A Weight Has Been Lifted

The monster topical review on testing general relativity is finally published in Classical and Quantum Gravity! This has taken a long time and a lot of effort from a large number of people, all directed and coordinated by our fearless leader Emanuele Berti. Here are some statistics on this review:

• 179 pages (188 in the arXiv version)
• 46 figures
• 6 tables
• 53 coauthors (I had to write the make-iop-author-list python script to keep the author list straight, since the IOP style files don’t do this)
• 903 bibliographic references (I wrote at least 4 shell scripts and used my available emacs-fu to try to tame these)
• 1330 commits in the repo
• countless hours of telecons
• countless greps, seds, awks, and other command-line-fu to get the whole thing under the same conventions
• 59 citations before it’s been officially published
• 4.8Mb submission tarball with 112 files
• 10580 total lines of LaTeX (after stripping comments), doesn’t count custom hacking of IOP style files

A timeline of the genesis of this baby:

• January 6-10, 2014: Emanuele’s workshop on testing GR in Oxford, MS. I remember it well because I didn’t bring a warm jacket, and the high temperature on the 6th was 19°F.
• January 13, 2014: first commit in the repo
• December 23, 2014: “first” draft circulated amongst co-authors (the “Christmas” draft)
• January 28, 2015: first arXiv version
• February 9, 2015: second arXiv version, including lots of additions from the gravity community following the first version. Version submitted to CQG
• April 13, 2015: received two referee reports. Yes, somebody has read this thing!
• June 3, 2015: responded to the referees’ reports
• August 3, 2015: accepted by CQG
• September 15, 2015: received first round of proofs from CQG
• September 21, 2015: sent first round of corrections
• September 22, 2015: third arXiv version
• November 20, 2015: received secound round of proofs from CQG
• November 22, 2015: sent second round of corrections
• December 1, 2015: published in CQG!

In conclusion, I won’t be coauthoring another review paper any time soon ;)
Thanks again to everybody who contributed and especially to Emanuele!