article!

I can't believe I haven't blogged about this yet. My first peer-reviewed journal article is published! Study 1 is my master's study, and Study 2 is combined from several follow-up studies that I did in grad school.

It has been a looooong road, almost 5 years from the first ideas for the study to publication...

• summer 2003 - came up with the basic idea. Because we use & understand symbols that don't always look like what they stand for, children's ability to understand other people's intentions ("I'm using THIS to stand for THAT") should predict their ability to understand symbols more broadly (interpreting drawings, knowing what map symbols mean, making maps to communicate to other people, etc). Turns out, this is indeed the case! Whoa - I'm not just making this stuff up, or pulling it out of thin air! LOL.
  
• November 2003 - proposed my masters to my committee
• spring-summer 2004 - collected masters (Study 1) data
• February 2005 - defended the masters
• March 2005 - presented the main results SRCD in Atlanta and blogged about it here
• May 2005 - I started turning the masters into a manuscript to submit for consideration for publication, but put it on the back burner for a while while I taught and did comps.
• Fall 2005 - I started collecting data for what became part of Study 2
• March 2006 - submitted the first draft (of just masters data)
  
• May 2006 - got the first reviews, which was a revise & resubmit. It basically says, we don't think this is publishable as-is, but it has potential. Revise and resubmit it and the editor and reviewers will re-evaluate. Lynn & I decided to revisit collecting additional data that I had begun in the fall, because we thought it would make it a stronger study and stand a better chance for acceptance.
  
• Fall 2006 - collected data from about 80 additional participants to fill out Study 2. I didn't even use about 15 of those because they were too young and didn't understand the task I was asking them to do.
  
• Feb 2007 - submitted radically revised paper including Study 2 to make it a stronger study.
• May 2007 - received second set of reviews. They liked the radical changes but had some lingering comments for changes.
  
• July 2007 - submitted third revision
• August 2007 - received acceptance and blogged about it here.
• March 2008 - got the proofs and Lynn & I both read them through in detail to catch any final, small changes before it went to press
• May 16, 2008 - published in the May/June edition. FINALLY!
  

My folder of drafts is 500 megabytes!! Not data, not jpgs, but word documents exchanged back and forth as Lynn and I were working on each draft of the paper. Whew. This paper took so long partly because it was a learning experience for me. If every paper took this long, that would be insane. I'm so proud of it! :-)