Six hours work for one citation
I recently had twenty minutes tackle a backlog of a few dozen studies I’ve flagged recently, putting me further behind than usual.
Twenty minutes later: “Well, there’s one of those processed!” 🤦🏻♂️ Just ten more hours for the rest of them!
By “processed” I mean: all key details added to my bibliography, tagged and briefly summarized so that, when I finally glance at it again in two months or two years, I’ll have a rough idea of what it is. I have many hundreds of bibliography records in this state: merely captured, not digested, not cited, not blogged about. When I do blog about a study, the time investment explodes. Here’s the recipe for this week’s “new study” post, about placebo analgesia.
- 2 minutes abstract reading, just a sniff test of in my RSS reader — enough that I know that I’ve found a paper I want to write about.
- 5 minutes full text reading. I reject a lot of papers at this stage. This one passed muster.
- 20 minutes improvisational writing about the subject. I want to know what I think I know about a topic before I try to upgrade my knowledge.
- 60 minutes reading the full text with a highlighter and an attitude. I usually check key references as I go, because it’s a huge red flag for bias if a paper starts with a major premise supported by a bad citation! I often do several PubMed searches while reading one paper. This one was quite good. I enjoyed it.
- 30 minutes writing a “naked” summary — a just-the-facts, plain English version of the abstract. (This is roughly the equivalent of all you’re going to get from 95% of other sources of study summaries.)
- 60 minutes writing the first draft a blog post. This is where I add context and colour and "have fun," just winging it until I have something that looks like a rambly but good post.
- 60 minutes revising and polishing. The first draft is always twice as long as I can use, and nothing in writing is nastier than trying to squeeze prose into shape, figuring out what's essential. This step has a substantial checklist of things like “Who will disagree with this and why?” and “Do I actually have support for that key point I made?” and “Are there enough dad jokes and pop culture references?”
- 60 minutes preparing images, metadata, and other technical publishing details. This stage can be waaaaay longer for more complex posts with things like audio versions. (In this case, I killed 20 minutes trying to get ChatGPT to generate a 3-armed image of a three-armed superhero, “Trialman.” I never got even one image with the right number of arms.)
- 40 minutes social media promotion. I prepare a version of the post for every platform, because platforms are different! Yes, I may be insane.
- 30 minutes to prep and send the newsletter version. Yet another technical checklist. This is usually where I start finding typos that have been reproduced in all the social media posts.
- 90 minutes of “integration” and cleanup … because publishing the blog post is not the finish line! The ultimate goal of a blog post about a study is … to have an excellent footnote that belongs in a permanent article in PainScience.com’s main library. So after all is said and done with the blog/newsletter, I still have to do something with that citation, to weave it into the tapestry of the website.
So just a bit shy of six hours of work … for one citation. And it’s not like I don’t have other things to work on.
And that is why I have a membership program — so I can afford to keep doing this for you. If you like the results, please join, for a while or forever: