Abraham Adeyemo: The many challenges (and rewards) of publishing

This piece was written in the spring of 2025 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Abraham Adeyemo as part of an assignment to write a personal narrative about his research.

This story comes from 2021. I was fresh out of vet school and transitioning from a purely clinical interest to one more open to pursuing research. I wanted to enter into the research domain, and I had found a mentor in one of my professors in vet school at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Dr. Olusegun A. Fagbohun. Dr. Fagbohun, a virologist, agreed to mentor me in the “veterinary virology way.” I was excited and hopeful that the time spent in his lab would give me much-needed research experience. Right from the get-go, he gave me a topic to research and asked me to write a review about it. The topic was canine parvovirus. 

    This is going to be great! I thought to myself. Little did I know that it would be full of ups and downs, back and forth, and, eventually, triumph.

    The first challenge was writing the manuscript for the paper. It was my first time writing a manuscript meant for publication, and I think the most difficult part was getting started with the title and the introduction. It was difficult initially to pick a title that captured what I had to write about, without looking like something that had been written already. I also found the introduction very challenging and very time-consuming. But once those parts were done, the writing began to progress better.

    Then came the manuscript review stage. I am especially grateful to Dr. Fagbohun, who carefully reviewed it and made extensive and insightful corrections. Of course, I then had to go back and make those changes. That required looking through my references and finding new references — it was a whole lot of back and forth. Another challenge was making everything grammatically correct and also aligning the paper to the language used in my field.

    The next challenge was submitting the manuscript to a journal for publication. We went through various internationally recognized journals, but the paper was rejected. Reviewers mostly said that our findings were limited to Nigeria and, therefore, not relevant to their journal. That was very frustrating; they basically said our hard work was too local and not worthy of their “internationally relevant” journal. We then tried other journals. Some asked for a lot of money, which we did not have, so we had to let them go. At the same time, new papers related to ours were being published, and we had to go back to the drawing board and review and rewrite some sections of our manuscript. This went on for more than a year, and I eventually left Dr. Fagbohun’s lab without the paper being published.

    I was already here at Virginia Tech, where I am enrolled in a combined anatomic pathology residency and Ph.D. program in biomedical and veterinary sciences within the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, when I received a message from Dr. Fagbohun that the paper had been accepted into an African journal and published. This was very good news! Our efforts had paid off. 

    This is a milestone event for me because this was my first attempt at writing and publishing a paper and my first first-author publication. I am very proud of my efforts on this manuscript and of the final product that eventually got published. It taught me the process of writing and publishing, and it also showed me what it takes to publish. I now appreciate the whole idea of having a publication more because I have experienced first hand what it takes to do so. I’m especially grateful to Dr. Fagbohun for his mentorship and thoughtful guidance throughout the process. His detailed feedback, encouragement, and unwavering support were instrumental in shaping the quality and clarity of the final work.