Sometimes, research is lovely. Everything goes where it's supposed to. You come up with a manageable number of on-topic but diverse papers that provide the groundwork for a comprehensive and in-depth paper that still manages to stay around the right length.

This never happens to me, of course.

Instead, I start researching allelopathy--in essence, chemical competition (think of it as chemical weapons) in plants. I find almost nothing and too much at the same time. It's too broad a subject to really cover in one paper, and I end up researching allelopathy and its role in invasive plant species, since there's some wonderful recent information on the role of allelopathy in the invasive tendencies of several Centaurea species (knapweed) and in Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard).

Then I realize that half the ideas that I want to track down are in other papers. Ones that I do not necessarily have access to, especially not in the next week. At the moment, I am attempting to track down papers referencing other invasive plants with a potential allelopathic effect. There were four for Eltrygia repens, for example. Korhammer and Haslinger 1994 needs to be requested from the government. I couldn't find anything more than citations for Osvald 1948 and Welbank 1960. Weston et al. 1987 is only available as an abstract or a "free preview," because "SpringerLink" sucks. A lot. And I am not requesting a $34 paper from my library for an introductory-level essay. For another invasive, Cyperus rotundus, another two are only available as abstract-plus-preview because of SpringerLink's fees; another one also needs to be requested from the government. The remaining two papers I found citations for are only referenced in citations. That is zero papers that I can actually read in full.

I haven't even been able to find "Antagonism of the walnuts (Juglans nigra L. and J. cinerea L.) in certain plant associations." Why do I want it? It's essentially the grandaddy of allelopathy papers. There was, apparently, an 1832 theory put forth by a De Candolle, but what people pay attention to is the 1925 study about walnuts by A. B. Massey. And I can't find it. Anywhere. It probably wouldn't even be that helpful, but it's irking me. (I also want to know the methodology, because a large part of my paper is going to end up revolving around the novel weapons hypothesis, or the idea that plant populations have evolved a resistance to allelochemicals produced by the plants, but only in the native areas, which is why you see the overwhelmingly aggressive behavior of the plants in the invaded communities--they don't have any genetic defense against it. There's some fascinating evidence going on there.)

So, now I'm off to go track down the Letourneau and Heggeness 1957 study "Germination and growth inhibitors in leafy spurge foliage and quackgrass rhizomes." It'll be a party.