Getting Your Research Published

Anyone in the field of veterinary medicine should be familiar with PubMed, a free, searchable database of published research. We, as students and researchers, access these databases frequently when doing background research for an upcoming proposal, research project, or school assignment among other things. While I am accustomed to searching through the literature and citing [for the most part] unfamiliar author names, I am not accustomed to being one of the authors. But that time has come; research I was involved with at Pomona College was published this year and now appears in PubMed.

The research, entitled “Psychological predictors of college students’ cell phone use while driving,” was a fun research project to be involved in and I am proud to be listed as one of the authors. As you can tell, however, this research is quite a few years old. I have not been involved in psychological research since 2007, and this study was done and written up during the 2005-2006 school year and finally published in 2010. This is the delay that often exists in academia when it comes to publishing research. Regardless of the delay, however, it is great to have new information out there to help shape future research projects and investigations that will ultimately shape practices and policies.

I can only hope that this is the first of many other papers to be published with my name on them. I hope that in the future my summer research project that examined the differences in behavioral expression of cats in different cages gets published as the impact that such research would have on current veterinary practices and animal shelters would be tremendous. In the end, to me, publishing research is not about building one’s C.V. or having one’s name at the top of a paper, it’s more about the impact that such research will have on the world we live in.