Skimming Studies

Last week marked my fourth mentor visit with Dr. Didehbani. Over the last month, we have been discussing how to initiate my final product and the literature review process. On Thursday, she and I revised my Final Product Timeline to specifically address key checkpoints in the research I needed to achieve. As my project includes a literature review of SARS-CoV-2's effects on both neural cognition and mental health, Dr. Didehbani and I both agreed that we needed five relevant, recently-published articles for each topic that I could synthesize into my final review.

For the next few weeks, I will be combing through neuropsychology, psychology, and neuroscience journals for relevant abstracts related to my topic on databases such as Google Scholar and PubMed. Although in the past I have experienced difficulties in accessing journals due to heavy paywalls, Dr. Didehbani was gracious enough to offer UT Southwestern's subscriptions to medical journals to send me the articles I need. This will tremendously elevate my paper as I will no longer be restricted to free texts and can access an entire library of information to synthesize. I definitely feel that we were successful in clarifying the objective of my final product and defining achievable goals for me to succeed. I am excited to continue researching for the next month and discover what articles I can find and what connections I can make within the intersection of COVID-19 and brain function.