Wait, did I just see a pig fly?

Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with the struggles I've had to finish and submit journal articles. In particular, there are two such articles that I've been working on forever that I just couldn't seem to wrap up, for one reason or another.

Well, ahem...check out the "Stuff I should probably be working on" in the sidebar.

That's right, I finally got one of the two monkeys off my back. Relief does not even begin to describe what I feel right now.

I fully expect this article to be rejected, or best case scenario require major revisions. I sent it to the top journal in my subfield. This is one of the many enduring lessons I learned from my thesis advisor: always aim for the top first, because you can always adjust downwards later if need be. (The subtext here, I think, is "believe that your work is the best of the best and maybe others will believe it too.") Oddly, sending this out for review to a place where it very well may be torn apart, and where the reviews may not be very kind, does not scare me at all. Actually logging in to the journal's site and submitting it? That's what I found truly terrifying.

I think this all harks back to my perfectionist tendencies. I hold on to these journal articles way too long, because I see the flaws in my own work and figure everyone else will see them, too. I'm not talking about the normal flaws that peer review will uncover: I'm talking about micro-level stuff that, chances are, I will be the only one to notice. I'm notoriously bad with this. I will reanalyze my data multiple times to try and remove the "flaws". Some of this is good, but much of it is unhealthy. With this particular article, I actually had to promise myself that I would "fix" the "flawed" analysis by writing it up as a new conference paper. For some reason, I'm much better about getting conference papers out for review in a timely fashion, even if they are flawed (or "flawed"). So I know that this particular work (the offshoot) will most likely see the light of day fairly soon. At any rate, that was enough to trick my brain into agreeing to submit this journal article.

Holding onto this article for as long as I did caused the rest of my research to suffer. I'm behind now on all my other projects, because getting this Off My Desk has been my priority. So I'm excited to get back to work on the other stuff! And I'm hoping that this experience has taught me to let go of the perfectionism and give myself permission to send out less than perfect work to journals for review.