My experience publishing a paper in BJET in the US as a first-year doctoral student

2020 is unique to everyone in different ways. For me it means being brave and doing things that challenge me.

I never thought of writing a paper for publication when I started my doctoral program last year. I didn't dream big until I met Ruixue in Dr. Wang's class. One day after class, she asked me to co-author a paper with her. I refused at once and asked her to talk with Yuri because he was a third-year doctoral student at that time and he had already completed his coursework. Ruixue was puzzled and asked me why. I said I felt I couldn't help because I had just started my doctoral program and I didn't have the requisite expertise. Moreover, I had never thought of writing a paper for publication. She said," You have to think about this, even though you just started. The earlier, the better. I can guide you. In China, I have published several papers." These words changed my mind, and I agreed to work with her while she was a visiting scholar here at Syracuse University.

I appreciate that she shared her research experience with me throughout this year and guided me to continue writing papers with her till the paper was published by BJET in September 2020.

Experiment and Early Writing Stage

She soon decided to work out a schedule with me. She went to my office once a week and she shared the experiments she had done before coming to the US. I was so surprised by her endeavor to do research. She said her advisor was busy and that she seldom sees him, but that she still knew what to do: review top journals frequently and follow the trends to select two or three topics she in which she is interested. Reading a broad summary enables her to get an overview of the topic and see if her own ideas are unique. This confirms what Tiffany said in her class IDE 990, that we have to review top journals and see if our research interests fit the trend. She also told me to pay attention to the key words in article abstracts, which are a great source for determining trends in research. These keywords may be also very useful to my later research. She identified gaps in the existing literature and then cooperated with an elementary school and did a quasi-experimental design. After some time I felt quite confident and we started to write together.

We talked with Dr. Qiu Wang to make sure the quantitative results were correctly described and then divided the tasks into two parts. She wrote the introduction and literature review, and I wrote the discussion and limitations sections, since I took a survey design course and had experience in writing these two parts.

Editing

After a month's work, I sent her the parts I wrote, and she sent me hers, and I made some changes. We used Google Docs to compile all parts into one. We were thinking about asking Dr. Lei to help us take a look. We sent the draft to her and scheduled a meeting. She gave us great comments. The main problems had to do with the literature review and future directions section. Some of the arguments conflicted with each other, and the future directions section was vague. We continued to read papers and kept revising.

Journal Submission

We didn't spend too much time choosing a journal. We found BJET planned to have a special session on virtual reality. We spent one week reviewing all the papers published related to virtual reality in BJET. Then we realized our paper was innovative and could probably get published in Special Sections. After we picked the journal that we thought was the best fit for the paper, We read the requirements for submitting our manuscript before we finalized our manuscripts. Although it was not perfect, we had to submit because the due date was approaching.

We then settled down for what we expected to be a very long wait for the review process to run its course. However, to our surprise, within one month, we received a very nice email from the journal editor.

“We have now heard from the reviewers who have been reviewing your manuscript ID BJET-0129-Feb-2020-OMS entitled "Effects of an Immersive Virtual Reality-based Classroom on Students’ Learning Performance in Science Lessons" which you submitted to the British Journal of Educational Technology. Their comments are included at the bottom of this letter.

The reviewers and editors have identified some significant revisions which need to be made to your manuscript. Please address the reviewer comments or provide a strong rationale for why this is not warranted.

We invite you to respond to their comments, revise your manuscript and resubmit it to us. It will then be reviewed again. The resubmission is due on 29-Apr-2020."

SO EFFICIENT!!! We suspected they might include our paper into the special section in August. I had a long list of suggestions from 3 reviewers.

We reviewed the questions together. Ruixue answered many of the questions and shared her experience with me. This was my first experience replying to editors. In China, we published papers without further edits. I felt like I was starting to learn how to conduct a rigorous study here in the US.

Journal Resubmission

We managed to submit our revised manuscript before the due dates. After another month, we received the feedback from the editor, saying that our manuscript was greatly improved. He also sent us some suggestions to improve the quality of our manuscript. On August 10, we finish received the editor's email that our paper would be published without further revisions.

Under the guidance of Ruixue, I also wrote a “Responses to Reviewers" piece. This is essentially a letter in which I addressed each comment and explained any changes I made to the paper (including line numbers!). I only made changes for approximately 1/3 of the comments.  When I didn’t make a suggested change, I wrote a thoughtful explanation as to why I felt it was not necessary.

Conclusion

Publishing a paper in a top journal requires many steps and aspects, writing up the paper, choosing the right journal, extending and doing additional work, dealing with reviewers--all of which can take up quite a bit of time. With help from professors and Ruixue, I endured this process and gained important experience. it is a great feeling to have made a contribution to science and the knowledge of the world! I believe that with much effort, I can publish more papers.