Monday, May 5, 2008

I'm not going home until it's DONE

Yes, I'm still talking about that stupid review paper that has been consuming my life. I just finished a major section so I'm taking a quick blog and ice cream break. I am not going home until I've emailed this to Herb. I fell asleep on the couch for an hour and a half earlier this evening so I should be good to go for a while. I think my goal right now is 2 am. I've been on a roll for the past two or three hours so hopefully I can keep it up.

I was pretty excited about this review paper until Saturday afternoon. I'm not sure what happened, but suddenly it seemed so overwhelming and insignificant. I haven't found the enthusiasm back unfortunately. I had a serious case of writer's block from yesterday until about 9 pm tonight. I read and read but couldn't get my thoughts together. During that time I managed to find at least 40 bazillion new articles that I should read. Do you do this? My desktop, which normally has only the hard drive icon so that I can see my pretty desktop pictures, is almost completely full of pdfs. I really love Google Scholar, and I love it that they have made it so easy for me to import citations into EndNote (if I didn't delete those icons right away my desktop would be overflowing). Leo told me that "cite while you write" would change my life and I think it has.

I think this version will be better than my last one, but what I turn in tonight isn't going to be anywhere near complete enough to submit for publication. I see more revisions in my future if Herb still thinks this is worth pursuing. I wish I'd been able to get this done earlier in the semester so that the lab group could read it once more before summer. But for tonight, my goal is to get something acceptable turned in. Better get back to work...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I downloaded a trial version of that EndNote program, and it looks awesome. Too bad I don't have the $200 to buy it.

Karina said...

You should be able to get a student version for $99, or you might even be able to get it free through your university. I think it's definitely something worth having. There are some additional things I wish it did; maybe I'll write a post about that sometime.

Unknown said...

I looked into it and my school offers RefWorks instead of EndNote. I've been messing around with it as I download a reading list for the essay I have to write this weekend, and I like it well enough except for the fact that the library is web-based instead of stored on your computer. I think it has the option of creating an offline library, though. I'll have to play with it some more.

Either way, thanks for the idea! I didn't even know they made programs to do stuff like this for you (although I suppose I should have guessed it).