In this webinar, held to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month, a researcher and an academic trainer discuss the importance of researcher wellbeing and mental health for researcher success.

Having mentally formulated the necessary steps to conduct and complete a piece of research, you might now be wondering how to articulate this effectively to communicate your work to your peers. This is where a research proposal comes in. This article provides essential pointers for writing a successful research proposal.

The difference between a concept paper and a research proposal lies mostly in the level of detail and the potential audience, based on which your approach towards writing each will vary. In this article, we dig deeper into the differences between a concept paper and a research proposal and recommend when to use which.

This article discusses ways in which you can plan and write your paper to ethically and organically increase its chances of citation once published. There are several measures you can adopt before starting the actual writing, during the writing stage and through self-citing.

This article suggests several strategies you can adopt to promote your accepted or published paper for increasing the chances of it getting cited.

In this two-article series, we offer some tips on the casing of chemical compounds. In the first article here, we look at rules for lowercase prefixes.

This article is the second in a two-article series on the casing of chemical compounds. This article explains the rules for capitals and small capitals. 

Style guides tend to disagree about whether there should be a comma before the final ‘and’ or ‘or’ in a list. This is known as the ‘serial’ or ‘Oxford’ comma, and it is a subject of some debate. This article gives an overview of the Oxford comma and provides some guidelines about its use.

In academic writing, people naturally want to come across as being objective, and this often includes using the ‘passive voice’. But exactly what is the passive voice (vis-à-vis the active voice), and is it always right to use it in academic writing? This article explains what the active and passive voices are and gives some suggestions about when to use each.

Selecting keywords after some careful deliberation can bring you multiple benefits as a researcher trying to get noticed in your academic community, not least by making your paper more discoverable. This article gives you some tips on how to choose the right keywords, what to avoid as keywords, and, once you have chosen the appropriate keywords, how to format them.

Researchers often suffer from a conundrum: you need data to get funding, but you need funding to get data. Indeed, this is a very real roadblock many face. This is where exploring alternative routes to funding can help. This article discusses some such avenues.

A post-hoc analysis refers to a statistical analysis specified after a study has been concluded and the data collected. A post-hoc test is done to identify exactly which groups differ from each other.

When writing your research paper, it is important to state the broader parameters and boundaries of your research. This forms the scope and delimitations of a study and helps to contextualise the research for the reader so they can better anticipate the extent of the details to come. This article explains the two concepts with examples.

When developing a plan of action for tackling a systematic review or a meta-analysis, one of the most important steps is developing a standardised and meaningful way of deciding which pieces of work to include and which not to. This article discusses what to think about when developing these criteria.

A search strategy is a means of organising your search and helps you to plumb the many sources of information for truly meaningful references. It will also help you filter out low-quality sources. This article discusses some strategies you can adopt to get the most out of your search, and to ensure a high-quality literature review.

Academic writing has its own style and conventions, and is often regarded as a dry retelling of the facts. However, this does not mean that you can’t make it easier for audiences to engage with your writing. This article discusses how developing a particular, personal voice or style can help improve your writing, and therefore, your audience’s engagement.

Carefully crafted language will take you only so far in describing data, lab procedures or surgical technique. Including carefully selected, high-quality images can elegantly and quickly show data, demonstrate a technique or make a point clear. This article explains the significance and provides some tips for including high-quality images in your scientific paper.

Well-developed and focused research objectives go a long way in ensuring the success of a research project. This article explains how to develop and frame your research objectives.

An original and well-defined research question gives your work direction and is a crucial factor that determines publication success. This article discusses how you can develop and frame a research question for different types of studies.

Working in a wet lab is a potentially dangerous undertaking. It's therefore important that you know how to safely and productively work in a wet lab. This article offers some best practices to follow in a wet lab.