A Paper A Day

FYI, the featured image for this post is a collage titled Numenius arquata on The village clerk by Albert Ankera by @birds_dont_cry

At the beginning of my PhD, I had TOO MUCH time to read, but TOO LITTLE focus to know what I needed to read. Now that I have a few experiments behind me and multiple, ongoing analyses and manuscripts in front of me, I have TONS of papers I want to read, but NO time to read them.

To make matters worse, I chase references like a dog chases squirrels. I can sit down with the best intentions of reading through a paper and find myself an hour later down five other rabbit holes with 50 new tabs on my browser all with new papers I certainly won’t ever read.

In an effort to make a consistent practice of winnowing away my ever-growing pile of “really important papers that I definitely want to cite in my dissertation,” I’m starting the #APaperADay challenge. My goal is to read a new paper each workday and write a quick synopsis. I have no roadmap or themes, so reader beware–these paper will be all over the place!

Be sure to check out the whole comment thread for the entire synopsis: