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Very Important Questions! Please Read!


Inkie14

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Hi everyone. As some of you know, I have been battling late-stage Lyme disease for years and the last few months I've had to come home from college, and spend all of my time being very sick, stuck in my house. When I was at school, I had an exciting senior project in the works (it involved infecting Jerusalem crickets with a new species of parasitic hairworms recently discovered in the county). I was doing lab work for grad students, organizing the California Polytechnic State University insect collection, and doing a few side jobs for professors. Now that I'm home and can't do those things, I need to find something useful and productive to do to get me closer to my goal of becoming an entomologist/taxonomist and give me some more experience, without requiring me to leave the house because some days now I need a wheelchair to get around and barely have enough energy to get out of bed. I'm thinking that the perfect thing to do would be to perform some sort of experiment, type up the results in a scientific paper, and maybe get it published in some obscure journal somewhere. I have pretty extensive experience with experiments- I've written more scientific papers than I can count for classes (I'm a fourth year Animal Science major with a Biological Sciences minor) and I've helped a few grad students and professors with their experiments.

So I have some questions for anyone who would like to offer some tips or advice:

1>>Do journals require that you work under a professor if you are only an undergrad student?

2>>Do you have to have multiple authors or work with a group of people if you want to be published? Or, does it at least increase your chances of being accepted?

3>>Do you have any ideas at all of questions that my experiment could examine, or species I could work on? What's a question about cockroaches or spiders that you've always wondered but never found the answer to? At home I have a dissecting microscope, a dissection kit, a jewelry scale, lots of insect pins, hundreds of small deli cups with caps, a few 30 gallon rubber bins... I have a decent amount of supplies, but I also have access to my high school AP Biology classroom which has a limited amount of equipment, and I miiiiiiiiight be able to get access to someone's lab at UC Davis if I ask. I have plenty of various species of roaches, and a small colony of Phidippus audax so I was thinking about experimenting with one of those, or I could always buy a different species online.

4>>Does anyone know of any journals I may be able to publish a paper like this to? Obviously I'm not going to send my paper to Nature or Science or the Oxford Journals (lol), but I might be able to find a journal somewhere that will publish me.

5>>Anyone want to work a little with me on this? If you can help me come up with some good ideas and we can get a helpful dialogue going, perhaps we could both do the same experiment and compare results, perhaps combine them? Or, if you just want to help a little, I could just mention your name in my paper.

ANY other tips and advice is greatly appreciated. Questions, constructive criticism- throw it at me. This is still in the planning stage so I could use any and all help.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, have a great day everyone.

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Animal scientist is what I wanna major for!

I dont know for sure but I dont think you need multiple people to publish a book or anything of the sort. Although it may increase the chances of it being published

I wouldnt mind helping you out on any of this and I am sure my bio teacher could help out a bit also!

I will try to see if I can get some Journal/magazines/books/anything that can publish stuff lol :) I have my connections ;)

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I'm definitely not looking to publish a book, just a paper.

I've been looking into different journals, and searching by impact factor. I'm trying to find one that aligns with my interests but has a very low impact factor. The Journal of Crustacean Biology only has a impact factor of 1.116... I've gotta start small I guess lol

I appreciate your help R-dawg! :)

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1>>Do journals require that you work under a professor if you are only an undergrad student?

---No. Anyone can submit a research study but be aware that some journals have publication costs.

2>>Do you have to have multiple authors or work with a group of people if you want to be published?

---No.

Or, does it at least increase your chances of being accepted?

---No, but it does help with the work load. Also including people with different skill sets (and resources and equipment) increases your ability to answer a larger number of more complex research questions.

---I am sorry to hear about your Lyme disease. Did you contract this out in the field while doing research?

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Someone just gave me a link to this article, it refers specifically to paleontologists but it is relevant to all aspiring scientists... I think this explains everything I need to know Lol

http://svpow.com/2010/11/12/tutorial-10-how-to-become-a-palaeontologist/

Thanks for the tips MrCrackerpants! Yeah, unfortunately I probably got it while out in the field collecting arthropods at school. It's been a rough battle, but it's inspired me to want to do my senior project about the prevalence of Lyme in San Luis Obispo County (where my school is located). Hopefully if I can raise awareness about it, I can save some lives. It's waaaay more common and dangerous than most people think.

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Keith: You don't get mono from ticks. I'm guessing that your cousin either got mono somewhere else and the tick bite was just a coincidence, or he/she actually had a tick-borne disease that mimics mono. There are hundreds of different diseases you can get from ticks, I've got three of them including Lyme. When I first got sick, I was misdiagnosed with mono because my first symptoms mimicked mono. Ampicillin and amoxicillin are sometimes used to help treat mono, and it just so happens that these antibiotics are used to treat a small number of tick-borne infections.

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Someone just gave me a link to this article, it refers specifically to paleontologists but it is relevant to all aspiring scientists... I think this explains everything I need to know Lol

http://svpow.com/2010/11/12/tutorial-10-how-to-become-a-palaeontologist/

Thanks for the tips MrCrackerpants! Yeah, unfortunately I probably got it while out in the field collecting arthropods at school. It's been a rough battle, but it's inspired me to want to do my senior project about the prevalence of Lyme in San Luis Obispo County (where my school is located). Hopefully if I can raise awareness about it, I can save some lives. It's waaaay more common and dangerous than most people think.

Glad to hear your senior project can help some people. :)

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If you're just looking to be published you could write an article for Invertebrates-Magazine. You would get some free copies and you wouldn't have to pay (most journals charge you hundreds of dollars to publish even a short paper though the cost is usually shouldered by the university the author works for).

Also, I could use some cockroach articles for the ACS publication 2 if you had multiple articles or substantial details for one paper. ACS Pub II likewise does not charge authors to publish.

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Thanks for the ideas Allpet! I would love any way that I could employ my knowledge of insects (specifically cockroaches) and writing skills during time that I'm not doing much else anyway.

I could definitely write an article or two for the ACS publication. When would you need them by, what sort of topics would you like to see, and where could I find a copy of the previous one so I can get a sense of the layout? You can private message me details if you'd like.

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Where does one submit articles? Could I present some ideas/titles to you and write the articles if you like the ideas?

Also, would this be considered a "for sale publication"? I ask because I spoke to someone who takes beautiful photographs of rare exotic roaches, and he said he'd expect payment if it was used in a for sale publication.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Where does one submit articles? Could I present some ideas/titles to you and write the articles if you like the ideas?

Sorry, I missed this post. You're welcome to PM me but the standard submission guidelines are on the website. http://www.angelfire.../invertmag.html

Also, would this be considered a "for sale publication"? I ask because I spoke to someone who takes beautiful photographs of rare exotic roaches, and he said he'd expect payment if it was used in a for sale publication.

The magazine is for the love of invertebrates and has lost money every issue it has been published because of the lack of paid advertisers. Editors are unpaid. Printing, postage, and renewal notices takes up the membership cost. Still I-M offers authors payment is in the form of physical copies of the magazine and copyright holders are credited on their work. American Cockroach Society Publication is a one time publication (hopefully per publication and not in total) with no memberships, no subscription.

You are aware journals charge you to publish an article so you would have to pay your friend for the photo and then pay the journal to publish it? Journals are for sale publications even those that offer online free previews. Institutions pay memberships to view them and nonmembers are often asked to pay twenty to forty dollars to view an article online which does not cost a cent to print or ship. Of course many of the journals are valuable resources and they require the funding for their upkeep.

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