The One Where I Read Too Many Articles

The first section of the manuscript is the background. The background frames the whole paper and is the most tiresome to write. It provides a general description of the scientific knowledge in the surrounding areas. In my background, I hoped to cover the background of cardiovascular disease, the connections of CAVD to atherosclerosis, and tell the reader why I chose to research what I did.

I spent hours on PubMed searching for articles to include in my background. After a week of reading through dozens of articles, I compiled a final list of 30 research papers. My articles ranged from something as broad as “Valvular Heart Disease: Diagnosis and Management” to something as specific as “Identification and characterization of aortic valve mesenchymal progenitor cells with robust osteogenic calcification potential”. The first draft of my background detailed topics including valve disease, the sirtuin family of genes, and calcific/fibrotic aortic valve disease. However, I decided that a more streamlined approach would be more appropriate for this paper. So, I narrowed my background down to calcific valve disease and sirtuins, which was directly related to my research. 

In the coming weeks, I will write many many more versions of my background, widening and narrowing the scope of information as I see fit. By the end of this project, I hope my background will provide a succinct review of the field of calcific aortic valve disease.