, if we could save enough data to publish a smaller study at a lesser journal. Have to wait and see on that one. Anyway, now that the review is pretty much done and dusted, the posts on here will hopefully be more forthcoming.