If you have come across this blog first, this is Part III of a 3 part blog looking at the story behind the research which led to the publication of this study:
Part I explores conducting the study.
Part II talks about what came after.
Part III (this part) will explore the perseverance required to get this thing published. The ending has already been spoiled but the journey is what matters. It was an adventure that turned out alright in the end.
I approached publication as go big or go home. We should always start that way shouldn’t we? I went to one of the most highly ranked nursing education journals and attempted to submit the paper as “original research” ignoring the fact that their author guidelines said they wouldn’t publish single-site studies in this category. In all fairness to my dumb decision, I had gone and flipped through the journal and it did appear that they regularly broke this rule. No shock, it was desk rejected. But they did ask me to revise the manuscript and resubmit it as a “research brief.” I cringed. To fit the “research brief” category, the manuscript, which was 15-pages, would need to be cut to 8-pages. I debated not doing it but I went forth anyway. I was ruthless. I gave myself five seconds to make a decision on a passage and if I hesitated it was gone. I actually think I ended up with a pretty decent short manuscript. I sent it back to the journal. It went to review and two months later it came back….. rejected. The feedback: manuscript didn’t go into enough depth in a very long list of areas.
I was pissed because I had been asked to resubmitted it in a category that denied me the space to give those details and it got rejected for not saying enough. No shit. Perhaps if I had been more experienced I could have foreseen that outcome and declined their resubmit request.
In the meantime, I had continued on with my reading. In 2013 before I started preparing this manuscript I had decided to run my study again, this time with a time-control period prior to the course start, so I was already working on another study.
(In fact, I got the requested minor revisions for the manuscript for this second study last week so that one will be coming soon as well.)
But all the new reading was developing my understanding of self-efficacy theory. I decided to re-write some of the review of the literature and discussion. I liked some of the edits I made to shorten the manuscript so some of those stayed, in addition to expanding on some of the literature. So if you are keeping track, at this point in the process, I am re-writing this manuscript for the second time. It was written, it got re-written to shorten it, and now I am re-writing it in preparation to go to another journal.
In September 2015, I submitted the paper to a second journal, where it sat. And sat. And sat in review forever and a day. I would email the editor every couple of months to find out how it was going. She was a lovely lady. Her sympathetic emails back to me always stated she couldn’t seem to get anyone to follow-through with reviewing the manuscript. At some point she had found one person. She really wanted three people to review it. Seven months later when I was getting the same response (reviewers not responding), I asked her if I should pull the manuscript and send it elsewhere. And she agreed that was appropriate. She sent me the reviews she had — there were 2 completed at this point, much to my surprise — and they were unenthusiastic reviews. They thought the review of the literature was not great. They thought the study was weak. They thought I was good at hiding the study weaknesses with editorializing (truth). I think she allowed me to pull it because she would have ultimately rejected it. It was now spring of 2016.
One of the reviewers told me that I needed to team up with a mid-career researcher to gain some experience.
What the hell? I wrote to Tom in an email. How can they tell?
They looked you up. He wrote back. And if they had looked me up they would have found no publications. All my previous publications were under my former married name.
It was supposed to be a BLIND review.
I was still reading. In 2015-16 I had been working on a third big writing self-efficacy project exploring all the measurements instruments assessing the concept. By the time I pulled this study article from the second journal, I had written that manuscript, I had written the manuscript for the replication study with the time control. I dove into re-writing THIS manuscript, especially the review of the literature for the third time. In fact, it seems to me I wrote the new review of the literature for this publication just after I wrote the first draft for the second study manuscript which in the end was probably fortuitous because it meant I was forced to write two different reviews of the literature. I used the same literature to write two different versions of the same background and review of the literature. Those of you who do a lot of research using the same concepts will know what I mean when I say, this is hard.
I sent this manuscript off to the new Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN) journal Quality Advancement in Nursing Education. It is open access and publicly available but there are no fees. It is peer reviewed but I doubt it yet has an impact factor as it is too new. I’m also not sure if it is indexed yet. I just tried to search for it in our library and it didn’t come up. The journal has been in existence for just over 2 years. I believe this is its 7th issue.
But they were wonderful. The reviews were wonderful and helpful. One reviewer asked me to write a section on scaffolding theory and include an appendix with the scholarly writing course structure and activities. I nearly screamed in excitement. I had already done a ton of reading about scaffolding theory because I had written it into the second study’s manuscript and allowing me space to publish my entire course structure was a gift I would have never gotten from any other well established journal with their strict rules and tight word counts. So now the final product comes in at a whopping 21 published pages. Not including references, tables, or the appendix it is 6500 words long — unheard of lengths for nursing journals.
Incidentally Torrie and Holly were at the beginning of the second year of their nursing program in October 2014 when they wrote their papers for my class on the topic of writing interventions and writing self-efficacy and anxiety. With all the revisions and re-writes this manuscript went through in the time since, there are very few of their actual words left. There is a spot here and there that I remember not being my writing but I can no longer remember what parts were theirs. They graduated from our nursing program in the fall of 2015. They’ve been practicing nurses for about a year and a half now. They are both wonderful gifted students. It makes me very happy to have given them this opportunity even though I know the whole experience hardly feels like it belongs to them anymore. Funny thing is that I was involved in a project with my professors when I was an undergraduate student that was eventually published. I hardly feel like I played any role in that project either anymore but there it sits in my publication credits. So this paper for me was like giving back to Torrie and Holly what one of my profs gave to me as an undergrad and I am forever grateful. It may be one reason why I am where I am today.
And so concludes the story behind this research. I look forward to your feedback and I encourage you, if you are a blog writer, to consider telling these stories of your work.
If you missed Part I and Part II they can be accessed at the hyperlinks.
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