r/research

I really want to publish a high school research paper.

I need a mentor. How do I find a mentor? What is the best way? Can I find one from Reddit?

What else should I know before working with a mentor?

I've a PhD student in my department whose first language isn't English and who did his undergrad in another language and field altogether. So his writing skills are....kind of not there. I edited his abstract for a conference and it took nearly half a day (so many questions "do you mean X or do you mean Y" "A means B, is that what you wanted to say?"). The poster wasn't so bad as it was mostly bullet points. Now he's working on a full paper and I really don't have time to babysit him through it. Can I just tell him to find an editor to do it? I was thinking of Editage because they work a lot with non-native speakers or Wordvice.

PS: Don't suggest Grammarly or any AI tool. He uses it already for his IMs and sometimes he sounds just weird when it's a technical topic because he just clicks on whatever the tool suggests.

Unfortunately, I ended up with this kind of supervisor, and it has been the most mentally torturous three years of my life so far. Every morning, he would stand in the lab watching what time you arrived, and if you were even one minute late, he would immediately send an email criticizing you. He held meetings every single day, demanding detailed reports on the previous day’s workload and the plan for the current day, making sure you spent every day working nonstop like a mule. Before every Christmas holiday, he would pile on work so that you could never truly rest throughout the year.

After I signed up for training on an instrument, he even went to the trainer and said that I did not need training for that model. He monitored every material and every piece of equipment in the lab every day — even a speck of dust left in the wrong place could become evidence of your “poor performance.” It was not enough to complete the tasks he assigned; you also had to do them exactly in the way he wanted.

What is strange is that despite such extreme strictness, our lab has produced no publications and secured no new funding for several years. Burnt-out and mentally broken students have become the lab’s biggest “output” in recent years.

Short version: How do I turn myself into a researcher in a month? (1 month is not a deadline, but I want to start something asap instead of being chronically confused like this) I have no experience and no support from my supervisor or labmates whatsover, so please share applicable real steps..

Long version: I am a graduate student in china in pharmacy department. My supervisor's research is about structure pharmaceutics and Advanced drug delivery systems, working on MOF and now COF. These details can be overlooked because the real problem is, I do not know how to come up with a project idea.

Apparently, research in China means that your supervisor is completely isolated from you. The only advice I got since I've come here is that I must learn the techniques such as LC-MS and HPLC.. I've seen my labmates do them, I've read about them, but since I have not tried any technique myself (not allowed unless it is for a pre-determined project, which I do not have) I lack the required deep understanding about them

This started feeling like a rant.. point being is, how do I do research if I was never a researcher? how do I read efficiently and how do I even begin to identify a research gap?

P.s. I am not aking for a research idea, I am asking how to find it

One of my junior lab mates is presenting her first paper at a conference. She's a broke PhD student with no budget to buy "fancy" clothes. She ran her wardrobe by me, asking if her plain black (non see-through) leggings would do. My first response was "hell no!". But maybe I'm a bit conservative? I just feel that as a woman and POC in our field (healthcare), she'll already have to work extra hard to be taken seriously.

Also, I'm much shorter and heavier than she is so she can't possibly borrow any of my pantsuits. Same applies to her other good friend in the lab. She moved recently to our area and spent some years in foster care, so she doesn't have family or people she could borrow from either.

So I was wondering how people can find things that are literally hidden on the internet . I want to know because i have research i want to do and i was curious in how much I can learn. Also I'm a beginner at researching topics so if anyone could help with letting me know where to start that would be great.

Can anyone explain the process? I am stuck and this is my first experience in writing and archiving papers

I had a conversation with a professor once talking about AI, and they mentioned how several online publications websites now provide automatic AI translation of non-English papers abstracts into English, or automatic generation of an English abstract.

Unfortunately, I forgot to ask for examples (and can't get back in touch with them at the moment), does anyone know any such websites? Where basically (if I understood correctly) even if the non-English paper doesn't originally have an English abstract, an AI in the website generates it. I'm doing a research project around AI and academia. I had a conversation with a professor once talking about AI, and they mentioned how several online publications websites now provide automatic AI translation of non-English papers abstracts into English, or automatic generation of an English abstract.

Unfortunately, I forgot to ask for examples (and can't get back in touch with them at the moment), does anyone know any such websites? Where basically (if I understood correctly) even if the non-English paper doesn't originally have an English abstract, an AI in the website generates it.

So, I have an opportunity to attend a really nice research program over the summer, but I was only allowed to apply a month late bc of my parents' connections, so I have the conflict between me wanting to go and the morally grey method that I used to access it. Do I go or nah?

During reading different research articles how can we find study gaps?

As I'm currently writing, I still haven't found a way or maybe I'm almost there to psych myself to going to college full time. So I'm going rogue. I'm not going to college or taking the traditional career path options of learning a trade.

I'm going to try to submit papers on arXiv and use these papers as references showing that I'm able to work as an independent researcher for an institute for minimum wage—any pay is good in this economy. I don't know how I'm going to do that yet. Maybe browsing arXiv papers to learn what's the current trends and trying to contribute to them. Or studying myself and trying to come up with something. Maybe a mixture of both.

My career advice question—more of a question that needs logical confidence—is if it's possible to do this without the concrete material? You know, if you want to contribute to astronomy, I think you probably need a telescope. My interest is mathematics which I think I can contribute to, but if I take this job, I'm willing to do research for whatever comes up—chemistry, astronomy, other mathematics different from mine, computer science maybe (computer science is heavily dependent on experience), robotics, etc.

Another minor question is if anyone has a good perspective of a learning method to quickly contribute to mathematics. I think I've built my own but sometimes I find myself stuck. I'm looking for something repeatable in the nature of what isn't repeatable.

Hi fellas! I'm a bit bored so I'm trying to find some extra practice for a web scraping/data collection in my free time; so, if you're a student, researcher who needs some unique or unusual data for your research, specific task or whatever, let me know! I'm not going to collect the whole wiki, but something realistic can be done; I do not promise to ship it immediately, but I'll do my best. One caveat - I'll post scraped dataset on Kaggle for showcasing but it can be done after finishing the job/research/paper so it cannot be a "private" option.

Question

Hey Guys! I am a rising freshman at college majoring in Biology. I was iust wonderina if it is acceptable to email professors over the summer(mavbe end of Julv for research opportunities/positions in their for the fall semester? I don't want to come off as a kiss-ass or annoving student to the professors before I even step foot onto campus. However, I truly am interested in research and it is quite applicable to my future aspirations.

Thanks for anv advice

What types of articles should I include while writing a qualitative systematic review on psychology & sexology? Would be grateful for tips. Can I only include qualitative studies or would it also be nice to include clinical trials? help

Today I came across some very exciting news. Apparently arXiv is going to issue a one-year-ban on all papers containing obvious AI hallucinations including but not limited to:
- obvious AI text (e.g. “Here’s an intro for your paper . . ."
- Fake citations
- Placeholder text

I am obviously all for that! I still remember the time when arXiv was at least somewhat reliable. I am however not sure how this will go in terms of implementation.

An admin mentioned the use of standard AI detection algorithms, I am firmly against that since they falsely flag good text as AI all the time. I’m not sure if there’s a definitive way to search for AI use in a database of 2.5 million papers and be in good faith.

Here are some implementation questions I personally have:
- How do we distinguish between a hallucination and an error in a citation (say instead of Anna Sampera, one puts Arthur Sampera. Is that AI or human sloppiness?)
- What if they caught their mistake and amended it in a next version (this one I think they should be pardoned)
- What if there are clear signs of AI use but left in LaTeX comments?
- What if someone was unknowingly added as a co-author to a paper that gets banned
- Should cases be classified by severity so that the lesser offenders just have the opportunity to amend their mistakes and get a strike?

All the above said I’m cautiously optimistic.

Hi everyone,

I’m a medical student currently working on an umbrella review and I’ve reached the data extraction stage. I would really appreciate guidance from researchers who have experience with umbrella reviews or meta-research in medicine.

After my secondary screening I have around 20-25 articles (some only systematic reviews others have done meta analysis as well). Some of the metas have included the same 3-4 RCTS for the most part and there's quite a lot of overlap.

I am confused between running a qualitative synthesis (including all srs and srmas and just qualitatively reporting data) OR including only meta analysis and running a meta-meta analysis. What should help me decide the right approach for my data?

If I choose to go for meta - meta analysis ,which metas to choose when significant overlap. Thankyou

Hello,

I’m looking for conversation classes focused on discussing scientific articles—covering aspects such as the research questions, methodology, and the broader context or current state of the field.

Ideally, I’d like something similar to working with a tutor, where sessions are interactive and centered on critical analysis and discussion rather than formal lectures. I would, of course, be happy to pay for this type of service.

I was wondering if anyone knows of platforms, tutors, or programs that offer this kind of training.

Thank you in advance :)

Ik the title sounds wierd but I want to do research on seeing if old synth technology can make mordern dubstep sounds.

How do I start doing research because nothing similar has been done before afaik so I won't have any guide and haven't done research myself before.