The Man with No Time

Part of every scientist's job is to contribute to the literature. This responsibility comes in two forms. First, there's writing your own papers, submitting them to journals, and having them be published. With my thesis now fully published, I've got a decent amount of experience at that - four first author papers, and several papers on which I'm a secondary author. Fine. The second part of the responsibility is that of being the referee (or one of the referees) carrying out peer review on submitted papers. Asking around at work it seems as though quite a few people actually did this for the first time during their PhD, or at least fairly soon after starting their first postdoc position.  I actually had a request last year, but I was in the middle of writing up and just didn't have the time, so I turned it down. But a few days ago I received my second request to review a paper. Since it's something I'll have to learn to do at some point, not to mention ...

Just a quick post today. I've finally managed to get the last science chapter from my PhD thesis published in an astronomy journal. It's a taken a while - I only worked on it on and off for several months, and it actually needed a fair amount of work done to it. Then the referee had several, really rather useful suggestions for improvements, which held it up a bit more. But as of today it's available online, either from the journal itself or as a preprint on the arXiv. If, for some reason, you're interested, here are the links: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society version arXiv preprint version Happy reading!