research Archives - Scholarcy | The long-form article summariser

Pitfalls to Look Out For During Literature Review

27 Jul

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 [...]

By Michael Upshall research, study skills Comments Off

23 Apr

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 [...]

By Michael Upshall research, study skills Comments Off

05 Nov

How to evaluate the quality and veracity of an article

Analysing how a study builds on, confirms or contrasts with previous work is key to appraising its reliability 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 [...]

By Emma Warren-Jones education, research, study skills Comments Off

Phone and mobile screens showing news stories

30 Jul

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 [...]

By Emily Ray AI, Articles, research preprints, research Comments Off

04 Mar

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. And the problem isn’t limited to published research. The number of [...]

By Emma Warren-Jones AI, Articles, research Articles, citations, discoverability, Literature Review, summarization Comments Off

16 Feb

Six elements a research summary should include

Summarizing a research paper (or papers) sounds like it should be a pretty quick, easy task. After all, how hard can writing 200 words be?! But whether you’re writing a summary to include in your essay or dissertation, or you need to draft a compelling abstract for your own paper, distilling complex research into an informative, easy-to-read snapshot can be one of the most daunting parts of the research process. For that reason, it’s often the activity that gets [...]

By Emma Warren-Jones research, study skills research, summarization Comments Off

03 Feb

Five pitfalls to look out for when doing your literature review

Literature Review Pitfalls 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. The amount of [...]

By Emma Warren-Jones research Literature Review, Skim reading Comments Off

22 Aug

Uncovering Previous Research Findings In Preprints

‘If Citations Could Talk’: Extracting, Structuring And Linking References To Reveal Earlier Research Findings Researchers have been making their early-stage research available on preprint servers since the early 90s, but it’s really over the past year or two that preprints have gone mainstream. As well as the huge growth in submissions to established repositories such as arXiv and bioRxiv, there are now preprint servers for marine biology, the social sciences, psychology, chemistry, health sciences, and larger publishers are starting to get [...]

By Phil Gooch AI, citations, machine learning, publishing, research citations, scite.ai, summarisation Comments Off

23 Jan

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

With Reading Time Diminishing, Valuable Information Is Being Missed 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 [...]

By Emma Warren-Jones Articles, machine learning, publishing, research, Uncategorised research, research tools Comments Off