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Leaving Academia and Founding a Start-up

Why did Phil do a PhD, and how did it lead to founding Scholarcy? What are the skills gained, and the lessons learnt along the way? Phil talks about his motivations, challenges, and successes as a PhD in academia

Oliver Back
April 25, 2024
5 min read

On leaving academia for industry

What's it like to leave academia for a job in industry? Are there any drawbacks to working in industry having an academic background? Matt from the Instagram @GradSchoolSucks shares his experience of leaving an academic job to pursue a career in industry

Oliver Back
April 22, 2024
6 min read

Navigating the Biomedical Maze: A Scholarcy Success Story

Picture the whirlwind of being a first-year biomedical science undergraduate at the University of Sheffield – the excitement of newfound knowledge mixed with the challenge of deciphering scientific jargon that might as well be written in another language. Now, meet a remarkable undergrad on this journey, not just as a first-year student but as someone who returned to academia at the age of 23, bringing a different perspective and life experience to her studies.

Emma Warren-Jones
August 14, 2023
3 min read

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?

Emma Warren-Jones
July 27, 2022
6 min read

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 knowledge, presenting challenges for the general reader and students alike.

Emma Warren-Jones
April 23, 2022
8 min read

How to evaluate the quality and veracity of an article

So you’ve got a literature review to write, and the deadline is approaching. Perhaps you don’t know how to begin. Or maybe you’ve started and got stuck. Perhaps you’ve used one of the many discovery tools out there to find relevant papers, but now you have to read and filter them all. You’ve got a folder full of articles, and you’re learning that PDF doesn’t actually stand for ‘print, download, forget’….

Emma Warren-Jones
November 5, 2021
6 min read

Best tools for screening and reading research papers

There’s a huge amount of relevant and high-quality research on any given subject, but researchers simply don’t have the time to absorb it all.It’s not just a question of discovering the best information, it’s understanding and applying it that matters. The risk is that important findings that could support new studies are being missed.To put this into context: there were more than 3 million articles published in 2018.

Emma Warren-Jones
March 4, 2021
9 min read

Breaking news: How AI technology is helping science journalists stay on top of the latest research

Science journalists are a vital bridge between researchers and the public. They “shine a light on discoveries” [1] and translate complex studies into accessible articles that help to educate and inform the wider community.This isn’t always an easy task — science journalists face an uphill battle to secure an exclusive story about significant scientific breakthroughs and developments. Not only are journalists overwhelmed with the increasing volume of scientific papers, they’re also under pressure to transform important discoveries and findings into engaging articles as quickly as possible.

Emma Warren-Jones
July 30, 2021
7 min read

Five pitfalls to look out for when doing your literature review

One of the activities common to all researchers – from undergraduates to post-docs – is conducting literature reviews. The volume of research literature has been growing at an unprecedented rate in recent years. The number of new scientific papers published each year now exceeds 2.5 million1 , and the problem isn’t limited to published research. Preprint servers - which are increasingly becoming an important resource for researchers - have grown by over 300% since 20152.

Emma Warren-Jones
February 3, 2021
8 min read

How to solve the problem of too much information and not enough time

Ever find yourself thinking how much better your work could be if you just had time to read more of the information that’s out there? Even then, not everything we might save with the best intention of reading later is relevant or useful. And if that rare oasis of time does open up, skim-reading is probably the most common and practical way of processing several articles to find what’s useful. In fact, as a way of digesting large volumes of information, skim reading is actively encouraged by some. Speaking at the 2018 Deep Learning Indaba, Jeff Dean, Head of AI at Google, said...

Emma Warren-Jones
January 23, 2019
10+ min read