Company News

Nature proposes a new type of research paper to encourage researchers to strive for reliable and reproducible results rather than simply acceptance and publication in high-impact journals.

Before you write up your research findings, your first objective will be to determine the actual research question that your article is designed to investigate and answer.

Access to data is very important to researchers: read on to find out about the opportunities that open data provides and the concerns surrounding it.

Charlesworth Knowledge workshops can help you broaden your research perspective and find ideas for shifts out of the “research rat race”. Training can help you to “see the wood from the trees” and take your research development to the next level in terms of ideas, paper and grant writing, and presentation skills.

If someone else releases a paper in a similar area or on a similar topic that potentially overlaps with your research (known as scooping), this might be a good thing. This means that your research is broadly interesting, and is corroboration that your question is meaningful.

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics. Did you know that, often, the toughest papers for journal editors to process are those that contain statistical analyses? 

Going into lockdown is a tough enough challenge for most people, but all the more so for PhD students and researchers who have to pause or drastically amend their fieldwork or lab work. 

Almost everyone is dealing with new ways of working during the current pandemic and lockdown. While some enjoy more time at home, many PhD students, researchers and even established academics are facing diverse practical challenges in terms of carrying out research in isolation, or with very limited resources. 

At some point, we all take notes for our research. It might be jotting down the results of experiments, pulling out the key points from a text, or setting out the key points made by a speaker at a conference. You might already have excellent note-taking skills, but it’s easy to miss something important, or end up with notes that make little sense when you return to them months or even years later.

If you’re running interviews or focus groups as part of your research, you’re going to end up with plenty of audio, or perhaps video, which needs transcribing.  If you’ve ever tried transcription, you’ve probably found it can take a surprisingly long time, and there are inevitably bit of audio which you find yourself puzzling over – what exactly was that word?  Who was speaking then?

It’s every researcher’s worst nightmare: Your data isn’t yielding the results you had expected, or your data is showing ‘negative’ results that completely negates your research aims and contradicts your hypotheses.

No matter how organised we are, the best laid plans can sometimes still go awry. Encountering various problems with data, during both data collection and analysis, is quite common among PhD students but no matter how frustrating it can seem, there is usually a way around these issues.

Research design refers to how the study was conducted and outlines detailed plans and procedures for how the study will be conducted.

Effect size is not the same as statistical significance: significance tells you how likely it is that a result is due to chance, and effect size tells you how important the result is.

As researchers, one task we are all engaged in is choosing the appropriate statistical test for our analysis and data. Choosing the appropriate test is key since our findings, interpretations, and recommendations will be based on the analyses we conduct.

All science is about understanding variability in different characteristics, and most characteristics vary, hence we call the characteristics that we are studying ‘variables'. 

Many research projects involve human subjects. Most institutions have an Institutional Review Board to ensure that research projects at the institution are in compliance with regulations for research that includes human subjects. When you are conducting a research project, you are required to submit an application for review to the IRB at your institution and receive approval before beginning the research project. Funders will ask about IRB approval when you submit an application, and you will be required to show a letter of approval by the time a grant is funded. It is important to understand how to prepare your IRB review application.

This course is about understanding statistical research and results presented for publication.

Tune in to our bitesize webinar module to learn more.

Module 2 talks about including descriptive statistics in academic papers. In order to decide which descriptive statistics to include in your paper, and how to include them, it is important to revisit what descriptive statistics tell a reader about the data. Even if you are not using quantitative data in your own papers, as a consumer of research it is important to understand what descriptive statistics are and know how to interpret them when you read scholarly papers that include them.

Tune in to our webinar module to learn more.

This module is about telling a story with your data. It explains how to supplement the text with visuals that are informative, non-repeating and easy to understand:

●Are there any data that readers might rather see as a display item rather than text?

●Do your figures supplement the text and not just repeat what you have already stated?

●Have you put data into a table that could easily be explained in the text such as simple statistics or P-values?