r/PublishOrPerish

I’m a wet lab rat. Most of my publications come from bench work, which is time-consuming and usually requires a lot of collaborators. However, during the pandemic I taught myself Python and data analysis, and I fell in love with it. I still do wet lab work, but data analysis has become kind of a hobby. Right now, I have two or three manuscripts that I think are publishable. The problem is that I did everything myself, from developing the hypothesis to running the analyses and writing the manuscript so, I’d be the only author. I’ve seen single-author papers before, but they’re not very common. In fact, I usually raise an eyebrow when I see one. Is it really that unusual?

I'm having an issue with a journal right now and am wondering if anyone else has faced this issue before. My submission got accepted last week and I received the proof a few days ago. I was reviewing the proof and saw that all of my citations link to the wrong sources (thank god I noticed) and was unable to change it on the proofing website.

Well, I emailed the journal and asked how I could fix it or whether they would and they apologized and promised to send the updated one. So, today I received the new proof and once again THE CITATIONS ARE WRONG. I seriously don't understand how they messed it up when everything was cited correctly in the manuscript.

Has anyone else had this issue or similar issues with manuscript proofs?

Does anybody here journal . If yes i wanted insight and had many questions. I would love to talk about it.

I submitted a minor revision of a paper over 4 months ago, and since then its status in the tracking system hasn't changed at all: it looks like the handling editor hasn't touched it yet, or if he did, he didn't update the status in the system - in any case, I'm in the dark about what is happening. I tried contacting the editorial office several times, and later the managing editor of the journal, but I didn't receive any response. This is for a paper that's been submitted 18 months ago to a highly ranked humanities journal. Both reviews were very positive, with only small comments to address.

Would it be a breach of etiquette to politely contact the handling editor directly at this point, and ask about the status? My concern is that officially, all communication is supposed to go through the editorial office, and handling editor's contact was never explicitly mentioned - I'd have to cold email him through his institutional email (I only know his name from the "minor revision" decision sent by the editorial office). Should I perhaps be contacting the editor-in-chief instead?

Hi All, I recently submitted a poster paper for IEEE quantum week QCE 2026 and have got the mail saying “congratulations on acceptance of your paper”. However, the 3 reviewers have scored 0 (borderline), 1(weak acceptance) and 2(accept) respectively. They have provided some feedback and recommendations. Since this is my first paper ever, I am unsure how to feel about this. Can anyone please guide me on what this means and if I should be happy ?
Thank You

After a few years of working on this without a lab, a grant, or a supervisor, my first paper is out, open access, in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature Portfolio). I am posting partly because I am quietly happy about it, but mostly because I would like people who know this area to tell me where it is weak. I would rather find the holes now than pretend they are not there.

The short version: the paper introduces a model that tries to measure psychological "sustainability," meaning whether a person can keep going under their current load, as something separate from whether they are currently in a diagnosable state. It pairs a five-part "Equation of Enough" (effective stress, effective success, pacing, person-context fit, and the capacity to imagine a future) with a single continuum from actualization to collapse. Across two studies (N = 44, then N = 250 from several countries) the five conditions accounted for most of the variance in where people fell on that continuum, and, more interestingly to me, a standard measure of meaning in life did not track with it.

One things I already know are vulnerable, and where I would most value pushback:.

1. The meaning result rests on an underpowered null. The "meaning and sustainability diverge" finding comes from the N = 44 phase, which is too small to detect a moderate correlation. I am treating it as a hypothesis, not a finding. Am I being too generous to it, or not generous enough?

Beyond that, I would genuinely welcome any critique of the construct itself, the item design, the analytic choices, or the framing. And since I am also trying to write about this work for non-specialists, any reaction to how clearly (or not) the above lands is useful too.

I submitted a manuscript to a Springer/Nature journal on June 5. On June 8, the submission system status changed to “Editor Assignment Pending” and has stayed there until now, June 23. However, in my Nature Portfolio account, the same manuscript appears as “In Peer Review.”

I also noticed some confusing public/editorial information. Before submission, the journal page listed one Editor-in-Chief, so I addressed my cover letter to him. Shortly after submission, the listed Editor-in-Chief appeared to change to another person. However, other public search results suggested that the newer listed person have already been Editor-in-Chief for years. This made me wonder whether some journal pages, public search results, or manuscript-status systems may not be synchronized or updated in real time.

Has anyone experienced this kind of mismatch between a Springer/Nature submission system and the Nature Portfolio account? Is it a bad sign?