A brief summary on 2016

It's about time I update the blog with something of interest, and if nothing else, then a brief summary on the turbulent year of 2016.

When last I wrote in my blog I was just starting to write the manuscript of my first paper. It was not as easy as I would have hoped and in the end it turned out to be year long struggle which felt like it would never end. Subsequently, I lost all my motivation to write anything else during that time.

While struggling to finish the first manuscript I also started working on something totally different in the form of a multivariate statistical model, called Piecewise Structural Equation Model (piecewise SEM) which was developed and applied by Lefcheck in 2016.
The model was something I'd thought about for a while after getting comments on my, comparably simple, statistics done in the first manuscript (which then of course was expanded to include multivariate redundancy analysis (RDA)). It was far outside of my comfort zone, but with the help of Carlo Berg at Science for Life Laboratory in Solna, we put together an R script and code to apply the model on a dataset generated in a previous project (in the Atlantic in 2010-11) which my supervisor participated in.
At first it felt like a longshot and the timeframe was more than a little optimistic since there was a hard deadline for a specific special issue in the scientific journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
However, as our work progressed the optimized model returned more and more satisfactory results and it was decided to be the major part of my second manuscript.

So, while I was struggling with both novel statistics, two manuscripts and a quickly approaching half-time point (where I still had nothing to show), there were internal conflicts that had to be dealt with.
Suffice to say that we're all humans (even researchers) and there are bound to be frictions in a tight, high-achieving workgroup. Still, it was not an easy time, although, I believe we all came out stronger in the end.

By the end of 2016 I started to see the light in the end of the tunnel, and it was thankfully not a train. I was the train, and things were moving fast!
After 36 updated and corrected versions of the first manuscript it was submitted at the same time as the second manuscript on the piecewise SEM, which was written and completed in less than a month.

In hindsight, I've learned A LOT, both about my research and myself as a human being and researcher, during 2016. Workwise I will likely not remember the year of 2016 fondly, but I would not have been where I am now without it.

Stay tuned for an update (in the near future) on the manuscripts and my current, third project.