Research Article Reflections


Writing this scientific research article was quite difficult for me, and on many terms that I did not initially expect. I guess some of the most troubling roadblocks that I ran into was how to actually interpret and explain my data. Although we did learn a lot of new statistical analysis methods that I do believe are very helpful and I will sure be encountering them again in the future, I still found my unfamiliarity with what they were actually analyzing and what conclusions I could draw from them to be a source of struggle for me. Therefore, the results did take me much more time than I had anticipated, as most of my time was spent on digging through old notes and the R code, and researching what certain plots meant. 

In addition, I feel like the open narrative of the study was another point that I got stuck up on. I’m generally someone who likes having a guide or structure to follow and I generally tend to panic when such structure is taken away. Therefore, this did allow me to do more of my own research into etoposide’s effects and attempt to craft a narrative, however, I often found myself trying to overgeneralize my data. Throughout this class, I have noticed that I do tend to try to overgeneralize implications when analyzing data and I believe the task of finding the appropriate scope of my experimentation is still a skill I’m continuing to work on as a scientific communicator.

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