Peer-Review Perils
I thought peer-reviewed journals were the highest form of credibility, and then I got published in one.
After years of pursuing a career in music production and mixing and mastering that would end up going nowhere, I fell under a deep depressive spell. Thinking that I had been wasting my life working at a job I didn’t enjoy and understanding that I wasn’t going to be able to make an actual living from music I turned to learning. It seemed like the only thing that made me feel better. At first I learned on my own, watching videos and reading books about different scientific topics that interested me. But then I realized that if I wanted to actually learn about science, the in-depth stuff, I would need to attend college.
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I enrolled at a local community college for my Associate’s degree with my mind set on physics. I figured that if I wanted to learn science, what better way to do it than to study the “base science” that all other scientific disciplines could be boiled down to. Take doctors for example: What is medicine but applied chemistry? And what is chemistry but the study of the physical interactions between atoms and molecules? Therefore, all doctors were just scientists studying the physical interactions of atoms. To me, all scientists were physicists, even if they didn’t know it.
With my mind set on a STEM-based education, I started taking the necessary courses to complete my degree. Two of the courses I took were WR121: Academic Composition and WR227: Technical Writing. Academic Composition was a required course, but I figured that Technical Writing would be useful for my future scientific endeavors, and indeed it was.
For the entirety of my Technical Writing class we worked on one paper. This paper would go through several revisions as we learned about how to do better research and how to format our writing in a professional manner. The professor told us to ask a question and then answer it using the information we found in the plethora of sources available to us for free as students.
The question I chose was “is eating gluten-free recommended?” This was based on my job at a care facility where I had to deal with gluten-free dietary restrictions as well as past experience working at restaurants and seeing plenty of people ask for gluten-free options. I knew about celiac disease, but I also knew that gluten-free had become a sort of fad diet, with a lot of people choosing to eat gluten-free not for autoimmune reasons, but for other reasons like weight loss or athletic gain.
With my question selected, I started reading every study I could find that had to do with gluten-free diets and came to the conclusion that no, it’s not recommended to follow a gluten-free diet without medical necessity. I wrote all of my evidence in a review essay and submitted it for the first round of review by my classmates and teacher. There were very few comments, mainly small grammatical issues that I had missed. As far as the content went, they found no issues. Although we had to go through a few more rounds of refining and review, my paper remained almost entirely the same as the first draft, with my classmates reading it over each time and saying “yeah, this looks fine.” Even my teacher had nothing to complain about. At the end of the class I submitted the final version and got an A on the assignment.
Fast forward about a year and I had met my current significant other who just so happens to suffer from celiac disease. I showed her the paper and when she declared that it was a solid piece she wished she had access to earlier, I decided to send it to a peer-reviewed journal. The International Journal of Celiac Disease was my target. This was something that I wanted to do just to see what the process was like. I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was going to be rejected after getting picked to pieces by medical professionals but thought it would be a good learning experience nonetheless. To my surprise, that’s not what happened.
The first response I got back said that the paper was “interesting,” but the editors wanted me to remove the in-text citations. Fair enough, there was a reference section anyway. I removed the in-text citations and when I sent it back I got another response. This time they told me that my paper had passed the editorial review and was being sent out for peer-review.
A few months went by and I hadn’t heard anything from the journal. I thought that the reviewers must have just laughed at my submission and the journal didn’t even feel the need to send a rejection email. One night, I was surprised when I received an email notifying me that I had been tagged as an author in a publication. I opened the link and, sure enough, my paper had been published in issue 4, volume 8 of the International Journal of Celiac Disease. Apparently, the peer-reviewers also found no issues with my manuscript and agreed it was worth publishing.
At first I was ecstatic and told my friends and family that I had made it into a scientific journal. Apart from my grandfather’s obituary in the local paper, it was my first published piece of writing. I had now contributed something to science and my name would show results when searched on Google Scholar. Then I started thinking about what had actually happened.
I wasn’t a medical professional, Hell I wasn’t even studying medical-anything in college. I didn’t have a degree and I hadn’t conducted any studies, yet I was able to get my name in a peer-reviewed journal next to the very same sources that I had considered to be the height of credibility. I thought that anyone that had been published in a scientific journal could be considered an authority on the topic they wrote about, but I didn’t feel like an authority at all. I was simply an undergrad student that had turned in a class assignment. I went down a mental rabbit hole.
“If I could get a paper published without any sort of authority, are others doing this as well?”
“How many of these scientists I considered an authority were also just turning in assignments from their writing class?”
“Would people throw out my ideas because of the community college affiliation and lack of supporting degrees, or was my paper being taken as seriously as Dr. Jane Doe with ten years of medical practice?”
“If my paper was being taken as seriously as the others, did it deserve to?”
Surely, my lack of credentials meant that my paper was below that of doctors and researchers. But, there it was sitting alongside manuscripts with long scientific sounding names like “Isolation and Laboratory Diagnosis of Antibiotic-resistant E. coli from Surgical Wounds of Inpatients at Zagazig University Hospitals, Egypt” and “Long-Standing Ulcerative Colitis and Sulphasalazine Treatment Complicated by Adult Celiac Disease.” Among the list of authors in the issue were tenured professors, rheumatologists, medical doctors, gastroenterologists, PHD lecturers, and one community college student who hasn’t even studied medicine.
Despite my lack of credentials I was able to pass the peer-review process, and with no feedback issued by reviewers mind you. My writing teacher couldn’t ask for a better example of how to do the assignment as I’m assuming most of her students don’t send their homework off to journals, and probably even less get accepted. In terms of a writing assignment, it can stand as a tried and true example of how to write a technical piece worth publishing.
To this day, I still haven’t come up with a clear-cut answer to whether or not I feel like I deserve my spot in the journal. Was it a fluke, or am I letting imposter syndrome get the best of me? The only way to find out is to keep learning, and to keep writing.
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