With one paper under my belt, I think I can now consider myself an expert in publishing your undergraduate thesis. While many of my peers who spent a lot of time on research in undergrad did work worthy of publication, I didn’t see a lot of them publishing their work. Why would they? It’s SENIOR YEAR, and that means things like desperately trying to finish your course requirements, upping your GPA, maybe applying to jobs or continuing education (and/or the NSF GRFP), finishing your senior thesis, and trying to enjoy your last year as a pseudo-adult. That’s a lot! However, I think that if you are planning to pursue a career in research or higher education you are doing yourself a huge disservice by letting your research sit there unpublished. The disservice is two-fold: (1) you aren’t getting the full research experience if you don’t do the writing and (2) is your work meaningful if you didn’t communicate it? While of course the answer to (2) is a resounding YES!, when you don’t publish your work you are withholding important information from the scientific community, even if it doesn’t feel that way. A big part of undergraduate research is to get experience doing real-world work, and if you don’t attempt publication, you are missing out on a critical learning experience (as well as a nice line on your CV).
I also think a big part of the barrier to publishing as an undergrad is emotional. Only ~real scientists~ have publications, and who would want to listen to a silly undergrad who did a summer REU and thinks they know what’s what? Well, doing research does make you a ~real scientist~, and a lot of people don’t care who you are but only want to know what you did, and how it can help inform their own research. These people need your paper! It is a valid feeling, but don’t ever let yourself get in the way of your own success. Publishing is difficult, but that isn’t news. Honestly, publishing my undergraduate thesis took about as long as the research itself did. It wasn’t accepted for publication until I was already in graduate school. We were rejected with no review by two journals. We were victimized by the classic “Reviewer 2” who insisted on insulting our intelligence with every comment. We had to redo many of the analyses. I had to create a graphical abstract (the horror). It took over a year from first submission to acceptance. At the end of the day, it was one of the most important learning processes of my entire undergraduate career, and now I can be proud that my work is permanent, public, and hopefully adding to the scientific conversation for the betterment of our world. Here is some advice if you have publishable undergraduate research and you want to get it out there: Pre-submission
The revision process
Post-publication
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