An "In press"ive Publication

This weekend I got to see the final, approved manuscript for the nutrition study I worked on as a research assistant before starting my masters program. It's supposed to be published some time in 2011, but it's now an "in press" peer-reviewed journal article on my c.v., which is nice. I am the fourth of four authors (after the professors) but I feel absolutely great about the fact that I did the analysis and wrote the introduction and results section and that the final version looks basically identical to the work that I had turned in before.

Here is the obligatory word cloud for this paper:



I also helped with data collection on the project (going around to Scout meetings to talk to the kids) but I joined the team after the study design was finalized, the questionnaires were written, and participants were lined up. Robert made a comment along the lines that I've done all the various parts of a study except for contacting organizations to line up participants, with the implication that this a hard part of the process that I do not have experience with.

I laughed.

After having to call up 89 park managers to convince them that they really do want to participate in this massive survey project of their visitors (despite the fact that they are understaffed and don't exactly trust the management of their own division, let alone an outsider like me)...

After starting up studies in China, Australia, and Canada on top of the projects I was already managing in 6 other countries and having to stay on top of the call center supervisors in all these countries to make sure they manage their sample well and get the correct number of completed interviews with participants who are getting nothing but the satisfaction of helping put my biggest client out of business by expressing their consistently dismal opinions...

The idea of contacting a bunch of organizations and offering them the opportunity for their members to completely voluntarily participate in a research project with $10 per person in compensation just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. It's not a cake walk, but it's not that bad.

Really, the bad part is getting your university's internal review board to approve your study and not, e.g., freak out that you used an acronym in the name of your study as it will appear on the experiment management software that the student participants will use to sign up for studies. (This happened to one of my classmates, who had his approval pushed back by weeks to deal with the "problem.")