My first publication as a Ph.D Candidate!
Well, it finally happened! I’m published!
Now, this isn’t the first time that I’ve been published – my Master’s thesis is available through the University of Ottawa’s research portal and I have a paper from law school buried in the depths of the Canadian Bar Association’s Military Law Section’s journal Sword & Scale. While I’m proud of those accomplishments, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of successfully navigating the peer-review academic journal process for the first time.
My article – Defining Injustice: Determining the Collective Identity of a Faceless and Placeless Virtual Social Movement – has been published by The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, in Volume 14, Issue 4. It’s already available online and will be coming to a university library near you soon!
This article has been a work in progress – from start to finish – for about two years, which I understand is fairly standard. It began as a theoretical investigation in a first year doctoral seminar, where I used the course to develop my literature review. Then, in my second semester, I developed my methodology, tested it and presented preliminary findings at two graduate student conferences. Finally, in a doctoral writing seminar in the first semester of my second year, we were required to take an article that we had in progress, complete it, and submit it. This class was fundamental to the finalization and, ultimately, the submission of this paper.
I submitted the paper for consideration in December 2017 and received word at the end of February 2018 that my article had been accepted – with revisions – for publication. I then made the mistake of sitting on the paper. For months. It seemed daunting to begin to address the revisions, plus I was teaching for the first time, studying for the bar exam, and getting ready to move. After those were finished, I threw myself into my proposal determined to finish it by July 2018 (it’s almost done now).
Recently, I had coffee with an old friend who is nearly finished his Ph.D in another faculty. He encouraged me to bite the bullet, sit down and address the comments of the anonymous reviewers. If I missed the deadline for submitting my revisions, then the paper would be lost – and it had already been accepted (no small feat in and of itself, only 27% of submissions to The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society are accepted).
Following that conversation in October, I prioritized completing the revisions and addressing the reviewers’ comments. A second round of edits was completed much more quickly than the first, and I made sure to respond to all emails pertaining to the copy edits and typeset proofs with 24-48 hours of their receipt – and well in advance of their deadline.
And voila! Less than a year after its submission, just over two years after starting the research process, a publication is born!
Stay tuned for a future blog post on the lessons learned from this experience…