Friday, June 26, 2009

The missing piece

You may recall that I am writing each of my chapters as separate, stand-alone papers that will be compiled into a dissertation by the addition of an introductory chapter and a synthetic conclusion chapter. Anyhow, I have been working on the Chapter 3 Paper and feeling kind of blah about it. The results are solid and will be valuable down the line for modelers, but by itself this paper was seeming kind of confirmatory. That's okay, I guess, since I'm planning to submit it to a specialist journal, but I was hoping for more out of this study.

Last night I obtained some supplementary data from a colleague. That allowed me to do some extra calculations and then bust out a figure that shows some very cool relationships among my results. This is the piece that was missing, the thing that will help tie everything together. What's more, it will better anchor my findings to the recent literature. I think the paper will be much more interesting now. yay.

7 comments:

Unbalanced Reaction said...

Sweet! You are really trucking away at that dissertation. Way to go!

Mad Hatter said...

That's great! Good luck with the rest of the writing and don't forget to give yourself a break every once in a while.

Jennie said...

Sweet!!

Cath@VWXYNot? said...

Cool! I love that feeling. Keep up the good work!

stepwise girl said...

Cool! Good luck!

ScienceWoman said...

Yay! It's wonderful when that happens!

EcoGeoFemme said...

Yes, it is great. Now the first draft of that paper is all wrapped up!