Travel notes: August 11, 2023. Why I don't share details of my daily research and writing process, but wish I could.

Checking in from Northern California. I’m visiting family in the Bay Area for a good chunk of August (I packed in a bunch of ER shifts early in the month, and will get in a few more near the end of the month). I wouldn’t call this a vacation, because I’m working fairly intensely on research and writing most days, but it’s certainly a nice change of pace.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: I don't share details of my daily research with you nearly as much as I wish I could. It’s not because I don’t want to—but because I worry that if I do, the work might eventually suffer.

If I did so, but I were too vague, it would carry no interest. If I were too specific, I might forfeit the opportunity for that work to succeed by being published in major medical journals later.

Let me tell you a few things I did this week. I’ll be vague enough, but hopefully not so much that it’s boring.

This week, I drafted two unexpected essays, both of which in fact started as pieces intended for you, the Inside Medicine readers. But I quickly realized that I needed to float them at some bigger venues first. So I sent them off to [insert name-brand publications here].

If the essays don’t land in those mystery publications, I’ll share them here anyway. One is a thought piece about how the pandemic started. (No—I do not weigh in on any “controversial theories” about laboratory leaks versus the Wuhan market origin, albeit I don’t mind mentioning that the best evidence we have favors the latter); it’s more about the chain of events that can lead to pandemics and how they are paradoxically highly unlikely and likely. The other essay delves into some of the public health implications of the horrific wildfires on Maui. Obviously I can’t share them just yet. But that’s how I spent many of my hours this week.

In addition to that, I’ve been finalizing two research manuscripts, both related to Covid-19 outcomes. One of them was just accepted at a very respected medical journal while the other is coming together nicely and will be submitted to [insert name-brand medical journal here].

See? Too vague. Even for me.

Sometimes, I imagine what it would be like if I just told you exactly what I was doing. For example, when I was working on a research manuscript studying Paxlovid and younger adults a few months back (now published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the top journal of the Infectious Diseases Society of America), I so desperately wanted to tell you about the various fascinating and challenging questions my colleagues and I were asking amongst ourselves in real time, and to share how we resolved them. While I later wrote about the process here in the newsletter, I was, again, rather vague about it. I did not want to disclose internal deliberations, especially because I would not want to misrepresent anyone else’s ideas or opinions. But I do think that sharing those details would provide readers with some fascinating insights and let you see how researchers wrestle with difficult issues. Perhaps in the future, I’ll do some of that (with explicit permission from my colleagues).

Another reason I don’t share as much as I would like to is that I’m fearful that I’ll get myself “scooped.” If I told you all what I was doing today, and any of my “competitors” were to read it, they might be motivated to speed up their own work, in an attempt to get their manuscript submitted to [insert brand-name medical journal here] before we finish. In other words, I don’t want to say something that could decrease the chances that the hard work my collaborators and I are doing might land at a top medical journal.

But it’s sad! The other day, Inside Medicine data analyst Benjy Renton and I were trying to solve some problem related to one of our research efforts. The peer reviewers at the medical journal where we had submitted a manuscript came back with some really fair and difficult questions. Fortunately, we have refined our work so well in the last year or two, that we could easily answer their questions in a matter of hours. The same analysis would have taken us days, if not a week, back in 2021-2022. In just an afternoon, Benjy made some graphs that I dreamed up (and some others that I hadn’t) to include in our submitted revision. Those graphs were made for the benefit of the peer reviewers and they will probably never see the light of day. But they were really cool and I wanted to show you them. Of course, if I had, I’d have risked the paper being scrapped by the journal. Sure, eventually the research will be public (this was the accepted piece I mentioned above). And I suppose at that point, I could share this all with you. But by then, I’ll be on to something else—and the main findings of that paper (of which we are indeed very proud) will be what you’ll be most interested in hearing about. Moreover, what would make sharing inside stuff like this really interesting would be its…freshness. “Okay, everyone,” I can imagine writing, “we were asked a really cool question today by the peer reviewers of the medical journal where we submitted our paper. It’s minutiae, but it is interesting minutiae, and we answered the questions in a nifty way. Here…check it out!” If I write about this a few months from now, it’ll lack that certain something, even if I were to try and pretend it “just happened yesterday.”

I’d like to gravitate towards radical honesty with you—letting you in on the really geeky (yet super cool) nooks my work sometimes takes me—without compromising the possible future prospects for the work. I don’t know how to solve this. But I’m working on it.

In the meantime, here’s what I did the other day that I can show you: I took my 5-year-old to her swimming lesson—at the same pool where I learned to swim 40 damn years ago, and the same pool where I taught swim lessons during my summer break 25 damn years ago!

Have a great Friday, everyone!