Finishing up my paper

Hello again!

As this research project is coming to a close, I have spent the past week combining all the different pieces of my research paper: the abstract, literature review, methodology, results, and discussion. The most challenging parts of this were balancing the tone of the paper as a whole, verifying all of my sources, and writing the abstract.

As the different parts of this paper were written over a few months, the tone of each section was slightly different, likely influenced by my plans for how the research would end at the time and what results I was expecting (this changed as I met consultants and started receiving results). I went through the entire paper after writing my discussion and looked at it again with the knowledge that anesthesiologists didn’t want the institution of a PCA pump prescription protocol but rather increased education on opioid medications and PCA instruments. I rewrote several sections to improve the flow of the entire piece, but was sure to also not allow my final results to color my initial hypothesis and background.

Verifying my sources was incredibly challenging (and is still an ongoing process). As the sources were compiled over several months, some of them have been put into a bibliography while others were stored on many different documents in different formats. In addition to putting all of my sources into my final paper in a works cited page, I have been going through each source and ensuring it accomplishes what I intended. This entails searching for each source online, identifying what the claims the source was supporting up in the paper, and determine whether or not the source is actually able to back up my paper’s claims. This was challenging, as the sources I had that didn’t have direct links were usually hidden in large medical databases. In addition, it seems that my access to MedScape, a website from which I had found a large number of my sources, took a large number of their anesthesiology papers off the free section of their website. Rather than pay to gain access to these papers, I have had to look for alternative sources to support the same points in my paper, a task that has taken multiple days so far.

Writing the abstract for this paper was probably the easiest task I have had to achieve this week. Once the results and discussion were completed, writing the abstract was simply summarizing each section I had already finished. The most challenging part of this was managing to get the material from a 4000 word paper into my 250 word abstract without losing any meaning. After writing a couple of drafts that I was unable to cut below 500 words, I decided to cut out a majority of the background information from my abstract and instead focused on the results and solution I found: that doctors were failing to properly screen out patients from PCA pump complications and needed more education on opioid medications and delivery systems.

Over the next week, I will finish my work verifying my sources and begin work on my presentation, which I will practice and complete in the upcoming weeks.