I'd like to know if your library uses a standard format to respond to literature search requests, and if so what that format looks like. I am particularly interested in hearing from those in academic or medical libraries.

I need to screen a candidate biomrker across severl tumor types plus normal controls, but building individual slides fr eacch case would take too much. Someone suggested a TMA but I've never ordered one before. What actually matters when picking a vendor for this?

Hello everyone! I was trying to learn more about this journal before I submit anything but I have found a lack of reviews/recognition online. That is not a problem for me, my goals are centered around a free, safe (not predatory), and relatively quick response time (8-12 weeks) rather than recognition or prestige. Here is the link to the journal:

https://www.ijrcom.org/index.php/ijrc/announcement

Can anyone who has either submitted here or just has experience in research/submission provide any insight if this a valid journal?

Any help is appreciated, thank you!

Early-career researcher here, almost a year out of my PhD. Research background and interests are broadly in kinesiology. Have a decent academic record comprising of 8 published outputs, 3 of which are first author.

Was on the North American academic job market this year, but couldn't land an offer unfortunately. Don't really have a strong network of mid-career and seasoned researchers; have found academia, in my field at least, to be insular and isolating especially as a person of color.

Confidence is currently low as I've had to work independently in my home country and don't have institutional support to grow consistently as a researcher and educator. Former supervisor and most committee members are unresponsive now as I'm no longer a grad student, so I have no reliable, trusted and accessible source of mentorship. I'm not inclined to follow up with them as they've not shown any interest in staying connected and also might not have the bandwidth to provide further mentorship at this point.

Reaching out here for genuine help and advice regarding the below points:

1) How do ECRs in similar circumstances manage to get mentors to collaborate on projects and grow their research portfolio? Traveling to conferences to meet professors and researchers is not an option due to how expensive they are. Also, most valuable conferences happen in Global North locations. I really want to be a part of collaborative applied research projects that do meaningful work and build long-term relations with senior authors.

2) Without an active institutional affiliation or current mentors with academic jobs, how do young researchers navigate ethics/IRB applications when wanting to do empirical projects?

3) Any actionable, specific advice on how to efficiently and independently create high-impact publications (empirical, conceptual, theoretical, reviews) that get more visibility and can advance one's profile? This is assuming I have to write papers by myself if finding collaborative opportunities is difficult/not possible. Having a strong record will help me land an academic job next cycle.

Trolls and chronically online toxic folks with nothing valuable to add can skip this.

Thank you

I have currently taken a drop year and I wish to gain more knowledge apart from academics before joining any iiser or medical college but I have no idea where to start from. Kindly suggest good sources of research papers I should read and also internships or courses I can apply to. P.S. I have completed class 12th this year securing 90.2%, pcmb, scored 438 in reneet and 131 in iat.

Thank you.

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone has successfully exported multiple condition or procedure concept sets into a single Data Snapshot in Workbench 2.

In my current setup in Data Explorer, I've selected ~20 different condition concepts and multiple procedure concepts, but the snapshot summary only shows one condition (Photosensitivity) under condition_occurrence and one procedure (Endoscopy) under procedure_occurrence. Multiple survey questions, on the other hand, seem to combine correctly into a single survey_occurrence table.

I've spent hours trying different things with no luck. Not sure if I'm missing something or if this is just a limitation of Data Snapshots. If anyone has gotten this to work, I'd really appreciate the help. Thanks in advance!

Note: I am NOT asking the fine folks here to engage in this survey.

Hey guys I’m currently working on an equation, and I have a base model set up but I need to survey people in order to calibrate the weights of the equation. Issue is, however, I am not sure how to get enough people to make this equation to be large enough to state the average person’s feelings on each variable. Furthermore the survey has to do with fear and such uncomfortable feelings.

So where should I look for a large enough scale of people?

Essentially, I have been applying to a range of research positions from research assistant to research co-ordinator. Yet, I haven't been able to secure even an interview.

I have a couple years of experience as a volunteer research assistant in different teams, have 3 publications (1 as a first author). I also hold a masters in public health. Yet, I can't seem to get into any paid positions. Despite tailoring my resume and cover letter for each position, I still haven't been able to break into a paid research role. I'm trying to better understand what principal investigators and hiring managers are actually looking for in candidates for academic and industry research positions, and whether there are specific skills or experiences I should be emphasizing more effectively.

Hey r/research, I’m a software engineer working on extracting clean structured data from ugly scientific PDFs, think multi-level headers, merged cells, nested row labels, footnotes mixed into labels, repeated subheaders, broken text layers, and scanned physical documents.

There are some decent tools in this space, specifically I've been building on top of PyMuPDF, Camelot, GMFT/Table Transformer, and img2table. Each has different strengths, so I’m combining them in a hybrid pipeline instead and trying to heuristically select the best results on a table by table basis, axis by axis basis.

It’s working pretty well so far, and on clean tables the existing tools do most of the work by themselves, where it breaks down is gross PDFs, the ones that when you try to copy and paste from it chrome freaks out and the text comes out all wrong, or you cant select it at all.

Currently from my test set I can recover the complete physical structure of a nasty 54-row table from a medium res scanned image. This specific test is one that all of the tools I'm building on fail in isolation, but using them as an ensemble my system is recovering it correctly. One of the more interesting cases has a symptom score with nested Pain, Burning, Paraesthesiae, and Numbness underneath it, and that hierarchy comes through correctly instead of being flattened into unrelated rows.

I’m looking for more hard cases so I can find where it still under performs, any cases with ugly merged headers, interrupted sections, image-only scans, corrupted symbols, enormous tables, or layouts that make no sense are all welcome.

Unfortunately, since I'm an engineer not a researcher, I don't have any kind of journal access, so anything you want to share would need to be open access. DOI, PMID, or direct PDF link would be ideal.

Hey, if you read to this point, thank you, and please help me break my code.

I proposed a research problem to my supervisor, and they replied:

"It's the same thing. Promising, but missing depth. Just take some time to investigate it, please."

At first, I thought "depth" meant that the idea itself was shallow. However, when I asked what they meant, they replied:

"You will know what the depth is once you do the research and read the related papers and check what has been done. You will know the techniques, approaches, pros and cons of each, etc."

I'm still struggling to understand what depth means.

How is this related to defining a research problem, and why is it necessary? If the idea is already promising, why do I need to develop more depth before starting? Couldn't I simply begin working on it and discover that depth as I go? What am I missing?

My university library does not have access to few subscription articles I am seeking. Is there any alternative way to access them? other than Annas archive.

Hey everyone, I’m an engineering student transitioning into research with a year of independent robotics experience. Since my university has no robotics programs or faculty, I want to know the most systematic way to approach students or labs at other institutions to co-author a paper, and what my realistic chances of getting published are through this route.

We are currently looking for suppliers or sellers of Polymeric MDI (Isocyanate Binder) suitable for the production of partition boards for our school research project.

If you know a reliable supplier or have this product available, we would greatly appreciate your recommendations.Thank you very much for your assistance.

hey everyone, i'm a nursing student entering my fourth year, and i'm interested in getting involved in research as a research assistant. i've been cold emailing researchers at the research institute affiliated with the hospital where i'm currently completing an externship.

luckily, i was able to secure a meeting tomorrow with the institute's scientific director, and i'm honestly pretty nervous because I've never done research before (besides in my courses). this is what she said in her email:
"Let's have a quick meeting so I can understand your research interests."

for those of you who have been in similar meetings (or who mentor students), what kinds of questions should i expect? how can i make a good impression despite having no prior research experience? is it okay to be honest that I'm still exploring my interests, and how would you recommend framing that? any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thank you!🙏

Hi people, I am a student helping an institute, and I was given a task to write sections for a literature review. Sections are already themed and named. I know the topic and what is happening in general, but I am really struggling to start writing. From my understanding I just read a ton of papers and then regurgitate it all i one text with references? My field of research is biology if that is relevant.

Hi reddit!

So my bg is from psychology. I graduated in 2025 with my bs Psychology degree. Past year I've been trying to get admission somewhere (and i did get at a lot of places abroad) but it was extremely expensive for me. I applied for many jobs too but no reaponse so I started self studying maths, statistics and data science. That's just for the context for the missing year.

So, i was reached out by one of my research coordinators from my previous uni a few months back. She wanted me to work with her as an RA on a project relating to paternal nutrient deficiency and neural circuitry. She was collaborating with a research lab at another local (but one of the top) unis in the country. I was just given a concept paper and told to do everything else (since my coordinator is also from psychology bg, she had no idea about any of the wetlab procedures and PI was busy mostly so i had to go through a lot of literature to design a methodology and understand what does what). We're also applying for a grant with it so I'd say im working really hard on it. While working on it, i came across another gap in the literature and decided to write my own proposal and apply to international labs for ms research.

Now my question is, with my bg in psychology only and a bs thesis in computational psychology, would it be possible for PIs to accept my proposal? I mean i have zero wetlab experience and i wasn't interested in this at all a few months ago. But since the RA-ship, i got hooked.

I have a detailed proposal, almost 13-15 pages long. Im still trying to finalize it but i just want to know if i have any chance of acceptance

The gap i found requires extensive research. So I've sort of designed the ms proposal as a proof-of-concept for phd, where the entire thing would be covered. And for the reason why my bs thesis is in computation and now im shifting towards wetlab, it's because i learnt computation and all the maths and stats on my own, but i cant do that with wetlab procedures. Eventually, I'd like to combine both my skills in my research journey

I can’t recall if it was this subreddit or another one, or even the post this came from (it was a couple weeks ago now), but anyway

I was reading comments on a post and one commenter said something along the line of “i have a document called ‘research acorns’ with ideas of research study topics that i think could be interesting to look into more but haven’t put in energy to do yet”

I thought it was a brilliant idea and immediately created my own “research acorns” note to dump those random ideas/questions that come to mind, when i’m not at a computer or in research mode already

just thought if anyone’s else’s mind is like mine where it jumps around on topics constantly and suddenly thinks “oh that could be interesting research” then maybe this would entertain/inspire you too lol

I do research/consult on my own outside of my full time job(currently a pipeline management that audits data and data system). A PI gave me data who he admitted may not be good and had to kick the person whose data it is off the team. I had to essentially beg the person that did the previous stage of analysis for the exact cells/stack/frame. She was getting frustrated and still I had to assist(met multiple times over zoom And expressed i couldn’t confirm her cells at all stages) and ensure I was using the exact data she used.

Anyways I do my analysis gave the result and the PI said MY data is wrong. Lol I’m an industry raised analyst and I professionally said I beg your pardon. now my analysis can very much be wrong but I also saved every intermediate step of my produced data also my analysis can be reproduced from the same data given to me. Even when I accidentally didn’t save an intermediate step, I re-ran from the previous step and generated the intermediate step and used that data. AND I shared that I did this to the group and noted that using the same data from the previous step, when I reran it the data changed. I chose data integrity first above all so All stages of my analysis can be reproduced!

lol like I value data. i build databases. my job that I get paid is to notice when the data changes and validate it with policy and update policy. I have degrees in biology, statistics and computer science. I’m methodical at my very core 😂nah I let a lot of disrespect slide but baby I said excuse you. I want to be a pathologist so like when I say I don’t play. AND research helped me navigate complex health issues.

Should I include library parameters, such as document-frequency filtering, embedding model names, and other parameters in conference papers?.

Final revision to appear on arXiv on Tuesday.

https://iconoclasts.blog/joe/triple-products

The new new here is that the original conjecture is now established as a pair of corollaries.

i found a paper and wondered if I could expand it into a different context. Although specific parts of the paper may exist in that context, the actual framework detailed in the paper hasn't been expanded to that context.

Is this fine?

Anyone else struggling with getting non-hallucinated lit reviews from LLMs and battling vague research topics that lead nowhere?

Would really appreciate any input on how y'all are managing this.

Hi, I'm an Electrical Engineer and have been working as a Design Engineer for the past 4 years. My long-term goal is to do a PhD in the same field.

The problem is, I don't really have any research experience. Apart from my undergraduate thesis, everything I've done has been industry work. My current job doesn't involve research or publications, and I feel like I'm falling behind because of that.

I keep seeing PhD applicants with papers, research assistantships, or master's research, while I have none of those. It honestly makes me wonder where someone like me is supposed to start.

Has anyone here been in a similar situation? How did you get your first research opportunity? Is reaching out to professors for volunteer research work a realistic option? Should I focus on getting into a research-based master's first?

I'd really appreciate any advice from people who made the jump from industry to academia, or anyone who has been through this process.

Thanks in advance!

I'm an undergraduate and I just sent my first draft of a lit review to my PI. Obviously, I know it's going to be heavily edited and I'll probably get sent back to rewriting most of it. That got me thinking: is there a bottom line of how bad a first draft can be? And if anyone had any experiences they would like to share about this lol. I'm quite nervous to get it back...

I am not talking about researchers online. This is specifically researchers you know in real life. They were your junior, senior, or maybe sat right next to you in class.

I am interested in the stories. What did they do?

For reference: when I think of a researcher contributing, I think of someone that has practically invented/discovered something through successful contribution to studies into something.