References...

Another long day in the office today working on my dissertation. Some parts are relatively easy, the part where you write down your thoughts, that is easy. Supporting your thoughts with references, that is f-ing hard. I have spent the last hour maybe even two trying to support these wild claims that my boss is making. Now let's be clear, I did it. I found the papers that I wasn't even sure existed. You would think there is a good way to go about doing this, but you would be wrong. To find a reference you go to this site called pubmed and put in search terms (think Google but for super nerds) and then you sort through the many different references it gives you for the one you need. Occasionally you get lucky and it is one of the early ones OR you get even luckier in that you can find where someone else has cited it and just use their hard work. But no matter what it seems a little silly that my cool 30 references has to be closer to 50 and I still have many left to find.... AHHHH I hate finding references.

Oh well, at least now that I have them I can just look in my folders to find them. There are few things that make me real irritated but this has got to be one of them. It might just be that I am looking for references about things I don't know if I believe. Oh well this is just part of grad school... the part where you do what your boss tells you. I cannot wait to be the boss to just tell my student what I heard today 'yeah I have no idea if that paper exists but I am sure you will find it'. Seriously, that was the entire lead in I had. What a chump... well my boss is pretty cool but in this moment I want to put legos in his shoes... That is right I am using Legos as a threat.

Well back to the references... they won't find themselves.

H