I finally got my first paper published! It only took half a decade.
It was originally a PhD student's project when I was a master's student back in 2021, but when they left the program, I took it over completely. I ended up deciding on, or at least arguing for, all the details of the experimental design, and eventually led a team of undergrads to help schedule and run 42 participants through five hours of tasks.
As part of the experiment, we also collected EEG data, and after data collection was finished, while I did the behavioral analysis and started writing the first draft of the manuscript, someone else in the lab was going to analyze the EEG data. As happens all the time in research, we didn't find what we were hoping to find. I was discouraged and didn't know how to write the paper, but with the help of my PI, I wrote a very rough draft while waiting for the EEG results. Before we got the results, I graduated and ended up leaving for a new job, hoping I'd hear something within six months.
Two years of essentially complete silence went by, and I'd moved to a new country and started a PhD. I eventually just assumed that the EEG results were also not what we were hoping for, so the paper would just never happen.
Then I finally got an email from the PI asking me to approve the paper before submission. Unfortunately, once I started reading, I recalled exactly how unpolished I had left the original draft that the EEG results had been added to. I did my best to double-check my behavioral results, polish up the methods language, and review the newly added EEG portions. We submitted it, waited months for reviewer comments, replied to those, and it again took a lot longer than expected. Then, 10 months after that first email, here we are. It crossed the finish line, and I'm an author!
This felt like an exciting but dreadful snail relay marathon. Thankfully, once the paper was ready to submit, the PI made sure the baton was never dropped again, kept the authors in the know every step of the way, and let us take however big of a role we wanted in responding to the reviewer comments. There were, of course, some comments that took creative diplomacy, but there was one reviewer who really provided insight into how to frame parts of the experiment. It wasn't easy working on a paper in addition to my usual work, but man, was it exciting.
I did it! I'm an author! I finally have something tangible to show for my two years of work. There are aspects of this whole situation that are actually really discouraging: it took much longer than I expected, there are things in the experiment I would've done differently in hindsight, and the end result doesn't feel as groundbreaking to the field as my naïve self starting the project hoped it would be. But at the same time, it's sorta fun how crazy this career is. It felt like it took forever, but having a published paper 5 years after starting a project isn't actually even a bad timeline (not optimal, but not outside the norm). And I'm someone who really cares about finding joy in the work more than the product, so this just reminds me how useful my patience is in this field.
I want a career in research, I want to make progress, I want to share that progress, and I want to make a difference, but I also am happy to just concentrate on today. What can I do today? Yes, this means I put off things I probably shouldn't, and I don't appreciate deadlines until the consequences are imminent, but that too isn't an uncommon trait in this field. I constantly feel like I'm surrounded by super-people, high achievers who are incapable of not succeeding in anything they do, people who learn languages and do impressive sports, and I of course don't belong here, but also, hey, I AM here. I AM a scientist. I AM a published scientist. I HAVE contributed to the field. I CAN do the work. I think I'll never stop feeling like I don't belong here, but I also think I'll never stop feeling like that's why I need to work hard to stay here.
Also, I acknowledge how silly this sounds coming from a white American man. Why wouldn't I feel like I belong? I'm surrounded by people that look like me, I'm the archetypal scientist, but also, I'm not. I really really don't belong here. Again, I'm not the high achiever, language learner, person who's destined to succeed; I'm just a lazy guy interested in science. I care more about enjoying the life I have than improving my life for enjoyment in the future. Maybe it's the ADHD, maybe it's that I grew up poor, maybe it's the burden of people assuming I'm far more competent than I am. I'm not a great scientist, I'm not a great worker, but I've gotten better and better at convincing myself I'm A scientist at the very least, that I'm potentially even a good scientist, and that sometimes I can be the guy who solves the problem.
That's the slow pace of science. The two years of work, two years of silence, and one year of the snail-paced publishing process. That system that I'd like to improve is also the system that reminds me that it's a marathon and not a race. And I can't run a marathon; I barely ran a 5K when I cared about those things, but I can walk it. I can just enjoy the view and stay on course. It's a rough road, there are smoother roads, but this is the road I'm taking, this is the path I'm choosing, and I'm happy sticking with it, I think because I'm happy in general.
Filbey FM, Short CT, Leazure A, Nekoui NE, Brown T, Kroener S, Liu C (2026). A non-randomized trial of the effects of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation on cognitive performance and resting state connectivity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20:1801066. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2026.1801066
In short: we tested whether stimulating the vagus nerve through the ear (taVNS) could improve executive function in healthy adults. Participants received either active or sham stimulation while doing an hour of adaptive brain training (BrainHQ), followed by EEG and a set of standard executive function tasks. The active group did better on the adaptive training and showed lower delta-band connectivity over the left hemisphere, but the standard tasks showed no difference, and the effects didn't survive correction for multiple comparisons. So it's an exploratory result, and one worth replicating.