Do Perfectionists perform better in research?

There is a lot that is required from academic publishers. A lot of diligence, innovative ideas and concepts, hard work, consistency and much more is required for getting success in research. But surely our list does not include perfectionism. On the contrary, most of the times, a perfectionist attitude tends to impede the process of academic writing and publishing. A writer needs to identify his area of perfectionism and strive towards growing past it.

How do we define Perfectionism?

Perfectionism as a term relies on two fundamentals and both are utopian in nature in academic writing. The first one is that it is possible to write down a perfect piece and the second one is that any academic writing that is not perfect is not acceptable. All writers strive towards excellence in their work but that is not synonym and should not be confused with finding perfection in your work.

Is perfectionism the way to procrastination?

Well, in academic writing, perfectionism is surely the way towards procrastination. It happens because of two reasons. The first reason is that the writer keeps waiting for that perfect idea and has the reluctance to write till the time he has the sense of perfectionism and secondly there is that inhibit on to share the work with a fear if it being imperfect. For those who keep finding the perfect idea or concept, actually have very little to write.

Perfectionism defers submission of manuscript: writers are often seen sitting on their articles for several months, against all other challenges as they see their article as not a reflection of their work but rather a reflection of their personality. The anxiety builds up to the level that they fear that through the evaluation process, the reviewer would evaluate the writer and not the work. This extreme thinking leads to a strong sense of perfectionism. Writers need to remind themselves that the work is not what the writer is but what he has created.

It is imperative to nip in bud this sense of perfectionism and keep the spirits high with a constant reminder that you as a person is much more and beyond this manuscript.

Whenever we submit a research paper to a reputed journal, the best review that we can expect from the committee is with some constructive comments and a request for re-submission. There are some easy steps that could help in getting an academic publication of repute with a feedback of re-submission

1. Read the letter carefully: first and fore mostly make sure to read the received letter very carefully to ensure that you have received a request for revision and re-submission as often there are other possibilities for which a letter may be written to the author. For example, a rejection without an invitation for re-submission or a conditional acceptance or an outright acceptance. Writers who are inexperienced in assessing a response from an academic journal should take the help and guidance of other seasoned writers in doing the same.

2. List the revision requirements in an Excel sheet: Putting down all the required changes in an excel file in four columns labelled as reviewer, suggestions, response and completed it helps in not missing on to any of the suggestions and makes the work all the more systematic

3. Pull out the suggestions from the editors’ letters: The process is very tedious and painstaking because it calls for extraction of all useful suggestions and also relaying it in a useful pattern. Labelling of each suggestion according to where it is coming from is important: reviewer one, two, three or the editor.

4. Sequence the suggestions in a logical fashion: for each sub head in the research paper, sequence the suggestions separately in a logical fashion. Labelling of each suggestion regarding where it came from is very important so that it can be handled in a more seasoned way

5. Write a memo to the editor in an excel file: the excel file you have prepared should not be sent to the editor like that. Instead the excel file should be used for writing a well formatted memo to the editor with suggestions from each reviewer and how you went about adopting them

6. Double check your work and send: double check your work to ensure that you haven’t missed onto any suggestions and you have addressed each of the critiques suggestions in your memo to the editor. After having done this send the revised article and memo to the editor of the journal!

Factor analysis is a commonly used term in research and its main application is found in 1) reducing the number of variables. 2) Detecting the structure of the relationship that exists between the variables. It can also be called as classification of variables. It is often also termed as a data reduction or structure detection method. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis allows the testing of specific hypotheses for a particular set of variables in one or many samples. The correspondence analysis is a detective or exploratory technique that has been designed to analyse two way and multiway tables that contain some measures of correspondence that exist between the rows and the columns. The result gives the information which has similar characteristics to those that have been produced by factor analysis and they explore the structure of the categorical variables that are included in the table.

When Factor Analysis is used as a data reduction technique it helps to identify relevant data from a large data set. It can be understood by a simple example. Suppose the researcher wants to measure the height of 100 persons in both inches and centimetres. In this case the height would be measured in two variables. A future research, that is to identify the effect of different food supplements on height, both the measures of calculating height would not be required as height is only a single characteristic off a person, irrespective of how it is measured. So we would eliminate one variable by using factor analysis. Another example of factor analysis that is more relevant would be let’s take a study on the measure of the satisfaction of people with their lives. A satisfaction questionnaire is the fundamental thing that is designed where the focus is on asking questions about various things such as how satisfied they are with their hobbies, how much time to they devote to recreation etc. and the analysis of the responses would show a strong correlation with each other. And a high correlation would actually show that they are quite redundant and the responses can be clubbed into a single scatter plot and eventually the two variables can be reduced to a single factor for the study on satisfaction level.

Thus, factor analysis helps and aids data reduction and arrive at conclusions in a much easier way and arrive at more relevant conclusions.

In Business Market Research is a process of collecting data in order to determine if any kind of service or product would be able to satisfy the needs of the customers. When market research is implemented effectively, the company is able to get invaluable information about its potential customers, competitors, demographic profile of target market, latest and evolving market trends and the spending traits of the customers.

Market research can be split into two types.   The first one being Primary Market Research and the second being Secondary Market Research. All businesses require doing some or the other kind of market research in order to be successful.

The primary research is used for monitoring the effectiveness of the sales and the understanding and analysis of the present business practices and the service quality.  IT also assesses the market competition by helping in the evaluation of the business plans of the competitors.

Secondary research, on the other hand, is a collection of data that is already published in order to create a database which would help and assist in situation analysis and decision making. Secondary research also helps in devising the strategies for benchmarking and helps in the identification of the most profitable market segments that should be targeted by the company.

Business market research cannot be ignored by any business. There are various reasons for this. They key ones being:

• Market Research assures the success of the marketing campaigns and hence influences the sales in a great way: not only does market research help in the identification of business opportunities but also helps in the creation of business campaigns which directly target the interests of the potential customers.  It offers valuable information about a potential segment within a particular age group.
• It helps to keep a watch on the competitors and plan your strategy and decisions accordingly. It is a very good tool for comparative studies and the company’s progress can be checked along with the growth of the competitors. Business strategies can be devised that would keep you ahead of your competitors.
•  It helps in minimizing the losses in the business as before the launch of any business, effective market research would help to identify the potential problems and come out with the possible solutions. The loopholes can be identified   in the beginning only and plans can be made to counter those losses.

Taking up Marketing Research involves working with those professionals who make use of a variety of terms that are used to elaborate the various steps of the research process.

•  Closed Ended Questions:  These are the survey questions that expect the respondent to choose from a variety of questions. This is quite like a multiple choice question option.
• Data: The actual measurement that one gets from research is called the data
• Focus Groups: A small kind of a group discussion that is led by a moderator
• Mean: This is basically used to identify the centre of a data set. Usually a numerical data set. It is also called the average and is calculated by taking out the sum of all the numbers and dividing them by the total number of numbers
• Median: it is the true centre of a numerical set of data. It is also the middle ranked value or score.
• Mode: the value that occurs most often in the  numeric data set is called the mode
• Non probability Sample: A research sample that reflects the information only to these people who have the inclination to respond.  There is unknown chance of selecting certain people in the population
• Open ended questions: a question where the respondent gets the freedom to write the answer in his own words and no choose from the list of limited options
• Probability sample: this is a more scientific sample and gives that information which can be proved with minimal scope for error. The questions reflect anything but the truth because of the circumstances in which they are asked.
• Reliability: The accuracy and precision of the information that has to be measured
• Response Bias:  a tendency that may  be conscious or sub conscious but leads to untruthful responses to the questions
• Response Rate:  It is the total number of conversions in terms of successful data collection divided by the respondents who were asked to participate in the first place.
• Test Marketing: It is a controlled experiment that mirrors  the precise conditions of the market
• Validity: the degree to which the accuracy of the score is captured by the information that is sought
• Variable: those factors that can change from one person to another and have the acope of subjectivity in data collection