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Inkie

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Hi everyone. As a couple 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.

 
First, sorry to hear that something like Lyme is affecting you like this. Is it possible for you to continue your education at home so that you do not fall too far behind? Being a biologist and a graduate student myself I understand science is really something you can't do in an online course. Can you continue the cricket work from home? Perhaps if you get in touch with the faculty you worked with at your last institution they may be able to help you out and maybe even drop in to check on your work at home.

What kind of background/training do you have in experimental design, statistics, etc? The reason I ask is because helping someone with an experiment is much different than designing and conducting your own experiment. This is assuming that those you helped didn't include you in the experimental design or didn't share much information with you on the background. I ran into that issue as an undergrad, I helped with a large scale ecology experiment but wasn't told anything other than what I needed to know.

1. To the best of my knowledge journals do not require you to collaborate with a professor. I think anybody can write and publish if the science has been done correctly and will add to the base of knowledge. I know people who have no degree or only a bachelors but still publish in scientific journals.

2. You do not have to have multiple authors. Multiple authors is what you see most often these days but it wasn't always the case. It probably wouldn't hurt to have a name on there that has been published before.

3. I assume you're familiar with the scientific method. You know that the process of science starts with an observation followed by a question. Instead of asking what questions others have why not use one of your own? I suppose it doesn't really matter much but I bet you already have a question you would like to try and answer. Having needed equipment on hand is great but I think what is more important is have a question and the hypotheses to go along with it.

4. I am not sure about which journals you may want to try but I do know there are some obscure ones out there. Phyllomedusa comes to mind as I had a friend publish a class paper there. All journals have their own publishing guidelines. Go to the journal website and look for their instructions to authors section. I think the most important thing now is to identify a question and design an experiment. Worry about publishing later. I'd love to help but I'm in the middle of analyzing data from my own experiment which is not coming along as quickly as I'd like. I really think asking one of those professors you worked with in the past to help you would be beneficial.

If you feel there is anything I can help you with feel free to PM me. If I am helpful and you want to continue corresponding I'll give you my email to use instead. I definitely think what you are proposing can certainly be done.

 
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Submit your article to Invertebrates-Magazine. Journal submissions usually require you to pay a certain amount per word to publish and tend to require the backing of a university or related institution. Invertebrates-Magazine edits your article by two or more people for free, publishes it for free, and even gives you some copies.

 

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