During 2018 I have been busy for Alzheimer's disease-related project, and I was not planning to go to the 2019 AACR meeting. But our Center for Cancer Prevention and Drug Development (CCPDD) wanted to send some abstracts for the AACR annual meeting. After talking with three post-doctoral members who may present the work, I sent out an abstract yesterday (official abstract deadline is today 11/15/18), along with a few other abstracts from the CCPDD.
Most of the results for my abstract were generated last year. Now I am busy writing up a manuscript for the project.
Writing a scientific paper is somewhat similar to making a picture story show, with rather structured storytelling pattern and no fictional picture allowed. Past three days were spent laying out the pictures (data, results), examining the pictures, and organizing the story. This was also a good time to plan ahead.
In many cases, future events and deadlines define what I need to do now. This is another example.
PS
Data and results are frequently confused, but they are not the same. Data is raw pile of data (frequently in a form of numbers) that you get from your experiment. A result is a message (or an answer to your research question) extracted from the data. Thus, a "result" is subjected to researcher's bias and interpretation, and we scientists are fussy about such bias and accuracy of "result". Preconception, prejudice, overstatement, over-speculation, over-interpretation, cherry-picking, .... all need to be weeded out.