 Thank you everyone for your presence and I'm delighted to present on how to write research papers. As you can understand this is such an important area and somehow it doesn't get the importance that it deserves. And in today's presentation I'll be talking about the structure of a research paper, what are the elements that we should be bothered about, and also about certain writing tips and how to write titles, how to write abstracts, and issues regarding plagiarism and citations and of course about finding the right journals. So let's have this discussion for the next 40-45 minutes. And whenever we are writing we must be aware or whatever we do as communicators we must be aware of who is our target audience and who are we trying to impress. Although in communication the expression is the important part but of course these are very important people, the general editors who are the gatekeepers who decide whether a certain thing go to print or not, the peer reviewers, the most important gatekeepers there, of course scholars and academicians because they are the ones who decide whether to cite your work or not. And if you are lucky then you are also trying to impress the professionals who might get certain inputs from your work and also policy makers. These are the objectives we generally have before we start writing news reports or these should be the objectives. Of course getting cited is very important because that's why we do our research work that somebody will find it interesting or will take the research forward or will use parts of the research for their own work and we want to provide an original contribution to our field, whatever field we are writing for. And as I said before we are trying to influence the practitioners and the policy makers as well. So there are lots and lots of advice about writing a research paper and I start off with a very simple one by George M. Whitesides and he says let's start with a blank piece of paper and write down in any order all important ideas that occur to you concerning the paper. So we'll talk about how to do this outlining but it's important that whenever that idea strikes us or whenever it comes to us we must make sure that we jot it down on a piece of paper or on your mobile notepad or wherever. For these structuring things I'm going to follow this particular work by Branch and Cording and it's called 10 simple rules for structuring paper. So I'll talk about those 10 simple rules and it is from a paper on computational biology on PLOS but it's extremely useful for other fields as well. So I'm just talking about these 10 rules that these writers talk about Mench and Cording and this is a very popular rule that people cite whenever they're talking about research papers. First of all focus your paper on a central contribution and that must be communicated in the title as well and that is important that if you forget the central contribution then the paper becomes unreadable for everybody for the editor, for the peer reviewer and of course for the reader and then your work is lost in the mesh. Right for flesh and blood human beings who do not know your work so you must have the expert in mind of course we have the expert in mind because we know that the editor is going to read it or the reviewer is going to read it but it is also for people who do not know your work so the aim is to also make people read your work. If you are not reading your work then your work is not important it will just be one of the many in the field. The third rule that these authors suggest is to stick to the context, content and conclusion so the context is what we'll keep in mind and the content and the conclusion as well. In fact the structure that I'm going to talk about the IMRD structure in a moment's time we will find that it's resonated there as well. The fourth rule, optimize your logical flow by avoiding those zigzag and using parallelism so parallelism is like the same kind of styles if you're having three research questions or whatever then answering them one after the other they do not advise us to go into that zigzag form or going to the subplots and coming back and so on and so forth. As you can understand there are so many things to talk about this so I don't want to get into each of these rules separately and as you can understand we can have one full presentation on just these ten rules. The fifth and a very, very important rule and I will emphasize on that as I go along is about telling a complete story in the abstract being very, very careful about how you write the abstract because that is where people decide whether to read it or whether to take it forward and so on and so forth. So writing a complete story in the abstract is a very important rule to follow. And another very important rule is about the introduction and very often we are not even aware of what the introduction should have. So we will talk in details about what are the elements that we require to put into a research paper introduction. Then delivering the results as a sequence of statements supported by figures that connect logically to support the central contribution. So we'll find out that the result section is also a very, very important section and it has to have the sequence of statements and I will talk in details about how to do that. The discussion part is again one part where we have to provide how the gap was filled. So we started doing this research in the first place because we had identified certain gaps or we wanted to provide inputs into certain things. So how that particular gap was filled for example and the limitations and we'll talk about limitations also, interpretation and relevance to the field. So these are important things in discussions. Often we are so engrossed in the first three parts that we do not give discussion the importance it deserves. Rule nine, a very, very important rule, allocate time where it matters. The title, the abstract, the figures and the outlining. So you'll find that many researchers that do not put so much stress on these particular things. So that's a very important piece of advice on the title, on abstract, on figures and on outlining. And in today's presentation, I'm going to talk about abstract titles and outlining in details. Getting feedback, we'll talk about why that is important. And the same authors, they say that if that rule is violated, how do you know about it? So the first rule was about the focusing on the big idea and if that is violated, readers cannot give a one-sentence summary. So that's one important thing that if people cannot summarize your work in one or two sentences, then it's too diffused and you're not doing a good job. The second important thing to, or the second thing that we saw in the last slide was about writing for flesh and blood human beings. So readers do not get the paper. If people do not understand your paper, then very few people are going to read it. And as readers or as writers, we don't want that. Use context content and conclusion. So the triple C structure as I said. So readers ask why something matters or what it means. So if you're not providing the context and the content and the conclusion, then people don't have an idea about why it matters. So when we are talking from the perspective of audience, the idea is to tell writers that what you should consider important. Optimize the logical flow. So if people stumble on a small section of the text, that's where you have failed on the logical flow. So this fourth rule, again, I'm repeating and how that is important. The fifth abstract, it has to be a compact summary of the paper. If people do not get the elevator pitch of your work after reading the elevator pitch, means they want to get to read the paper. So if people do not decide on reading the paper of the abstract, then your abstract is not useful. Introduction, as I said, the most important part of the paper and we'll have to put a lot more stress on introduction because that's where the interest grows for the reader. The results, why the conclusions are justified and if you are readers or if people, our peers, they do not agree with our conclusion, then the result section is not what it should be. Same for discussion and the other points. So these are the 10 points as we suggested is important for any person who's wanting to write a research paper. So let's now start in from the outline. So how do we bring out the outline? As I said, different people have different ways of working, but whenever we are planning to write anything, whether it's a chapter, whether it's a paper or even a dissertation, we must have an outline in mind. And if you're working without an outline, there are many people who say that it's not required. But if you're working systematically, it's important to understand these things about outlines. So how do you write an outline? So first of all, you start off with the topic. What is the idea in a single sentence or phrase? If that is convoluted, then you're probably lost. So first of all is the main idea. And from that main idea, you get to the main points about the main idea or about the topic. So why or how is the main idea important and why or how is it right? So that is how I get the main points. If I answer these questions, then I'll get a lot of these main points. So we start off with the topic and then we go to the main points and suggest why or how these main points are important. So after you get the main points, important to arrange them in a logical order one after the other. Because if there is no logical flow, then you'll struggle to write down or you'll struggle to take it forward. And beneath each of these major ideas, we must have sub points. And many authors suggest that if you do not have at least two points for each of the main ideas. So main ideas means the main point I was talking here in the second point. So that should have at least two sub points. And if you do not have at least two sub points, then that idea may not be relevant to the topic. We are not just trying to fill up the spaces. It should have certain reason. And you must afterwards evaluate the outline. So it is always a reflective process. It's not that the first draft is what works. So we have to evaluate the outline, look over the outline. Does it make sense? Is anything else required? So that is how we go to the outline. So again, I got it from a work by Lidesau. So this is how they suggest that this is how we work on the outline structure. We start off with Roman numerals. Then we go to the capital letters. Then we go to these Arabic numbers, one, two, three, et cetera. Then to the small letters. And then finally to the small Roman numerals. So you have this one, two, three, four, five structure. The Microsoft word does not follow this particular structure, but this is one idea to make your work more systematic that when you are creating that outline structure, the main idea be through Roman numerals and then this is how you carry forward. After the outline, et cetera, this process actually begins at various positions. It can be at the end of your work. It can be right at the beginning of the work, but I'm just putting in today's presentation. I'm just putting it here because later on there are more important things to talk about. So identifying the right journal is very important. So what are the aims of the journal? Because a lot of the time our work gets rejected at the desk. It is not even sent for peer review because your work does not fall with the aim of the journal. So it's very important to go to their website and find out what do they aim to do and the style and the format of the journal. What are the audience that they're looking forward to? They are catering to and then the ethical guidelines and data sharing because in many journals, they have an open data policy where you'll have to put out your data if it's a survey data or whatever. You'll have to put it out on their website and if anybody wants to do a similar work, they can draw their conclusions from there. So it depends on various journals. So important to identify the right journal and to familiarize yourself with the journals in the field as well. And this is a question that we ask or we get to know very often about, you know, people asking that which journal should I publish. So it's important to look for journals that have published content similar to yours and which are the journals which appear most in the list of citations because if you're publishing in journals which are not the ones that get cited, then probably you shouldn't be looking for such journals. And of course there are many other factors and I don't want to get into all of that but there are journals which are open access, which are not. There is a question about the prestige of the journal as I said about indexed, whether it is indexed in scopers or on Web of Science or whether it is on the care list or whatever. Impact factor, you shouldn't be much bothered about impact factors because there are lots of problems there. So we will talk about that at a later time. The publication time required and the likelihood of acceptance. So I'll carry on with this presentation. So the factors as I said is about the scopers index. Then it's also about the directory of open access and the care thing as individuals should be concerned about because our work, if it's not in one of these journals and probably it's... So the UGC is now having these two groups. The first is a group one which is there in the UGC care protocol. The second is the one which is indexed in scopers or in Web of Science or in social sciences index or these kind of indices. So that's how we identify the journal. So that shouldn't be a very tough process. So often the paper as I said will not make it to the peer review process because there are some fatal flaws in your paper. So we must be very clear about identifying those fatal flaws even before sending it out to a journal because if it does not get into the peer review process then that learning process that you can go through just by getting the response to your paper is lost. So this is one hurdle that we must cross and if you are aware of the journal policies and all those things then you can avoid desk rejection. So what happens to desk rejection is that maybe an assistant editor or whatever he or she decides that, okay, this is not good enough to be sent for peer review. So that is the first gate keeping is that that process that the person decides whether it is good enough to be sent for peer review. Peer review as you can understand it, it will go to a senior colleague who's regarded as an expert in the field and he or she will peer review it. And there are lots of apprehensions about peer review and this is a funny diagram that I found out in one of those sites and this is what people have an idea about that. You are the writer and as you can understand that, you know, this stereotype is quite an old person and he or she wants to get the paper accepted. This is the goal and this is what they have to contend with or at least that is what most authors think of peer review as. These are the people who are, you know, waiting with all their weapons to, you know, kind of prevent us from getting the paper accepted or at least that is the idea. Or as you can understand, this is one funny way of looking at peer review but it's a tough process as you can understand. It's time consuming and a lot of times, you know, a lot of authors, all of us, you know, have faced lots of rejections and that's where, you know, a lot of frustration creeps and so on and so forth. But peer review process is very, very important in any field and that's, there are certain reasons and this is again, you know, from one of the works by Haymes 2008 and one of the reasons that we have peer review in such systematic forms is to prevent the publication of bad work. So if bad work gets published, then you understand the problem and that's where, you know, it might lead to some of the vicious circles and also to check that the research has been carried out well. So the methodology, et cetera, they have been carried out well. Also that the results have been presented correctly and they are not too speculative and it's for general interest to the readership and the peer review process is also to help editors decide or to make judgments on as to whether the articles meet the selection criterion or not. So generally the peer review process is not as combative as it appears from this picture, but it has some very, very important functions in the publication process. So as writers, we must be aware of these requirements. So again, another quote says that if the abstract is of interest, the editor next looks to the method section. So method section is again a very important part. So we'll talk about the method section and so on and so forth. So the next few slides, they are from, again, this paper on how to write your first research paper. This is where Elena De Kalistinova and every good writing class on research papers or on articles talks of these four structures, some people call it as the IMRAD imbred structure or many of us we call it as the IMRD structure. So this is what your paper should have. First of all, the introduction, why did you do it? Why did you do the research? The method section, how did you do it? Results, what did you find? And discussion, so what? Why should we be interested? So if you can conceptualize the writing process into these four parts, then a lot of the trouble is taken care of. If you know why you did it and if you are able to put it out in the introduction of why you did it or into the method section very clearly on how you did it. But as you can understand, this is just a very simplistic way of talking about a very complex thing and I will talk about all these four sections in details right now. So most of our theoretical, most of our social science papers and papers in other fields also, they will follow this IMRD structure. There are some theoretical papers which does not follow this IMRD structure. So just a caveat that this is not a kind of a rule that has to be there all the time. There might be historical review articles or there might be some review articles which talk about current work and there might be some historical paper that do not follow that IMRD process. So if you're writing some historical work, then you do not have to follow this particular process or when you're writing these systematic review articles, whether you are proposing a theory or whatever, even there in these theoretical works, you do not have to talk about the IMRD process. So that's not something that is as in gold. So it is something that can be avoided in certain cases, but we should know what we're doing and that's one, if you're aware of the traditions in the field, then we'll be probably clear about that. So just to talk about this, and I will go to this in greater detail. So as you can see, the introduction takes a long part of it. So just the width of these quadrilaterals, it gives you an idea about how much importance is given to all these things. So the introduction is quite important as you can see. And then the methods and the results section and you can see they are related to each other. They are slightly thinner and then the discussion part is again very thicker. So in the introduction part, we go from a general discussion to a specific discussion. So it could be from general theoretical work and going on to the specific. And in the discussion part, we will actually do the opposite. We have our specific results and from those specific results, we are trying to generalize it into our field or we are having those components of discussion. And I will talk in details about these four sections or these four structures of IMRD. So again, just to go back to the outlining part and to talk about how do we look at the introduction now. So I am looking at all these four parts separately now, starting with introduction. So the first line is about what is the topic of my paper. And we have seen earlier and I am just trying to emphasize on those things again. Why is the topic important? How do I formulate my hypothesis? What are my results and what is my major finding? So why is your research important? What is known about the topic? What are your hypotheses and what are your objectives? They all go into the introduction. So very often we think that introduction is just like, you know, something that we just have a general talk about and then we will talk about or these are just two or three phases. We just fill in just like that. No, we have to put in all the important things right at the introduction. Why is your research important? What is known about the topic? What are your research questions or whatever? What are the objectives that you want to achieve through the paper? So this is again a very useful piece of advice. Interest your reader in the introduction section by signaling all its elements and stating the novelty of the work. Why is your work new? Why should I be reading it? Why should I be interested in going forward with your work? So the fact that this work hasn't been done before is not reason enough. And very often when you ask people that why you are doing this research, they say that, oh, there is nothing that has been done there. Maybe you don't know that there is a lot of things. So that is not enough. The fact that there is not enough data, even that is not justification enough. You have to know what, why is it important? And that's important. So what is the value of the research? Just because nobody's done it before is not reason enough. And don't just list what people have done in the past but discuss why it is interesting. So we are not going to just chronologically list about, you know, Mr. X did that and Mr. Y did that and Mr. Z did that. No, we have to talk about the issues and why they are interesting. And it's better not to exaggerate or to speculate that this is the first research of its kind and so on and so forth. And we'll talk about academic modesty also as we go along. So this again is from these established works. So first of all, in introduction they talk about these three moves. So the first one is to establish a research territory. So when you establish the research territory, you have to show that the general research area that you talk about is important, is interesting, and there are certain problems which need to be addressed. And you have to introduce and review items of some previous research in the area as well. So that's how you establish a research territory in the introduction. And then the second thing that you do in the introduction is to find a niche to indicate a gap in the previous research that, okay, they have done this research, but it was not in respect to social media or it was not in respect to a post-COVID world or things like that. So finding a niche means looking at that gap or extending previous knowledge in a new way. So if you do not find a niche, then your work can't be just repetitive of what has been done earlier. So that niche can be of many, many times, it can be this is from a Western perspective I'm doing it in the Indian perspective. Okay, it has been done in the North Indian perspective I'm doing it in this or whatever. So that finding that a niche is very important after you have established a research territory in the introduction. And then you occupy the niche. And that's where you outline the purposes of your research. Then you list your research questions. Then you announce the principal findings. It will be principal, P-A-L. And then you state the value of the present research and the structure of the research paper that this is what we do. And this has to be in the introduction. As you understand, introduction is a very thick part of it. So it has to be there in the introduction part. I mean, it can't be just a few paragraphs about, you know, why the research is important, so on and so forth. So the introduction should have all these things. And if your paper is not structured like that, then peer reviews and editors who are used to reading quality papers of this kind, they will find some kind of a fatal flaw if your structure does not have that. So this is just, I've copied it from one introduction just to read it out, just to say that. In this paper, I describe a field test of Cross's multi-method approach to the construction of a culturally grounded measure for older people in Thailand as a step-by-step elitist, et cetera. So it has to give people an idea about what, you know, the paper is about. And as a reviewer, this is again by Smogorovski in 2008. If I can't reconstruct the author's means of collecting, reducing and analyzing data, then I have little faith that later on it will be responsible and consistent. So important to have, as he said, important to find the opening theoretical gambit to be compelling. So you have to make it compelling at the introduction phase itself. So just to emphasize the importance of introduction. And from there, I go to the method section. So if you see this diagram, so we will come back to this diagram again from introduction. We have gone to the methods section. So very quickly, the methods must provide an overview of the work you've done and about the research aims that this is what I wanted to get or these were the research questions, et cetera. And who were the subjects? If you did an experiment, you have to talk about, you know, whether you took people from an undergraduate course or this or that or whatever, or whatever materials, you know, if you used documents or if you used other kind of textual matter or whatever, it has to be there. What was the location? Did you actually, you know, do it on a software or you went there and you spoke to people? It was on field. It was online, so on and so forth. It has to be there. The procedure, how you exactly did that. And then the limitation and the data analysis. So as you can understand it, it is a very, very structured way of writing the methods. Again, you start off with the overview. You provide the research aims. You provide whoever your subjects or whatever documents, et cetera, you've used. You provide the location, the procedure you did it, the way you did it. And then you also talk about the limitation of that. So in fact, if your sampling was, you know, for example, just wasn't random, we have to provide it there. And then we talk about the data analysis process there as well in the method section. So very, very important part of the research paper structure. So we provide useful background knowledge, you know, in the method section because it has to be elaborated. So we describe the procedural steps. We include justification that to determine this, we did that or, you know, these kind of things because that elaboration is important. That justification has to be provided there in the paper using cognitive or volition where we believed or we wanted to or we understood and so on and so forth. So what are the assumptions that you had in the method section? So again, as I said, this, when you follow this structure, it becomes a lot easier for anybody who is reading it. So this is again, you know, one way of suggesting that you provide the background information, then you summarize the, so I'm talking about the results, then we talk about the comments and we talk about the limitations and also about the recommendations. So let me just talk about this in a different way. So after the methods part, we started off with the introduction part and we told you that it's so important. We did the methods part and now we are in the results part and I'm just showing you some examples of, you know, how to, these are just one sentences and as I said in the earlier slide, you have to provide a lot more justification for your results as you go on. So analysis showed that 70.5% of students had access to both desktop and a desktop laptop computer while only 0.6% of students had access to neither. As you can understand that as a social science scholar, we have to follow a particular style which is known as the APS style and I have another lecture on my YouTube channel on how to use APS style. So you can have a look at that. But these are just ways of, you know, talking about subordinators, about talking, you know, using phrase linkers in contrast to the false positives, the false negative rate improves when the distance threshold. So this is just about some research we are talking about conjunctions, for example, the results of some observers were poor but of others were satisfactory and then you write the table. More likely than, less likely than women are more likely to have given the most pro-neighbourhood answer or things like that. The results shown are very much like that. During the study period, both cities and suburbs are like. So when you're using these particular terms, your results are very clear to whoever is reading and, you know, whether you're trying to relate it or whether you're trying to put it in absolute terms. So just a very quick example of the terms or the phrases that we can use in results and we can also, you know, include steps of procedures which are required to maybe that, you know, following the method section, again, and any other detail is required there or not. And I've spoken about the words so I won't, I will skip that particular word from there. And then we come to the most important part or one of the most important parts after the introduction part and that is the discussion part. So discussion part has to be these things. It has to be more theoretical because as we saw in the earlier diagram, it has to go from a specific to general. So it has to be more theoretical. It has to talk in more abstract terms. It has to talk in more general terms. It has to be more integrated with the entire field and with the entire world and also with the implications and applications of the study. So that is where you are describing your research or you're telling you, you know, why the research is important in a general kind of a way. And very often these questions are asked of, you know, research especially from that, how is it relevant to a western perspective or things like that. So you have to connect it to the real world or integrate it to the field at large. And you also have to discuss the limitations of the study and I will talk about limitations in a more general way in a moment's time. So the discussion is an important, a very important part. So just like I did with the introduction, I want to talk about the three moves there. So first of all, the study is major findings of your study and the meaning and importance of those findings. And whether there is an alternative explanation because, you know, that's my explanation. So whether there is an alternative explanation and why that explanation is true or not true. So you are, you know, trying to cover all bases if I can use that metaphor. And then the research context where you compare and contrast your findings with other published results, whether it is similar, whether it is different so on and so forth. So that's very important. Again, you know, explaining any discrepancies or any unexpected findings because that is what is expected. And, you know, generally when we are doing research, we want to find any unexpected finding and, you know, so that, you know, people make notice of this. But again you have to be able to justify and explain those unexpected findings. And if you cannot do that, then there will be question marks on your findings. So stating the limitation as I again said has to be there in the discussion also. And then you close the paper by summarizing the answers to the research questions you had initially. And then indicating the importance of the work by applications or how it can be applied into the professional field or in the real world and whether there are any recommendations or whether there are any implications of the research process. So again, an example of, you know, how discussion is written, but we will skip this, you know, reading that. So this is just there on the screen. If you want to read, you can just, you know, have it on the recording. Limitations again, very important. And we have to, you know, be aware of the limitations ourselves before those questions are raised by others. So it should be noted that this study has been primarily concerned with. So we did not do it for everybody with that. The analysis has concentrated on the findings restricted to. This study has addressed only the question of the limitations of the study are clear colon and then you say that you'd like to point out that we have not done it for the entire population or for a random population or things like that. So it should be written clearly. However, the findings do not imply the results of this study cannot be taken as an evidence for. I'm just telling you, these are the terminologies we use for for limitations that's important. Unfortunately, we're unable to determine from this data whether this can be extrapolated to the entire population. The lack of randomness means that we cannot be certain about the implications so on and so forth. So important that we are aware of our own limitations because as I said, you are you are not being being a modest academically. Of course, you know, you should be very confident about your work, but you must also understand that about the limitations about where, you know, it could have been done in a different way. So there we say not withstanding its limitation. This study does suggest this, or despite its preliminary character, does do that. However, exploratory, this study may offer some insight into these kind of things. So a very, very good way of, you know, signing off or ending when you do that. So just to repeat that once again, the same things that I did. So the abstract, and this is one popular figure that I share with all students and scholars and you may have seen this before as well. So the abstract, it should have all the things there itself in introduction, all the three things I spoke about of establishing a territory, establishing a niche and occupying that niche. It should be there in the introduction followed by a literature review. So that can be regarded as part of the introduction or you can regard it as if I'm talking about the IMRD structure, you can take it just between introduction and the methodology, the process of data collection, etc. And then in the discussion, we have all those three points again about introduction, about evaluation, about the conclusion. And finally acknowledgements and references. That's a normal thing. So this is a repetition of what I did so far. Now I'll talk about three or four things very quickly and basically about the title, about the abstract, about revision and about the use of English and so on and so forth. So as you can understand the structure of the paper and so on, they are so very important, but the title should be very often people write title at the end of the work. So it's important how you write down the title. So it's the naked, of course, the topic of the study, the scope of the study and should be self-explanatory to whoever it is reading. So if it is a focused work, it should be there in the title. It shouldn't be too ambitious if I can use that word. So very different of, you know, we use maybe finite words, two words and understanding of social media use or those kind of things. We use columns and I will talk about, you know, how columns are very well used and when we write down those titles, at times we use questions also. So if you search and, you know, there are lots of, there's a lot of work on that. So we can have a Google search and find out about, you know, how people just use question marks in the title. So that is a good way of inviting readers and also using of qualifications. So instead of saying towards a theory of social media use, we can say towards a possible theory of social media use. So there you are trying to, you know, as I said, covering all bases. So possible is a qualification we use. So very often in social science, we use the colon to, you know, put two different aspects of the title, you know, there. So it could be the first part of it about the problem. The second is the solution. So before the colon, you're writing about the problem and then you're writing the solution. Or before the colon, you're writing something general and then this is about specific. So an overview of agenda setting model and then a review of or, you know, a survey of Kolkata students or things like that. So this is just very crude. So it could be about topic and it could be about method. So it could be, you know, news framing, colon, a structural equation modeling method. So you're writing the topic first and then the method after the colon and maybe starting off with something major and then the minor thing after the colon. So colon is very one good way of writing down titles. As I said, abstracts are so important that they're standalone minitex and they have lots of functions where they are used for screening. They are important for readers and they are important for professional abstract writers or people who are trying to compile those abstracts. So abstracts can, you know, these are some of the beginnings I said that this is how you can beginning abstract. So you can start off with real-world phenomenon. So something like communication scholars have long been interested in the relationship between media use and credibility. So there you start off with a real-world phenomenon or it could be starting off with a purpose or an objective. The aim of the study is to examine the effects of online behavior or you can start with the present researcher action. We analyze social media use for and after the pandemic. So these are very, very simple ways of, you know, joining of starting abstracts or you can start with a problem or uncertainty. So just the first word of the abstract is as I said, so important. So this is from Sweets and Fiks book from 2009 and they have a very good book on writing for academic work. So research abstract can be result-driven or it can be a summary abstract. So it could be indicative about, you know, what was done or it could be informative that you talk about your main findings. Often they look for editors, they look for keywords, also four or five keywords and they are looking for those words to put it out to peer reviewers. So if you write those keywords, it should be specific enough but not too specific that, you know, it does not, you know, fall into certain carries. So for example, you could be talking about framing research, you could be talking about or whatever. So four or five important, most important keywords from your research which you identify yourself. So at certain times in our field, we do not have those structured abstracts but in many place we have these structured abstracts also where you have to write on the background, the the method, the results, the conclusion and all that. We have to be extremely, extremely careful about use of these published and unpublished ideas because if you do not attribute or if you do not have permission and if you do not use it properly, then you will land in big trouble. So these similarity index indices, they can be very, very confusing at times. So unless it's from, from, from, and I can use the name here, if it's from established agencies like Turnitin, a lot of those free plagiarism detecting software, they will kind of be giving you wrong results. So the same thing that very recently, I did some similarity test and I found 39% similarity on Turnitin and I did it on some other software, it was just 10% similarity. So be very careful about that. Correct citation and referencing is very, very important and because many people they think that, no, but I have taken the text and I have cited it, that's not enough because if you're taking one-third of the text from other people and you're writing your own words, then that research paper is not yours. So if you're using text from other places, you make sure that you just paraphrase it and that's important. Paraphrasing means using your own words to, to make the message and you know, and when you're using that, you make sure that you do not paraphrase the specialized vocabulary or the specialized, if I can use the term jargon. So paraphrasing is, is a very important thing. Citation is again, it's important because you know, you want to acknowledge somebody else's work, you want to show respect for previous scholars and you give your arguments greater authority because you're suggesting I have read these latest documents. So if your citations are very old, then that's you know, a question mark that you know, you haven't then, or you haven't read the recent literature on that. So the citations are very, very important and as I said, APA has a very important structures on that and I don't want to get into details on that. I've spoken on APA elsewhere. So writing, you know if it's too much that's a problem or if you're writing too formally or using too much of sophisticated language then it needs revision. So I will talk about revising the writing in the last part of today's presentation and it's important that when you create the first draft do not succumb to the temptation of editing that you know, you write the first few lines and you think that let's edit now. So that is not an advisable thing. All writers, they will ask you to just put your ideas into the paper and leave revision and editing for later. If you halt to improve your sentence structure every point of time then you are breaking down your flow of ideas and all. So whatever it is, let that ideas flow and have the revision for later on because when you're reading it later you will be reading it from a distance and that's what is important because if you are revising it while you're writing then that distance is not there. So when you're revising later on you are doing it at two levels. You're revising at a macro structure. Seeing whether all that, you know the introduction, the literature review, the methods and the discussions and the conclusion all there they are right or not and then into the micro structure looking at you know things including language and whether there is any gap or not. And this is one very simple thing. This is available on internet. Seven rules for using plain English and these are some very important rules and this is from this author aid site and you can you know go to that site as well to get an idea about all these and we've been talking about these things very often using active sentences using sentences short using U and V because you know if you're not using U and V and there was a decision then you're not saying that who did what. So avoiding jargon and you know avoid turning verbs into nouns. So English writing is all about fantastic image inducing verbs. So use these verbs instead of making it into nouns. There are reasons for that but today's session I don't have time to get into all that. And wherever possible you can get into this point wise form as well. Again you know a lot of those advice about rewriting passive sentences in active form and searching for verbs where writing is or was where and rewrite them with a more powerful verb. Because English is all about verbs and powerful verbs. So let's have as much verb as possible and there are other lot of other good advice including that you know whenever there is a which WHICH it can always be written as that and whenever there is an EFFECT effect it is generally a noun. And when it is an AFFECT effect it's a verb. So very very different ways of doing it. So as I said getting into that is a long process and another very important side that you can look for is that academic phrase bank and they have this phrase bank for all these things you know whether it's for classifying whether it's for defining terms or describing terms or describing quantities. So that's a very useful resource for anybody who's using English not as their first language. So they provide these kind of things. I've taken screenshots from that particular website. This definition allows for highlights, helps distinguish takes into account, poses a problem. This following definition intended to model down too simplistic, useful, problematic in need for revision. So we can you know have all these different ways of writing those kind of things or you know how to write those introductory phrases which can be used as a three-part definition. So the first part and then the research maybe defined as a systematic process which consists of that. A university is an institution or whatever. So they can be used as three-part definitions or if you get into habit of that then it's good for writing. So a lot of good advice on these things. So just to sum up we must have an idea about the research questions in the introduction and what why and how. So that's there in the introduction and the as I said literature review is almost a part of the introduction in many cases or we can have it as a separate structure also. Then the methodology and very important to describe your research design your procedures, the kind of data you had, the collection procedures you did, how you selected people and you know whether who are the human subjects and whether this cost and funding is not required generally at the end. And then the limitation as I said is such an important part of the research processes well. So this is from again an article called counterintuitive insights from an academic writing coach. So productivity is personal. So everybody has their own ways of looking at it. So maybe your colleagues supervisors may be wrong. So you have to have your own sweet spot of writing. So a lot of writing time does not always lead to a lot of writing. So it's a lot about you know, reading as much and doing more research is not always conducive to the success. So it's not always you know about doing it but putting it on to paper is very important. So you go on researching about those sentences again and again and again but that is not always the right thing. So too much of perfection there can be avoided. So accept that your writing practice will change over time and that has to be accepted. This is something that we do not realize and done is always better than perfect. So it's important to just keep on not you know ruminating about what is there but you know how it should be done. And dedicate less time to writing and more time to reflection because if you're not thinking about those things then you will not be able to do justice to the process. So that ends the presentation.