Chapter 12 Doing things the old way
Brian van Wilgen
Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Back in the late 1970s, I was an MSc student working on a thesis about the effects of fire in fynbos vegetation - a biodiverse heathland vegetation endemic to South Africa’s southwestern region. I was employed by the Department of Forestry, and based at the Jonkershoek Forestry Research Centre near Stellenbosch, South Africa. It was a time when the Department was about to embark on an ambitious program to introduce prescribed burning to vast areas of mountain fynbos, and they needed scientific studies to provide a basis for knowing how often, and when, to burn. It was an exciting period to be a researcher in this field, because at that time the entire collection of scientific papers about the ecology of fynbos could be stored in a single small folder. It was also conventional to write a thesis as a single, stand-alone document, but universities were beginning to experiment with the idea of preparing each chapter as a paper that could be submitted to a journal for publication. Consequently, I was advised to follow this route.
My study examined the effects of frequency of burning on fynbos vegetation. I used three sites to compare outcomes – one that was burnt every four years, one that burnt every 20 years or so, and one that had been protected from fire for 37 years. I had two potentially publishable papers in my thesis, one that dealt with the botanical composition of the sites, and one with the above-ground biomass. My research confirmed that burning at four-year intervals eliminated tall proteas (family Proteaceae), reducing the vegetation to a short stature with low biomass. Burning every 20 years resulted in stands of healthy proteas, with much more above-ground biomass. Protection from fire for longer periods resulted in the proteas becoming senescent, with excessive amounts of dead, dry material above ground. At the time, it was policy that all research done in the department had to be published in the South African Forestry Journal, which was not rigorously peer-reviewed. My academic supervisor, Dr Eugene Moll at UCT, thought that the biomass paper would be suitable for an international journal, and encouraged me to submit it to the Journal of Ecology. This break with protocol required lengthy negotiations with the department, but in the end they allowed me to submit the paper to the journal.
FIGURE 12.1: Proteas growing in the fynbos. The fynbos is a fire-dependent vegetation, but if fires don’t burn frequently enough, proteas like these can become senescent and die.
12.1 Submitting the manuscript
Things were very different in those days. Everything was done on hard copies, and we used the postal service to submit and receive documents. Receipt was acknowledged with postcards. Manuscripts were prepared with a device called a typewriter, and figures had to be prepared by hand using graphic artists and manufactured sheets of typefaces and other elements (e.g. Letraset) that were transferred manually to the artwork. Once my manuscript on the effects of fire frequency on fynbos biomass was ready, I placed it (and three additional copies to be posted on to reviewers) all into an envelope, stuck stamps on it, and posted it off to England. If I could have held my breath and kept my fingers crossed for the next three months, I would have done so.
Eventually, a large manilla envelope, festooned with British stamps and addressed to “Doctor” BW van Wilgen appeared in my postbox. In it was a covering letter from the editor handling the manuscript, who said that the journal may be interested in publishing the paper, provided that rather a lot of changes were made to bring the paper up to a standard that they would be happy with. Accompanying this was a copy of each reviewers’ comments, and a copy of the manuscript from the editor with corrections indicated in pen. Some words were crossed out, others were added, and words or parts of sentences were ringed, with arrows showing where they should be moved to new positions. When I looked at this, I could see that the editor obviously knew their stuff, and that they had done one heck of a lot to improve my grammar, syntax and logic. I very carefully attended to all of this, prepared a new manuscript, and posted it back to England. At this point, there was no knowing whether or not I would be able to get my manuscript accepted in an international journal. It was very important to me, but I knew I would have to wait again for the outcome.
This time, only two months passed before another envelope arrived in my postbox. It was more reviewer comments and another painstakingly marked-up version of my manuscript, with a cover letter expressing appreciation for my clumsy attempts to improve the paper, and requesting a further round of corrections. I worked through all of this again, and prepared a marked-up version for the typist to attend to. The typist indicated that it would have to go into the queue of other work, and that they would not be able to realistically get to it before the end of next week. I was appalled at this delay. I then, somewhat foolishly, decided to re-type the manuscript myself to speed things up. This was a painstaking process, as I had no training. I had to search for each letter on the keyboard before hitting the lever that imprinted the letter onto the paper. I used the two index fingers on both hands to do this, which made me look like a chicken pecking at seeds on the ground (it is a technique I use to this day, much to the amusement of my colleagues, but I am a little faster now). Of course, any mistake you made meant that you had to start the whole page over again. Needless to say, the typist cleared their backlog before I was halfway done, and rapidly completed the job for me.
Another round of review followed, and this time the manuscript was returned requiring further, but much less extensive, changes. These I attended to, and received by return of post a letter saying that the handling editor was happy with the paper, and would now pass it on to the Editor-in-Chief for a final decision. To my dismay, another marked-up version appeared in my post box about a month later. Further edits were required. The editor also wanted the title of the article to change from “effects of fire frequency” to “effects of post-fire age”, saying that it was with consternation that he noted that this rather fundamental point had not yet been picked up. He also told me to remove a figure, in which I had drawn curved lines through three data points showing how live biomass first increased, and then decreased, with increasing post-fire age, while at the same time the mass of dead material increased at first gradually, the exponentially. He told me that my carefully-prepared figure “owed more to art than to science”, so I replaced it with a written description. After this, my paper was accepted in the Journal of Ecology, and finally appeared in print one and a half years after the first submission: van Wilgen (Van Wilgen, 1982).
FIGURE 12.2: Brian van Wilgen collecting plot data in the fynbos, 1978. This frequently-burnt plot of fynbos is dominated by small shrubs and herbaceous plants, and large, relatively slow-maturing proteas have been completely eliminated.
12.2 Looking back
I was immensely proud of this paper. I had managed to get published in a leading international journal, and I was on my way to becoming a real scientist. Other scientists around me had taken what was considered to be the required route for publishing, namely to send the papers to the department’s in-house publishers. Posting a manuscript overseas was like a leap into the unknown, but after a huge amount of effort, it had paid off. This was thanks in no small part to some quality editing on the part of the journal, something that is not always the case today. More importantly, the process had taught me lessons that have stood me in good stead ever since. These included the importance of saying what was necessary in as few words as possible, and how to structure a logical progression from introduction, through methods and results to discussion. Most of all, it taught me the importance of attention to detail.
Researchers in the 21st century have constant access to word processors, graphics packages for preparing figures, statistical packages for analyzing data, and online access to published papers. While all of this has made it so much easier to write and produce papers, it also makes it easy to cut corners and sometimes to become sloppy. When you can simply add, delete or move a sentence without having to retype the whole page (or add a paragraph without having to retype the rest of the manuscript), you could inadvertently make things worse. My advice would always be to spend additional time getting things as close as possible to perfect the first time around. It will increase the chances of your paper getting a positive reception, and in the long run save time in the revision stages.