I've submitted something for peer review for the first time. While I wait, the inbox gets more attention than it deserves. I can think of several replies I'd be glad to receive, and a few I'm trying to be ready for.
I don't have an academic credential. I do have questions I keep returning to, and enough interest in them to spend time reading work that's difficult to understand. The investigations on this site are where I follow sources and explain what I think the evidence supports. Publishing them has given me practice showing how I reached an answer, including where I'm still unsure.
Submitting work for review adds people who may know exactly where my reasoning is weak. An editor might decide it doesn't belong in the journal before it reaches a reviewer. If it does go further, I hope the response will help me see what needs more work. I won't enjoy every part of that, but I'd rather know about a problem than keep building on it.
Reviewers can disagree, miss something, or make a mistake themselves. I'd still value a careful reading from someone who understands the subject and has no particular reason to be pleased with me. Their criticism would need an answer supported by the work. Being enthusiastic about the question won't do much for a calculation that doesn't hold.
The research I'd like to do over a lifetime together could start much closer to home. We'd have the land, the water, and years to watch what happens there. We could choose something specific enough to measure properly, then find out what people who study it would need from the observations before we began collecting them.
In the first year we'd write down the method, mark the places we were measuring, and learn where it was awkward to carry out. We'd need records clear enough that someone else could repeat the work. If the method changed, that would go in the notes too, along with missed readings and anything else that might affect how the results should be understood.
By the eleventh year, I imagine some of those mornings would feel thoroughly familiar. We'd still need to take care with them. An uneventful season would belong in the record as much as an interesting one, and being tired of the routine wouldn't make a guessed number useful.
I'd want the methods and data available for other people to use. Someone with a different question might find a use for observations we'd barely remarked on. If years of careful work on our patch of ground helped another person answer something, I'd be pleased to have contributed, even if their name was on the paper.
She wouldn't need a scientific background to enjoy this with me. Curiosity would give us somewhere to start. We could turn a rock over, wonder about what was underneath, and still be talking about it on the way home. If she did have the relevant training, I'd be happy to learn from her and take on the parts where I could be useful.
I'd particularly value the moment when I was halfway through explaining a result and she asked whether there was a simpler reason for it. That might save us months. Or it might leave us with a better question and an evening spent finding out how to test it. I'd like room in our life for that sort of detour.
For now, I'm waiting for a reply to the submission. A rejection would probably hurt, even with all this preparation on the page. I could let it hurt, read the comments again when I'd settled down, and decide what to do with them. Where the criticism was right, I'd revise. Where I disagreed, I'd need to explain why carefully enough for someone else to check.
Then I'd work out where to send it next. There will be more to learn from doing that than from checking the inbox again this afternoon.
