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AI technology is helping science journalists

Best assistive technologies for college students

With digital-first learning becoming more established in colleges and universities, there’s also increased demand for assistive technology to support the growing number of students with a neurodiversity or physical disability. Assistive technology can unlock the learning potential of neurodivergent students in Higher Education helping them to focus, stay organised and grow in confidence.  We’ve taken a look at some of the best digital assistive technologies available to college students today. #1. MindGenius – helps students visualise their work Many dyslexic people are [...]

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image about universities neurodiverse students

How universities are adapting to support neurodiverse students

Imagine a world where all individuals are free to use their strengths to learn, develop and create. This is a mission many universities are looking to embrace through the introduction of services, technology, and spaces designed to support students with a wide range of learning needs. It’s estimated that around 15-20% of the world’s population has a specific learning difference such as ADHD, autism, or dyslexia (1). While it’s difficult to gauge how many students are neurodivergent, in the US [...]

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reviewing peer- AI Tools for Postgraduate

The 5 Best AI Tools for Postgraduate Research

What’s the most challenging part of working towards your postgraduate degree? For many students, combing through mountains of research presents an insurmountable obstacle. For one thing, the sheer volume of research articles you have to read is overwhelming. On top of that, research material isn’t exactly an easy read, and sifting through each article to glean the relevant information you need takes a great deal of time and effort. Organizing your thoughts and then putting them on paper in a [...]

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Sifting and evaluating academic articles using Scholarcy

Getting a clear insight into what an academic article is about takes time. It’s perhaps not surprising that researchers are good readers, but effective research involves two quite different kinds of reading: reading at scale, and detailed evaluation. Researchers read at scale to carry out the initial scan of an article. Using the standard figure for adult reading speeds of 300 words per minute, and given an average length of article as 4,133 words (based on a count of 61,000 [...]

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Connecting the dots: knowledge graphs for all

There is a famous saying by the pioneering linguist John Rupert Firth, that ‘you shall know a word by the company it keeps’. Nothing exists in isolation – it’s not enough to know that a document mentions words such as love, poetry, or people such as Keats, Wordsworth, and places such as Paris. We want to know the context in which words and concepts are described and how these relate to their mentions in other documents. These relations, or [...]

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Pitfalls to Look Out For During Literature Review

Can automation make you a better researcher?

With many skills, such as learning a language, playing an instrument, or learning to ski, we often think that if only we spent more time on the task, we would reach our goals more effectively. But is the same true for all aspects of academic research – for example, screening the literature?  Does spending more time screening research papers always make for better research? Honing strong research skills isn’t just about devoting more time Getting proficient at academic research is in [...]

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Diagram showing how citations work

How to make citations work harder for you

A fundamental component of scholarly research is reading, and citing, other people’s work. One effective way to get more context and a deeper understanding of a subject is to look at the citations to, and from, an article. Science is one long trail of citations. Apart from the very first academic article, published in January 1665, every article has had earlier papers to draw on, to agree with, or to refute. And even the first article must have been based [...]

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studying tips

7 studying tips for non-native English speakers

For international students, the opportunity to study abroad in an English-speaking country is laden with advantages. Not only does it give students a chance to immerse themselves in another culture, but it gives them the opportunity to improve their confidence with the English language. It’s an option that appeals to many: in 2019-20 there were over 500,000 international students studying at UK universities alone – that’s over 20% of the total student population in the UK. (1) While the opportunity can [...]

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Making content accessible

Making published research more accessible

Accessibility has been a consideration of web design for almost as long as the web has existed. Accessibility guidelines are arguably well understood, and relatively straightforward to implement when it comes to websites and apps. Academic books and articles, however, predate the internet by many years, and it may seem that academic articles are the most unlikely starting points for accessible text. At first sight, articles can look very daunting – full of technical abbreviations, and demanding considerable prior [...]

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managing citation

How to effectively manage citations

One of the cornerstones of the academic article is citations. Scholarly knowledge proceeds by recognising the work of others, which means by citing published articles and books, and then using that knowledge to create some new theory or idea that is different in kind to what came before. After the new paper has been published, others will critique it, might agree, or disagree with it, and so scientific knowledge continues to evolve. As Newton wrote, in a 1675 letter [...]

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