• Question: Have you ever had any of your work published?

    Asked by jellytotayers to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 25 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi Jellytotayers,

      Yes, I have. It’s one of the main aims of a scientist, when you’ve done good work and found out something new, you publish it in academic journals so that other scientists can read about what you’ve done, and try to repeat your results. If everyone agrees with what you found, your ideas become part of established science.

      The feeling you get when you get a piece of work published is brilliant, like winning the cup final in football or something. All the hard work you’ve put over a year or more is rewarded by the publication.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hiya jellytotayers

      I’ve had one piece of research published, last August and I have a copy for anyone to see available here:

      http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~eejop/IAS2012/Quantifying_Uncertainty_in_Model_Predictions_for_the_Pliocene_project_Initial_results.pdf

      As James V says, it is a tremendous feeling when you get the e-mail saying it has been accepted for publication, the worst part of it is when you get the reviews back. All scientific papers have to be reviewed (which is like they are being marked) by your fellow scientists (it’s called peer review) and they have the say on whether a journal should accept your work. Normally these reviews are friendly and helpful, like good constructive critisim, that helps make your work better, but sometimes they can be very tough. Thankfully mine were very fair and really useful.

      I hope to publish another 2 or 3 papers from my PhD work, and hopefully lots more interesting science in my future career!

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Alot of the work that I have worked on has been published in reports rather than journals. It is very important that work is published in any form so that people can read it and then take it one step further, using what you have learnt and adding more to it so that the science keeps progressing.
      I hope to have a paper published soon on some work I am doing about reactions of carbon dioxide with cement.

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