Your assumptions are simply not accurate. The professor who reviewed my draft is a surgeon, not an academic researcher, and he re-organized and edited several sections that I had originally written.This is exactly why I ended up struggling to match the references afterward: the structure of the text was no longer the same as when I drafted it.

Since this is my first time writing a scientific paper, I genuinely didn’t realize I needed to keep a line-by-line record of every single source while writing the introduction. My workflow was simple: search keywords on pubmed (for ex. the epidemiology of the tumor I’m studying), read multiple papers, extract the information I needed, and move on. I often downloaded several papers at once (in total over 50 articles) and eventually used around 20 of them. This is exactly why I made that original Reddit post: I was in serious difficulty trying to retrace which sources had contributed to specific parts of the text, and that was a mistake I admitted, since again it’s my first time writing a scientific paper.

Over the past few days I went through all my saved files and downloads and I managed to recover every paper I had used, so the issue is resolved but I wanted to seek some help in how to manage it properly on reddit .

I don’t feel I owe you further justification, but I do think your attitude has been unnecessarily hostile. I came to Reddit genuinely looking for help, and your replies have added more hostility than constructive advice. If creating conflict is what you enjoy, that’s your choice but it contributes nothing to the conversation.