Questions tagged [research-process]
Questions directly focused on PERFORMING academic research. Do not use this for questions about publishing research. Read the tag wiki before applying this tag.
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How should I deal with becoming discouraged as a graduate student?
I am a third year (starting fourth year in the fall) PhD student in mathematics. I've passed all qualifying exams and am currently doing research. As far as I can tell, I am not doing poorly. I have ...
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How to avoid procrastination during the research phase of my PhD?
I just finished all of my coursework for my PhD program, and am entering the research phase of my degree with a topic already in mind. I've already started the research, but I'm already finding that ...
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How to read papers without falling into a rabbit hole?
Often while reading a paper, I will see a citation that that seems more relevant than my current one. I'll switch to the new paper, only to experience a similar feeling. Or maybe I need to look ...
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How to stop hopping the learning chain and actually begin somewhere?
Here is what I feel whenever I find something interesting and feel like pursuing it :
Oh so I like X (Computer Graphics), let me read up papers/books about it.
Ok let me begin with reading up Y (...
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Best-practice models for "research" code?
I have been a professional software developer for a number of years, I'm also an academic researcher - and my research has involved lots of software development.
I sometimes feel as though my ...
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Why do students go for a PhD even when chances of getting academic jobs on its completion are slim?
This is in reference to my question: How to do a PhD to equip myself for a job as assistant professor.
I was told in the answer of the above linked question that chances of landing a job as an ...
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One of my postdocs elegantly solved a problem another postdoc had been working on for years. I have no idea how to navigate this delicate situation
I run a lab in an applied computational field (e.g. computational biology/chemistry/physics etc.)
One of my postdocs (“A”) has been working on a problem for the last two years. They have made good ...
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How to stop feeling guilty about unfinished work?
My biggest challenge as a PhD student is best summarized by the following from PHD Comics:
"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com
A consequence of working in research is that the ...
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How do mathematicians conduct research?
I am curious as to how mathematicians conduct research. I hope some of you can help me solve this little mystery.
To me, mathematics is a branch where you either get it or you don't. If you see the ...
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How to become well-known in the research community while being a PhD student
This question is mainly about building useful contacts during the course of the doctorate. How does one keep the relevant community in other universities informed about his/her research work? One way ...
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How should an advisor handle an underperforming PhD student?
I'm a junior faculty in academia and I was asked to take a PhD student several months ago.
I was not involved in the hiring process, hence I did not have a chance to evaluate his abilities before ...
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What good is engineering research with no practical relevance?
I am a Ph.D. student currently doing research at a top engineering school in North America.
I am becoming more and more jaded at the fact that a sizable portion of the research conducted at my ...
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What do mathematics researchers do if they aren't good?
I am a high school student so I don't know much about academia, but I would like to clear up some confusion I have over research in mathematics. Please excuse my naivite/ignorance on this topic.
I ...
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How to deal with a colleague who always puts you down?
I am just starting out my PhD which will take 5 years to complete and I am dealing with a person in my own research group who cannot stop putting me down every chance she gets.
In our research ...
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How did researchers find articles before the Internet and the computer era?
I find it hard to write a literature review, even though I have Google, the Internet, and all free, very easy to search for information tools.
I have to search for days to find a piece of information ...
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Rampant sharing of authorship among colleagues in the name of "collaboration". Is not taking part in it a death knell for a future in academia?
I am a final year PhD student in chemical engineering. Since the start of my PhD, I was clear on one personal philosophy. I will put my name only on those papers where I have made substantial ...
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I proved a theorem I heard from another researcher. Can I publish my results?
Some time ago I heard a talk in which the speaker mentioned some theorem. I needed this theorem for another paper I wrote. I looked for this theorem in the relevant literature (which I know quite well)...
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How should a social scientist deal with envy of disciplines that are more quantitatively rigorous?
I am a student in social science who got into quantitative research at the start of my graduate school. Since then, I have had the valuable opportunity to take many Statistics classes and become aware ...
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How much percentage royalty do I get from Springer (as the paper's author) and how I can apply for royalty payment?
I have submitted a paper to a Springer conference and it has been published. The publisher will charge 24.95$ to anyone who would eventually download my paper and 201 copies of my research sold by ...
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What should be done when the theory behind a PhD thesis turns out to be wrong?
I have a friend who has been working on a PhD dissertation for over 3 years and he is supposed to be wrapping it up. Unfortunately, his thesis involves a complex model and populating the model with ...
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Is it OK to generate parts of a research paper using a large language model such as ChatGPT?
Large language models (LLMs) are complex neural networks that can capture and represent world knowledge present in the human-generated text as their weights. LLMs are trained on a large collection of ...
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Is uncredited use of grad students' unpublished research by professors accepted/common practice in academia?
I'm a master's student, and over the course of my studies I've conducted a few independent studies in which I investigate specific research questions that I formulate on my own. Those independent ...
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Why does research cost so much money?
I have been dragged into an argument with someone who can't understand why millions are being raised to fund ALS research (that's the "ice bucket challenge", love it or hate it). He doesn't get why ...
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How to work efficiently under loose supervision during graduate studies?
I work in a very cross-disciplinary field, which has caused me some headache* over the past couple of years, partly due to the fact that my supervisor isn't very knowledgeable regarding the day to day ...
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What to do when you spend several months working on an idea that fails in a masters thesis?
How shall a masters student deal with the complete failure to meet the expected results when working on a master's thesis?
For example, in the field of machine learning a masters student might spend ...
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Is it possible take take part in a research project if I'm not a part of a university?
I graduated with a Masters of Engineering, concentrating in digital signal processing, in particular medical and audio, almost two years ago. I've always been interested in research, but due to ...
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Popular software used in research is incorrectly reporting solution is optimal: what to do?
I have an example demonstrating the solution produced by a popularly used software package is not the optimal solution, despite the software claiming that it is. Several recent papers published from ...
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Why do people publish on arXiv instead of other places? [duplicate]
I work in engineering and I was warned by a colleague years ago that I should not cite materials on arXiv because they are not peer reviewed. Although it was never clear to me what peer reviewed meant ...
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Inadmissible theorems in research
One of my engineering friends told me how e once had to take a make-up calculus I exam due to being hospitalised and so self-studied a lot of the missed topics. For the make-up exam, e used L'Hôpital'...
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I don't have the theoretical background in my PhD topic. I can't justify getting the degree
I did my PhD in computational materials science. I used molecular dynamics simulations and finite element method to carry out my research investigations. I have published several publications and ...
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I don't want to do research (First year tenure-track faculty)
I'm currently in my first semester as a tenure-track faculty in a small liberal arts college. I also finished my dissertation and defended about 5 months ago. While I'm grateful that I've got a tenure-...
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As a new PhD supervisor, how should I deal with taking a student to a wrong direction?
I am a postdoc who was supposed to co-supervise a PhD student along with another academic who invited me for that. However, I ended up fully supervising the student after the supervisor became too ...
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Why are CS researchers reluctant to share code and what techniques can I use to encourage sharing?
While researching a topic area I have come across a number of papers that claim to improve on the state of the art and have been published at respected outlets (e.g. CVPR, ICIP). These papers are ...
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Stuck without progress working on thesis - worried about failure
I am a student of Indian origin. I am Studying Mechanical Engineering in a local university in north of Germany.
I am writing my thesis in a company. My task is to optimize the throughput of the line. ...
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Is there a single example of an outsider considered a "crank" publishing a ground-breaking result that was found to be correct (in the last 30 years)?
I'm interested mainly in mathematical and related fields, in which several important and famous open questions exist (e.g., Riemann Hypothesis).
Almost every day a new "amateur" scholar (...
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How can a software developer best volunteer to help childhood cancer research? [closed]
I have 30 years of professional experience as a software engineer and I'm at the point in my career where I can volunteer lots of time. I have helped with several childhood cancer organizations over ...
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Popular proprietary program or obscure open source substitute for reproducible research?
For a long time, I had been using open source software for my work to make it reproducible. I believed that if I made my code open source and the software to run the code was also open source (or at ...
user107
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What to do with spare research topics?
A while back I reached the stage where my ideas for research topics/papers exceeded my capacity to personally work on them. As a PostDoc, I tried to head-hunt students or more junior researchers in my ...
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If you get stuck in research, at what point in time should you ask for help?
It's always worthwhile to take some time to try to figure it out by yourself. But eventually there's a point where you're unsure how much more time it would take to figure it out by yourself (which ...
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If someone conducts unethical research unbeknownst to anybody, but produces positive results, what would happen to the research once discovered?
I was just wondering about this specific scenario.
Say someone was researching nature vs. nurture, but his experiments involved keeping babies in a controlled environment for the first 10 years of ...
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Asking 'silly' questions to doctoral supervisor
My doctoral supervisor is very helpful and I really enjoy working with him on various problems. I have officially entered my second year of doctoral research this month. During discussions, I get few ...
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How do you balance producing results with learning new skills?
On the one hand, I'd like to produce a few graphs every week so my project can move forward. Taking a month off to learn a new programming language, do a literature review, or work through a relevant ...
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Do academics get bored of research?
I am wondering if academics (Professors, Researchers etc.) who usually have to spend their lives on research get bored of the subject or get tired of research?
In this case, I want to know how they ...
user26985
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Can I have a PhD in one field, and be an avid academic contributor in another?
Disclaimer: I'm an undergrad with very limited knowledge of how academia really works and what the atmosphere and culture is like.
I'm very interested in pure mathematics, and I think I'm pretty good ...
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I solved their problem. Should I involve them?
I have dedicated time and effort to solve a theoretical problem posed by two other people.
Now I think I have resolved it, and I have material for a publication.
Should I involve them as co-authors?
...
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What distinguishes top researchers from mediocre ones? [closed]
I am a PhD student studying theoretical physics at a US institution. I am now beginning my fourth year in the program, and struggling to solve my first research problem. I see PhD students around me ...
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What to do with an overtly exasperating colleague in computer science?
I am working on my undergraduate research project in an HPCC. Whoever does programming knows this is a "teach-yourself" skill. Everytime a problem arises, you search the wealth of tutorials and guides ...
user31319
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Is it acceptable to use Mathematica to derive results in your research?
While doing research in statistics, sometimes I came across complex integration that I can't or don't want to solve analytically.
Is it okay to use Mathematica to solve the integration and use the ...
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Why aren't more research papers/textbooks written in a "thought process" style?
This may be a weird question, but I often wonder why the default way of writing about a given methodology is describing the method as if it "fell out of the blue". Admittedly, not all ...
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What to do when you are a promised a research-based research associate role but are required to act in an IT support role?
First some background. Two years ago I joined a research group as a research associate. My intention in obtaining that position was to publish with the group and build some academic capital, but in ...
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