The daily life of a PhD student is a beautiful cycle of reading literature, planning experiments, conducting said experiments, taking notes, reading more literature, analysing data, writing conclusions, proofreading, realising your conclusions make no sense, reading even more literature, questioning your life choices, asking your postdocs for help, bothering your professor, getting valid answers, rewriting everything, and finally… submitting your manuscript for internal review.

After you receive your first devastating review, you are usually back to questioning your life choices. But after convincing yourself that quitting is not an option and you’ve successfully deleted that fast food cashier application you had written out of pure desperation at 2 AM, you start over. The internal reviews pointed out the weak spots in my manuscript. In addition to the red thread not being clearly recognisable and well-structured, my scientific English showed room for improvement. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t awful (or so they said), but it wasn’t as precise and clear as it should have been.

Now, I thought my English was solid. I’ve taken English lectures, English exams, and I watch all my media in English, so surely, writing a paper wouldn’t be that bad, right? Wrong. Scientific English is a different beast.

After the whole writing, internal reviewing, rewriting, and questioning your life choices process, you finally end up with your first manuscript submission. Clicking the submit button felt like sending my soul into the void. This submission was not just a milestone but an essential step, as my doctoral thesis depends on at least three published papers, supplemented by a comprehensive text that integrates and contextualizes them. No publications, no thesis!

A few days later, I got an email: “Your manuscript is under review.” Nice. The provided tracking link became my most-visited website. Then, at the end of November, the moment of truth arrived — the reviewers’ comments.

To my surprise, they were… actually quite nice? I had braced myself for soul-crushing criticism. But instead, the comments were constructive and even encouraging. I had one month to address the feedback, so I tackled every point carefully — either making the necessary changes or (politely) justifying why something couldn’t be changed.

A few days after resubmitting, the acceptance email arrived. And now I’m just happy to share my work with everyone, unsolicited:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344925000370

I know that I’m in no position to give any advice, as I’m just a PhD student who was fortunate that my first publication went relatively smoothly. However, when I look around, I see my fellow PhD colleagues facing challenges similar to mine.

True to the saying, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), I would like to share my experiences:

Be patient, be persistent, and stay open to feedback. Turning research into a clear and well-structured manuscript is an art—one that cannot be mastered overnight.