“SemiparTM” now published in the Annals of Data Science

Nearly four years ago now, I wrote on this blog about the completion of my master’s thesis, which we put up on the arXiv in a compact, paper form soon after its approval by my thesis committee. Yesterday, we just received news from the Annals of Data Science that the final, approved version of the paper is now available open-access on the journal’s website. Many thanks to the granting committee that supported my co-author and adviser (Dr. Erniel Barrios, now professor at Monash University’s Malaysia campus).

At this point I have already gone at length about the content of the paper (you can read my first blog post for a more pedestrian-friendly precis, and the paper itself for the technical details). The paper represents my first real step into the world of academics. I find no shame in admitting that seeing the paper live on the journal’s website gives me a sense of validation that I actually have not been running around in circles the past eight years (since starting my master’s). Kudos can be hard to come by, but this is about as good as it can get for a beginning academic like myself.

I thought the road to publishing literary works was grueling. It turned out academic publishing is a different beast entirely. The intervening four years between when our preprint came out and two weeks ago when we received news of the paper’s acceptance in the Annals consisted of three other failed submissions, each taking the better chunk of a year. In that time, I had since applied for and gotten accepted into a doctorate program, and am now once again in the interim stages of waiting for three other papers (two as main author, and another as coauthor) to get a decision or receive peer review in other journals.

The process can be very cruel, especially when funding, career, or degree are in the balance. For instance, the doctorate program I am in requires having at least one paper accepted in a journal. In fact, it sometimes feels like it’s the only requirement. Within these three years, I can guarantee publishing at least one literary work in a magazine or journal – maybe even one a year – but a research paper not only takes so much in terms of labor and thought, the peer review process has a tendency to slog and at times completely halt. The months of waiting that we did for “SemiparTM” that only ended in rejection were easier for me to handle: I’d taken rejections before with my stories and essays, and back then there was nothing at stake. This time, every rejection poses a roadblock on the path to my degree. Every month that passes without a word from reviewers feels like a stopper on my productivity for the semester.

It’s not a perfect system, and one must always recognize the burden that reviewers and editors have to carry along with their other academic tasks. For this reason, it can be infuriating (if not a little discouraging) to at times read news about people abusing the system, or those that treat it as little more than a joke. I’m way too early into the game to make pretenses of proposing alternatives, but one hopes we can all someday progress into a healthier alternative that is lighter towards its academics while remaining heavy on rigor and quality. For the rest of us, the best we can do at the moment is to keep on pursuing the science. There are yet more papers to write.

The paper is available here: [link].