Unconventional means to take notes for researchers

Unconventional means to take notes for researchers

 Taking notes on paper seems to be the most ideal way of doing so. It indeed is the most convenient way but surely not the best method. The points just get fixed on the paper you write them upon. For more flexibility you can look for some other options.

Index cards: make for yourself small index cards. When you are researching and need to make notes, you must write down your ideas, facts, quotations or anything else that you find relevant on a separate index card. After completing the cards sequence them out in a way that   you create a streamlined outline of your research. You could further make it more organised by using colourful cards where each colour would be indicating something specific thus easier for you to distinguish main points from sub heads.

Computer: if you are good with keeping your planning hi tech then nothing better then using the computer to keep your notes. This is more so good with the sophistication that MS Word offers you by which you are able to arrange and systematise your work in a way that it remains sorted and easy to access. However, being savvy with the computer and taking it around everywhere with you should be in your comfort zone.

Circular pattern: This is again not much away from the conventional pattern of jotting down notes on a piece of paper, however what is different in this method is that all your points become accessible to you on a single page and you need not hunt them on separate pages here and there. This way you are able to see all your ideas on a single page. Whenever you have point that needs to be jotted down, write it and draw a circle around it.  And then whenever you have a concept which can be associated with the previous one connect the two circles with a line. This method is very useful for concising a lot of information on a single page thus saving a lot of your time and effort. However, the major disadvantage of this method is the limited amount of information that you can accommodate on a page thus as you move to the next page, you automatically need to start fresh as you lose connectivity with the previous set of circles you have drawn.

Hope you find them useful and worth trying

Writing a thesis is nothing less than taxing. But the after task of doing a thesis, where   you have to make it look neat and consistent is also essential. It is an exhausting task at its own level. The respite that writers   have here, thanks to Microsoft word, is the option of “styles”. It makes formatting much easier and faster.

What is style? It isn’t anything but a set of formatting instructions and options, such as size, colour, paragraph, and spacing. Using it saves time and manual effort of formatting for each and every document.

When we talk of theses and other lengthy manuscripts, styles have a great contributory role to perform here:

1. Brings uniformity in headings and subheadings: Use of styles in thesis formatting is a sign of consistency. Each and every heading level need not be formatted by memorising it. If your preference changes for the look of the heading, it can be done by the click of a button and not individual manual effort.
2. Speeds up the formatting task: When you are formatting your thesis, all that you are required to do is to create the specific style with all details in place according to the requirement. There isn’t a need to format each part individually. It quickens up the pace of your work and makes it much simpler than you thought.
3. Quick and easy steering: The navigation pane that MS word has, is a blessing, as it takes you to any section in a jiffy, however long the document be without actually scrolling up and down. By just pressing CTRL+F, you can easily open the navigation pane.
4. Multilevel flawless numbering: Linking of numbers can be generated automatically, even in the case when you insert new sections or chapters in between the manuscript.  Styles in MS word would do it automatically for you.
5. Reflex table of content: This couldn’t get better and would become the most important reason to use Styles. It is a task, to say the least, to manually list up sections and keep going forward and backward to tally page numbers, section wise to mention in the table of contents. This isn’t the end, as any modification in size, figure, content or formatting would change   the number sequence thoroughly. But when you use styles, it does it for you automatically and updates the same for you in a way that is unbelievable.

So if you have a theses or a lengthy manuscript to format and sequence up, do not depend on anything but styles in MS word and see your task simplifying manifol

When we talk of academic research, particularly in the genre of sciences, abbreviations are staple and indispensable.  They surely help to bring down the wordiness of complex sentences but there major use is down to bring down the word count of the manuscript and hence they are embraced in the academic community with a lot of preference.

The use of abbreviations has an influence in the design and figures of the paper and a lot of unnecessary use of abbreviations does make the paper difficult to read. They are particularly more troublesome for journal reviewers when they receive the figure legends separate from the figures.

If as an academic writer, you avoid using unnecessary abbreviations in your figure design, it will benefit you in ways more than one. Audience often have less time and attention span to understand figures and with minimum use of abbreviations there we make their task far easier.

When you have to link the use of abbreviations in figures as well as text in the manuscript, avoid the use of abbreviations that appear only at one or two places in the text and nowhere else. This does not create vagueness and ambiguity for the reader and they are able to establish a better link between the table and the text. It is also true for reviewers and not just readers so do not create an extra barrier in the understanding of your document by the reader. When you have coined or used an abbreviation in the text of the manuscript, it is more acceptable to use it in figured but still not recommended.

In a situation when the abbreviation you wish to use has been used extensively in the literature review, it is more acceptable to use it. But if you want to make you work get appreciated and accepted in the community outside your academic area, it is more recommended that you minimise the use. It would enhance the accessibility to a broader audience as they would not be apprehensive of terminology that is acronym or abbreviation specific to a sub field.

If you wish to use some abbreviations that are ubiquitous in nature, it is perfectly fine to use the as they would not come in your of widening your audience and understanding of your manuscript. It is all the more good to accommodate those globally accepted abbreviations in figures that have already been used in the text before.

Descriptive statistics gives simple summaries of the desired sample and about the different observations that are made by the researcher. They can be either quantitative or visual, whatever be the choice of the researcher. They come of use at many stages during the entire course of research. In some researches, descriptive statistics form the fundamental basis for initial description and as pre requisite for more extensive research. In some researches, which are simpler in nature, they may by self-sufficient for a specific investigation.

Descriptive statistics has a history that goes back a long way in the past. What I understand by extensive reading is that it first showed its presence as a basic tabulation of the census data or the economic data of the country. Its application in all kinds of research has made its place in more recent times and it is considered an indispensable part of the exploratory data analysis.

When we talk in the field of business, it offers summary of varied types of data and comes of use to particularly investors and brokers to put to use historical account of the return behaviour. It is done by performing analysis so that one is able to make wiser investing decisions can be made in the future.

What we see as the most commonly used descriptive statistics is them mean. It is a means that helps to find out the central tendency and is to be analysed with a level of coefficient. When our sample size is large, it is so said that our mean comes out to be more accurate. The mean gives us the confidence intervals and from that we can have the range of values around which we can expect the mean to be located. On important reason for carrying out descriptive statistics is that it gives us the shape of the distribution and also the frequency of the values from the many ranges of the variable that have been found.

Even when you administer the most simplest of descriptive statistics, it is going to be of use, whether you are a researcher or an organisation. It would help you to know how close your data is in being normally distributed. Skewness and Kurtosis tells us how close it is to being normally distributed.

So whatever you area of research be, look into descriptive research and find it to add value to your research and take out more concrete and sound results.

Have you ever gone in the history of the word plagiarism? Where does the origin of the word lie? It comes from the Latin word “plagiarius” which means “the kidnapper”. This pretty much makes the gravity of the offence of plagiarism quite clear.  It is necessary as a scholar to present the ideas you pick from reading literature as your own ideas to avoid getting trapped in the offence of plagiarism.

So that you are able to void plagiarism it is important to understand it thoroughly and develop the practice to avoid it in a tactful manner. Here I will share with you some practical and technical concepts related to plagiarism so that you know what to look for when working around making your document plagiarism free:

Most of the authors think that it is just sufficient to just list the source of the content in the appended bibliography or if required in the content and that takes care of the concern of plagiarism completely and indicates a sense of general gratitude of the writer towards the author from where the idea has been retrieved. But if your objective is to avoid charge of plagiarism then all borrowing of content and idea, however minor or small it be has to be very specifically, precisely and accurately referenced.  It is a trait of good academic practice.

Whenever you quote a source directly, word by word then it is not enough to just mention the source in the bibliography. You also need to be very careful that the passage which you are using word by word should be in quotation marks and intended with source having been given accurate referencing whether it be in footnote, endnote or the given specifications by the journal. Be very sure that you don’t leave any source of ambiguity in concern to where the quotation begins or ends.

If you are using tables, figures or  charts from any source then the source needs to be  cited in a very explicit manner and nit kept  discreet anyhow.

As an author you must never ignore or neglect acknowledging sources from where you have you used general content or paraphrased in according to your requirement.

As an author, when you sit to find sources of information , you may use research paper, websites, newspapers, television programmes, essays, tutorial, books and many more but the rules for referencing apply everywhere equally. Always remember that if you are careful about reference work you can stay away from the problem of accidental plagiarism.