Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
spelling of each author's name. Send a copy to your coauthors if applicable and ask them
to read over the proof as well. Check over the proof as soon as possible and send it back to
the copy editor before the given deadline. Within a few weeks, your article will appear
online on the journal's website in Early View format and will be fully citable. Soon there-
after, your article will be in print format in the journal. Don't forget to add it to your
curriculum vitae, and congratulations, you have successfully published your first article!
On to the next one!
CASE
STUDY: THE FIRST RIB AND THE PHOTOGRA
PHS
A few years ago, several colleagues and I published an article on a newmethod to estimate
age-at-death using the first rib (
DiGangi et al., 2009
). There were eleven variables on three
different morphological aspects of the first rib that we examined and tested to determine
which were best correlated with real age. Statistical analysis later discriminated this list to
two variables.
We began data collection about three years before manuscript preparation, and while we
took photographs at the time, we realized three years later that some of those photographs
were not of sufficient quality for publication. It is common for the data collection stage to
precede the publication stage by a large amount of time. We learned from our mistake that
it is always best to take as many high-quality photographs as possible of each variable you
are studying, as you never know what images you will need later for publication. Given
that several of our images were low quality or did not illustrate exactly what we needed,
we had to do two things: (1) find examples of the variables in a different skeletal collection,
as our original study collection was no longer available (this involved going through several
hundred boxes), and (2) hire a photographer with a camera that had high-quality zoom to
take the necessary photographs. These logistical solutions added a great deal of time (and
money) to manuscript preparation.
The final method had two variables (the surface texture of the tubercle facet and
geometric shape of the costal face), and therefore we needed to include photos of each
different possible scoring phase for each variable (there were nine total possible phases).
This meant including 18 photographs in the manuscript, as we included two examples of
each scoring phase. Since the print version of the article was to have grayscale images
and the online version color images, 18 photographs doubled to 36. This by itself was
daunting; however, the reviewer comments asked us to include a supplementary file for
online publication on the nine variables and their scoring states that we had studied but
had not been discriminated statistically as best correlated with real age. This involved add-
ing several dozen more photographs!
As each variable involved different aspects of one of three morphological areas of the first
rib (costal face, tubercle facet, or rib head), there were several photographs that illustrated
more than one variable (for example, we used the same photo twice to separately show
the geometric shape of the tubercle facet and articular margins of the tubercle facet). Having
some duplicate photos and some single photos meant that we had to be meticulously orga-
nized and very careful with the real age and sex information for the figure legends. The
second author and I spent many hours over the phone together checking and rechecking
