Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Searching
Gaaah! I am writing up a paper at the moment and on the whole my data is OK and it all tells a nice story. My current issue is finding and interpreting other literature in the field. One of the main aspects of my work is validating a new experimental model so things are always complicated comparing to my data done with a new model to stuff done using more traditional methods. This is not so bad, it's just a bit of a pain having to really go through and understand the methods sections in other papers just to check a 1 or 2 values out of the paper to see if it's actually comparable or not. My main frustration at the moment is tracking down papers to compare my findings with. Obviously I have some good starting papers but doing literature searches to check certain values and other models is a nightmare as everyone seems to use a slightly different combination of capital letters, brackets and abbreviations in their titles and keywords so rather than just being able to look for example something with a simple name, I seem to end up doing multiple searches with each version of the name, and then this is further complicated that the thing I am looking for in relation to my main search parameter is also written in lots of different ways.
One thing which has consoled me with all this tedious literature searching is that I think my new model is really neat and is relatively simple to use to find out important parameters which at the moment are not easy to find out without using some quite unnatural experimental conditions.
One thing which has consoled me with all this tedious literature searching is that I think my new model is really neat and is relatively simple to use to find out important parameters which at the moment are not easy to find out without using some quite unnatural experimental conditions.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]