The Slings and Arrows of Research
Sometimes research is not for the faint of heart. Yesterday, I got a rejection letter on a piece I'd done with a former student. I sat on her doctoral committee (not her chair- just a member) , and this was one of her essays. It had already been rejected at a two top-tier journal, and a second-tier one. Now we send it to a lower-tier one. After all, better to have it published somewhere than nowhere. Then I got a phone call from a second coauthor (another student who's committee I'd been on, but at another school). I'd spent the last couple of weeks putting a data set together for a project we'd discussed. Unfortunately, the initial analysis turned up a dry well - there wasn't anything remotely interesting. So, since the approach seemed promising (although it didn't work out on this data set , we'll use it to examine another topic. We might as well use the approach that we developed, even if it didn't pan out for this data. If it turns up n...