My manuscript

[callmejoe3]

Hello everyone, I'm making a thread to discuss a very big project I've been working on for a while. I've already discussed it with @bmathison1972 , but now I'm letting everyone know.

Megafauna, especially marine species, have always fascinated me and many others. A lot of sources, even scientific literature, are known to contain misinformation regarding maximum and typical sizes for these species. My favorite things to read are literature reviews of intraspecific size variation for marine megafauna that aim to resolve this issue (De Maddalena et al., 2003; McClain et al., 2015; Paxton, 2016; Roberts, 2012; Romanov et al., 2018; Wood, 1982).

For the past 2-ish years, I've been working on one dedicated to the sperm whale. I've done a very intense search of the literature along with an analysis of the IWC catch database (akin to McClain et al., 2015), to provide a better look at this species, a long with a definitive resolution on the maximum size achieved by both sexes. I've combed through countless sources from grey literature available online, purchases of antiquarian books, inquiries into museum specimens, and personal communications with various authorities abroad.

I've submitted my manuscript a few months back and recently submitted my second round of revisions. I won't go into details about that process beyond just that I think it's going well. Though feel to ask me some questions if you're okay with vague answers.


For those who are excited for what I've announced, I've made a blog post a while back that's a supplemental primer for my article.


https://callmejoe3.wordpress.com/2023/06/02/a-review-of-the-growth-and-sexual-dimorphism-of-the-sperm-whale-physeter-macrocephalus/



De Maddalena, A., Glaizot, O., & Oliver, G. (2003). On the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias (Linnaeus, 1758), preserved in the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne. Marine Life, 13, 53–59.


McClain, C. R., Balk, M. A., Benfield, M. C., Branch, T. A., Chen, C., Cosgrove, J., Dove, A. D. M., Gaskins, L., Helm, R. R., Hochberg, F. G., Lee, F. B., Marshall, A., McMurray, S. E., Schanche, C., Stone, S. N., & Thaler, A. D. (2015). Sizing ocean giants: Patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna. PeerJ, 3, e715. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.715

Paxton, C. G. M. (2016). Unleashing the Kraken: On the maximum length in giant squid (Architeuthis sp.). Journal of Zoology, 300(2), 82–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.12347

Roberts, T. R. (2012). Morphology. In Systematics, Biology, and Distribution of the Species of the Oceanic Oarfish Genus Regalecus: (Teleostei, Lampridiformes, Regalecidae) (pp. 105–124). Publications Scientifiques du Muséum.

Romanov, E. V., Jaquemet, S., & Puetz, L. (2018). A giant squid (Architeuthis dux) off Reunion Island, western Indian Ocean: The greatest giant ever? Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, 98(, 2087–2093. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025315417001588


Wood, G. L. (1982). The Guinness book of animal facts and feats. Enfield, Middlesex : Guinness Superlatives.

[bmathison1972]

Congrats! Glad to see it is moving along nicely! Since we have several members who are published, I have often thought about starting a thread for our scientific publications (whether it be magazines, peer-reviewed scientific journals, books, etc.).

[Gwangi]

Congrats and welcome back! I thought maybe you were gone for good but I can see you were just busy instead.

[AnimalToyForum]

Great work. Where are you considering to submit your article? A peer-reviewed journal perhaps? 

[callmejoe3]

Great work. Where are you considering to submit your article? A peer-reviewed journal perhaps? 

The article's already in review with the journal right now. So far that's been going well.

[AnimalToyForum]

Great work. Where are you considering to submit your article? A peer-reviewed journal perhaps? 

The article's already in review with the journal right now. So far that's been going well.

Fantastic! Good luck. Watch out for reviewer 2.

[callmejoe3]

Fantastic! Good luck. Watch out for reviewer 2.

Without disclosing too much, you clearly seem to know what's happening XD.

[AnimalToyForum]

Fantastic! Good luck. Watch out for reviewer 2.

Without disclosing too much, you clearly seem to know what's happening XD.

There's always a reviewer 2.

[bmathison1972]

Fantastic! Good luck. Watch out for reviewer 2.

Without disclosing too much, you clearly seem to know what's happening XD.

There's always a reviewer 2.

With the MS I just got back, it's Reviewer 1 LOL. Reviewers 2 and 3 were easier on us LOL.

[AnimalToyForum]

Fantastic! Good luck. Watch out for reviewer 2.

Without disclosing too much, you clearly seem to know what's happening XD.

There's always a reviewer 2.

With the MS I just got back, it's Reviewer 1 LOL. Reviewers 2 and 3 were easier on us LOL.

In this case, reviewer 1 was your reviewer 2!

[bmathison1972]

It can sometimes be disheartening to get responses back, especially overly critical ones, but in the end I always feel my manuscripts are a lot better because of the feedback!

[callmejoe3]

It can sometimes be disheartening to get responses back, especially overly critical ones, but in the end I always feel my manuscripts are a lot better because of the feedback!

Yeah, especially because I'm very new to this, I try to take it on the chin. I would say about 50% of my reviewer 2's comments were justified and fair. The other half were another story, though I felt made good practice for defending certain aspects of my paper (in a polite manner of course).
The paper just passed the staff checks yesterday, so I should be getting my response within the next 30-ish days.

[bmathison1972]

I just got initial reviews back on a paper today that I thought was going to get a lot more scrutiny than it did. Especially since we are basically debunking a falsehood that has been perpetuated in the medical literature for decades! One reviewer wanted us to do Meta-analysis of all the published reports, but luckily the journal already said that was beyond the scope of the work. Whewwww...lol

[callmejoe3]

I just got initial reviews back on a paper today that I thought was going to get a lot more scrutiny than it did. Especially since we are basically debunking a falsehood that has been perpetuated in the medical literature for decades! One reviewer wanted us to do Meta-analysis of all the published reports, but luckily the journal already said that was beyond the scope of the work. Whewwww...lol

Some of my problems were the opposite, where I was asked to either provide specific references or statistical tests for statements that were canonical knowledge. However there were already text and tables (with references) that made the aforementioned statements self-evident.