Exciting times in the Arthropod Ecology laboratory as we all work hard on getting manuscripts moving towards publication.  Ph.D. student Dorothy Maguire is working on a paper from a few years ago, about the vertical stratification of Coleoptera and Diptera in forest canopies in the greater Montreal area.  This work was done with former PhD. student Maxim Larrivée, and the collecting and laboratory work was mostly done by two undergraduate students at the time.  My colleague at McGill, Dr. Terry Wheeler (head of the Lyman Entomological Museum), is also involved with this work.  We hope to have the paper submitted early in the new year.  Post-doc Dr. Laura Timms is working with former Ph.D. student Joey Bowden on a paper that resulted from a graduate class in forest entomology from several years ago – this will be an interesting ‘meta-analysis’  paper about ecological analyses of arthropod biodiversity studies.   I’ve also been dusting off some other work from past students, and have recently submitted some work from former M.Sc. students Kathleen Aikens and Carol Frost.  And, Ph.D. student Raphael Royaute and Joey Bowden, are working on some final revisions on their own papers…. we are hoping these are all accepted in the near future.  Phew. That is a lot of activity!

Publications are the end product of a LOT of hard work for all these students, and is one of the more important currencies by which we measure academic success.  It is a wonderful feeling to see your own research appear in the peer-reviewed literature to be read by colleagues from around the world.  It’s a good time to be getting papers submitted – the time between academic terms offers a nice window of opportunity!

That being said, the publication process is not easy – it’s a long road from project idea and implementation to data collection, analysis and writing, and final manuscript preparation and submission takes a lot of work.  And there are always moments of disappointment after papers get rejected, and it is sometimes difficult to make all the revisions on papers after the review process.

Is all the effort worth it?

Absolutely.