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Search Help

Get the most out of Google Scholar with some helpful tips on searches, email alerts, citation export, and more.

Finding recent papers

Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:

• click "Since Year" to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance;
• click "Sort by date" to show just the new additions, sorted by date;
• click the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.

Locating the full text of an article

Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here're a few things to try:

• click a library link, e.g., "FindIt@Harvard", to the right of the search result;
• click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
• click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
• click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.

If you're affiliated with a university, but don't see links such as "FindIt@Harvard", please check with your local library about the best way to access their online subscriptions. You may need to do search from a computer on campus, or to configure your browser to use a library proxy.

Getting better answers

If you're new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for "overweight" might suggest a Scholar search for "pediatric hyperalimentation".

If the search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they're citing in their "References" sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature.

Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click "Cited by" to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.

Explore! There's rarely a single answer to a research question. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" to see closely related work, or search for author's name and see what else they have written.

Searching Google Scholar

Use the "author:" operator, e.g., author:"d knuth" or author:"donald e knuth".

Put the paper's title in quotations: "A History of the China Sea".

You'll often get better results if you search only recent articles, but still sort them by relevance, not by date. E.g., click "Since 2018" in the left sidebar of the search results page.

To see the absolutely newest articles first, click "Sort by date" in the sidebar. If you use this feature a lot, you may also find it useful to setup email alerts to have new results automatically sent to you.

Note: On smaller screens that don't show the sidebar, these options are available in the dropdown menu labelled "Year" right below the search button.

Select the "Case law" option on the homepage or in the side drawer on the search results page.

It finds documents similar to the given search result.

It's in the side drawer. The advanced search window lets you search in the author, title, and publication fields, as well as limit your search results by date.

Select the "Case law" option and do a keyword search over all jurisdictions. Then, click the "Select courts" link in the left sidebar on the search results page.

Tip: To quickly search a frequently used selection of courts, bookmark a search results page with the desired selection.

Access to articles

For each Scholar search result, we try to find a version of the article that you can read. These access links are labelled [PDF] or [HTML] and appear to the right of the search result. For example:

A paper that you need to read

Access links cover a wide variety of ways in which articles may be available to you - articles that your library subscribes to, open access articles, free-to-read articles from publishers, preprints, articles in repositories, etc.

When you are on a campus network, access links automatically include your library subscriptions and direct you to subscribed versions of articles. On-campus access links cover subscriptions from primary publishers as well as aggregators.

Off-campus access

Off-campus access links let you take your library subscriptions with you when you are at home or traveling. You can read subscribed articles when you are off-campus just as easily as when you are on-campus. Off-campus access links work by recording your subscriptions when you visit Scholar while on-campus, and looking up the recorded subscriptions later when you are off-campus.

We use the recorded subscriptions to provide you with the same subscribed access links as you see on campus. We also indicate your subscription access to participating publishers so that they can allow you to read the full-text of these articles without logging in or using a proxy. The recorded subscription information expires after 30 days and is automatically deleted.

In addition to Google Scholar search results, off-campus access links can also appear on articles from publishers participating in the off-campus subscription access program. Look for links labeled [PDF] or [HTML] on the right hand side of article pages.

Anne Author , John Doe , Jane Smith , Someone Else

In this fascinating paper, we investigate various topics that would be of interest to you. We also describe new methods relevant to your project, and attempt to address several questions which you would also like to know the answer to. Lastly, we analyze …

You can disable off-campus access links on the Scholar settings page . Disabling off-campus access links will turn off recording of your library subscriptions. It will also turn off indicating subscription access to participating publishers. Once off-campus access links are disabled, you may need to identify and configure an alternate mechanism (e.g., an institutional proxy or VPN) to access your library subscriptions while off-campus.

Email Alerts

Do a search for the topic of interest, e.g., "M Theory"; click the envelope icon in the sidebar of the search results page; enter your email address, and click "Create alert". We'll then periodically email you newly published papers that match your search criteria.

No, you can enter any email address of your choice. If the email address isn't a Google account or doesn't match your Google account, then we'll email you a verification link, which you'll need to click to start receiving alerts.

This works best if you create a public profile , which is free and quick to do. Once you get to the homepage with your photo, click "Follow" next to your name, select "New citations to my articles", and click "Done". We will then email you when we find new articles that cite yours.

Search for the title of your paper, e.g., "Anti de Sitter space and holography"; click on the "Cited by" link at the bottom of the search result; and then click on the envelope icon in the left sidebar of the search results page.

First, do a search for your colleague's name, and see if they have a Scholar profile. If they do, click on it, click the "Follow" button next to their name, select "New articles by this author", and click "Done".

If they don't have a profile, do a search by author, e.g., [author:s-hawking], and click on the mighty envelope in the left sidebar of the search results page. If you find that several different people share the same name, you may need to add co-author names or topical keywords to limit results to the author you wish to follow.

We send the alerts right after we add new papers to Google Scholar. This usually happens several times a week, except that our search robots meticulously observe holidays.

There's a link to cancel the alert at the bottom of every notification email.

If you created alerts using a Google account, you can manage them all here . If you're not using a Google account, you'll need to unsubscribe from the individual alerts and subscribe to the new ones.

Google Scholar library

Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by adding labels, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere. You decide what goes into your library, and we’ll keep the links up to date.

You get all the goodies that come with Scholar search results - links to PDF and to your university's subscriptions, formatted citations, citing articles, and more!

Library help

Find the article you want to add in Google Scholar and click the “Save” button under the search result.

Click “My library” at the top of the page or in the side drawer to view all articles in your library. To search the full text of these articles, enter your query as usual in the search box.

Find the article you want to remove, and then click the “Delete” button under it.

• To add a label to an article, find the article in your library, click the “Label” button under it, select the label you want to apply, and click “Done”.
• To view all the articles with a specific label, click the label name in the left sidebar of your library page.
• To remove a label from an article, click the “Label” button under it, deselect the label you want to remove, and click “Done”.
• To add, edit, or delete labels, click “Manage labels” in the left column of your library page.

Only you can see the articles in your library. If you create a Scholar profile and make it public, then the articles in your public profile (and only those articles) will be visible to everyone.

Your profile contains all the articles you have written yourself. It’s a way to present your work to others, as well as to keep track of citations to it. Your library is a way to organize the articles that you’d like to read or cite, not necessarily the ones you’ve written.

Citation Export

Click the "Cite" button under the search result and then select your bibliography manager at the bottom of the popup. We currently support BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, and RefWorks.

Err, no, please respect our robots.txt when you access Google Scholar using automated software. As the wearers of crawler's shoes and webmaster's hat, we cannot recommend adherence to web standards highly enough.

Sorry, we're unable to provide bulk access. You'll need to make an arrangement directly with the source of the data you're interested in. Keep in mind that a lot of the records in Google Scholar come from commercial subscription services.

Sorry, we can only show up to 1,000 results for any particular search query. Try a different query to get more results.

Content Coverage

Google Scholar includes journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies and university repositories, as well as scholarly articles available anywhere across the web. Google Scholar also includes court opinions and patents.

We index research articles and abstracts from most major academic publishers and repositories worldwide, including both free and subscription sources. To check current coverage of a specific source in Google Scholar, search for a sample of their article titles in quotes.

While we try to be comprehensive, it isn't possible to guarantee uninterrupted coverage of any particular source. We index articles from sources all over the web and link to these websites in our search results. If one of these websites becomes unavailable to our search robots or to a large number of web users, we have to remove it from Google Scholar until it becomes available again.

Our meticulous search robots generally try to index every paper from every website they visit, including most major sources and also many lesser known ones.

That said, Google Scholar is primarily a search of academic papers. Shorter articles, such as book reviews, news sections, editorials, announcements and letters, may or may not be included. Untitled documents and documents without authors are usually not included. Website URLs that aren't available to our search robots or to the majority of web users are, obviously, not included either. Nor do we include websites that require you to sign up for an account, install a browser plugin, watch four colorful ads, and turn around three times and say coo-coo before you can read the listing of titles scanned at 10 DPI... You get the idea, we cover academic papers from sensible websites.

That's usually because we index many of these papers from other websites, such as the websites of their primary publishers. The "site:" operator currently only searches the primary version of each paper.

It could also be that the papers are located on examplejournals.gov, not on example.gov. Please make sure you're searching for the "right" website.

That said, the best way to check coverage of a specific source is to search for a sample of their papers using the title of the paper.

Ahem, we index papers, not journals. You should also ask about our coverage of universities, research groups, proteins, seminal breakthroughs, and other dimensions that are of interest to users. All such questions are best answered by searching for a statistical sample of papers that has the property of interest - journal, author, protein, etc. Many coverage comparisons are available if you search for [allintitle:"google scholar"], but some of them are more statistically valid than others.

Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read published opinions of US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791. In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available.

Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

We normally add new papers several times a week. However, updates to existing records take 6-9 months to a year or longer, because in order to update our records, we need to first recrawl them from the source website. For many larger websites, the speed at which we can update their records is limited by the crawl rate that they allow.

Inclusion and Corrections

We apologize, and we assure you the error was unintentional. Automated extraction of information from articles in diverse fields can be tricky, so an error sometimes sneaks through.

Please write to the owner of the website where the erroneous search result is coming from, and encourage them to provide correct bibliographic data to us, as described in the technical guidelines . Once the data is corrected on their website, it usually takes 6-9 months to a year or longer for it to be updated in Google Scholar. We appreciate your help and your patience.

If you can't find your papers when you search for them by title and by author, please refer your publisher to our technical guidelines .

You can also deposit your papers into your institutional repository or put their PDF versions on your personal website, but please follow your publisher's requirements when you do so. See our technical guidelines for more details on the inclusion process.

We normally add new papers several times a week; however, it might take us some time to crawl larger websites, and corrections to already included papers can take 6-9 months to a year or longer.

Google Scholar generally reflects the state of the web as it is currently visible to our search robots and to the majority of users. When you're searching for relevant papers to read, you wouldn't want it any other way!

If your citation counts have gone down, chances are that either your paper or papers that cite it have either disappeared from the web entirely, or have become unavailable to our search robots, or, perhaps, have been reformatted in a way that made it difficult for our automated software to identify their bibliographic data and references. If you wish to correct this, you'll need to identify the specific documents with indexing problems and ask your publisher to fix them. Please refer to the technical guidelines .

Please do let us know . Please include the URL for the opinion, the corrected information and a source where we can verify the correction.

We're only able to make corrections to court opinions that are hosted on our own website. For corrections to academic papers, books, dissertations and other third-party material, click on the search result in question and contact the owner of the website where the document came from. For corrections to books from Google Book Search, click on the book's title and locate the link to provide feedback at the bottom of the book's page.

General Questions

These are articles which other scholarly articles have referred to, but which we haven't found online. To exclude them from your search results, uncheck the "include citations" box on the left sidebar.

First, click on links labeled [PDF] or [HTML] to the right of the search result's title. Also, check out the "All versions" link at the bottom of the search result.

Second, if you're affiliated with a university, using a computer on campus will often let you access your library's online subscriptions. Look for links labeled with your library's name to the right of the search result's title. Also, see if there's a link to the full text on the publisher's page with the abstract.

Keep in mind that final published versions are often only available to subscribers, and that some articles are not available online at all. Good luck!

Technically, your web browser remembers your settings in a "cookie" on your computer's disk, and sends this cookie to our website along with every search. Check that your browser isn't configured to discard our cookies. Also, check if disabling various proxies or overly helpful privacy settings does the trick. Either way, your settings are stored on your computer, not on our servers, so a long hard look at your browser's preferences or internet options should help cure the machine's forgetfulness.

Not even close. That phrase is our acknowledgement that much of scholarly research involves building on what others have already discovered. It's taken from Sir Isaac Newton's famous quote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

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Eight Ways (and More) To Find and Access Research Papers

This blog is part of our Research Smarter series. You’ll discover the various search engines, databases and data repositories to help you along the way. Click on any of the following links for in an in-depth look at how to find relevant research papers, journals , and authors for your next project using the Web of Science™. You can  also check out our ultimate guides here , which include tips to speed up the writing process.

If you’re in the early stages of your research career, you’re likely struggling to learn all you can about your chosen field and evaluate your options. You also need an easy and convenient way to find the right research papers upon which to build your own work and keep you on the proper path toward your goals.

Fortunately, most institutions have access to thousands of journals, so your first step should be to be to check with library staff  and find out what is available via your institutional subscriptions.

For those who may be unfamiliar with other means of access, this blog post – the first in a series devoted to helping you “research smarter” – will provide a sampling of established data sources for scientific research. These include search engines, databases, and data repositories.

Search Engines and Databases

You may have already discovered that the process of searching for research papers offers many choices and scenarios. Some search engines, for example, can be accessed free of charge. Others require a subscription. The latter group generally includes services that index the contents of thousands of published journals, allowing for detailed searches on data fields such as author name, institution, title or keyword, and even funding sources. Because many journals operate on a subscription model too, the process of obtaining full-text versions of papers can be complicated.

On the other hand, a growing number of publishers follow the practice of Open Access (OA) , making their journal content freely available. Similarly, some authors publish their results in the form of preprints, posting them to preprint servers for immediate and free access. These repositories, like indexing services, differ in that some concentrate in a given discipline or broad subject area, while others cover the full range of research.

Search Engines

Following is a brief selection of reputable search engines by which to locate articles relevant to your research.

Google Scholar is a free search engine that provides access to research in multiple disciplines. The sources include academic publishers, universities, online repositories, books, and even judicial opinions from court cases. Based on its indexing, Google Scholar provides citation counts to allow authors and others to track the impact of their work.  

The Directory of Open Access Journals ( DOAJ ) allows users to search and retrieve the article contents of nearly 10,000 OA journals in science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. All journals must adhere to quality-control standards, including peer review.

PubMed , maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, is a free search engine covering the biomedical and life sciences. Its coverage derives primarily from the MEDLINE database, covering materials as far back as 1951.

JSTOR affords access to more than 12 million journal articles in upwards of 75 disciplines, providing full-text searches of more than 2,000 journals, and access to more than 5,000 OA books.

Selected Databases

The following selection samples a range of resources, including databases which, as discussed above, index the contents of journals either in a given specialty area or the full spectrum of research. Others listed below offer consolidated coverage of multiple databases. Your institution is likely subscribed to a range of research databases, speak to your librarian to see which databases you have access to, and how to go about your search.

Web of Science includes The Web of Science Core Collection, which covers more than 20,000 carefully selected journals, along with books, conference proceedings, and other sources. The indexing also captures citation data, permitting users to follow the thread of an idea or development over time, as well as to track a wide range of research-performance metrics. The Web of Science also features EndNote™ Click , a free browser plugin that offers one-click access to the best available legal and legitimate full-text versions of papers. See here for our ultimate guide to finding relevant research papers on the Web of Science .

Science.gov covers the vast territory of United States federal science, including more than 60 databases and 2,200-plus websites. The many allied agencies whose research is reflected include NASA, the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

CiteSeerx is devoted primarily to information and computer science. The database includes a feature called Autonomous Citation Indexing, designed to extract citations and create a citation index for literature searching and evaluation.

Preprint and Data Repositories

An early form of OA literature involved authors, as noted above,  making electronic, preprint versions of their papers freely available. This practice has expanded widely today. You can find archives devoted to a single main specialty area, as well as general repositories connected with universities and other institutions.

The specialty archive is perhaps best exemplified by arXiv (conveniently pronounced “archive,” and one of the earliest examples of a preprint repository). Begun in 1991 as a physics repository, ArXiv has expanded to embrace mathematics, astronomy, statistics, economics, and other disciplines. The success of ArXiv spurred the development of, for example, bioArXiv devoted to an array of topics within biology, and for chemistry, ChemRxiv .

Meanwhile, thousands of institutional repositories hold a variety of useful materials. In addition to research papers, these archives store raw datasets, graphics, notes, and other by-products of investigation. Currently, the Registry of Open Access Repositories lists more than 4,700 entries.

Reach Out Yourself?

If the resources above don’t happen to result in a free and full-text copy of the research you seek, you can also try reaching out to the authors yourself.

To find who authored a paper, you can search indexing platforms like the Web of Science , or research profiling systems like Publons™ , or ResearchGate , then look to reach out to the authors directly.

So, although the sheer volume of research can pose a challenge to identifying and securing needed papers, plenty of options are available.

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• v.32(11); 2017 Nov

Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations

Armen yuri gasparyan.

1 Departments of Rheumatology and Research and Development, Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust (Teaching Trust of the University of Birmingham, UK), Russells Hall Hospital, Dudley, West Midlands, UK.

Bekaidar Nurmashev

2 South Kazakhstan State Pharmaceutical Academy, Shymkent, Kazakhstan.

Marlen Yessirkepov

3 Department of Biochemistry, Biology and Microbiology, South Kazakhstan State Pharmaceutical Academy, Shymkent, Kazakhstan.

Dmitry A. Endovitskiy

4 Voronezh State University, Voronezh, Russian Federation.

Alexander A. Voronov

5 Department of Marketing and Trade Deals, Kuban State University, Krasnodar, Russian Federation.

George D. Kitas

6 Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Unit, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Currently available online profiling platforms offer various services for researchers and authors. Opening an individual account and filling it with scholarly contents increase visibility of research output and boost its impact. This article overviews some of the widely used and emerging profiling platforms, highlighting their tools for sharing scholarly items, crediting individuals, and facilitating networking. Global bibliographic databases and search platforms, such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar, are widely used for profiling authors with indexed publications. Scholarly networking websites, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, provide indispensable services for researchers poorly visible elsewhere on the Internet. Several specialized platforms are designed to offer profiling along with their main functionalities, such as reference management and archiving. The Open Researcher and Contributor Identification (ORCID) project has offered a solution to the author name disambiguation. It has been integrated with numerous bibliographic databases, platforms, and manuscript submission systems to help research managers and journal editors select and credit the best reviewers, and other scholarly contributors. Individuals with verifiable reviewer and editorial accomplishments are also covered by Publons, which is an increasingly recognized service for publicizing and awarding reviewer comments. Currently available profiling formats have numerous advantages and some limitations. The advantages are related to their openness and chances of boosting the researcher impact. Some of the profiling websites are complementary to each other. The underutilization of various profiling websites and their inappropriate uses for promotion of ‘predatory’ journals are among reported limitations. A combined approach to the profiling systems is advocated in this article.

INTRODUCTION

Comprehensive evaluation of research performance is an increasingly important task for the research and publishing enterprise in the era of digitization, open access, and diversification of social networking ( 1 ). A wide variety of individual and institutional websites is now available to keep the global scientific community abreast of ongoing research projects, published articles, conferences, and opportunities for collaboration. The digitization of the individual curriculum vitae has advanced the archiving of scholarly articles, books, presentations, and audio and video materials in specifically designed websites, which were not available even a decade ago ( 2 ). The accuracy, transparency, and completeness of information on such platforms mark the professionalism and scientific prestige of the creators and moderators.

Online profiles are increasingly employed for evaluating prospective academic mentors, authors, reviewers and journal editors, for sharing and commenting on scholarly articles, and establishing scholarly networks. For the global scientific community, one of the most important components of such profiles is the article in English ( 3 , 4 ). Subsequently, simultaneous searches through the global databases and platforms, such as MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, increase chances of retrieving relevant items and navigating through the authors' profiles for their comprehensive evaluation ( 5 ). The journal editors often refer to profiles of their contributors in their editorial management systems, linked to bibliographic databases and search platforms, for improving their quality checks and promoting the best contributors. Publishers and editors are strongly encouraged to evaluate academic profiles and online identifiers of their contributors to avoid ‘fake’ reviewer commenting and other forms misconduct ( 6 ). Several search platforms, scholarly networking websites, and bibliographic databases have adjusted their online tools to offer regularly updated information on researchers and authors for advanced profiling and aggregating scholarly information.

This article provides an overview of some of the established and emerging profiling platforms ( Table 1 ).

ORCID = Open Researcher and Contributor Identification, RePEc = Research Paper in Economics.

PROFILING PLATFORMS

Scopus author identifiers.

Scopus author identifiers are unique digital links to research performance of individual scholars in any academic discipline. Such identifiers are automatically generated when the authors get at least one Scopus-indexed item, allowing them to track and analyse their citation data, and particularly the h-index values, display professional keywords, affiliations, and links to their co-authors' profiles. Advanced tools are now available to navigate through authors' list of publications, analyse their annual publication activity, highly-cited items, target journals, names of co-authors, article types, and subject areas. Scopus profiles may also include the Open Researcher and Contributor Identification (ORCID), which are now searchable through a separate browsing window at the Scopus interface. Such information is available for free previews and can be processed for ranking authors in certain fields and evaluating their impact over time ( 7 ).

The recent integration of PlumX Metrics with Scopus has added a new direction to the online profiling by aggregating information on article-level metrics, such as usage (downloads, HTML views), captures (bookmarks), mentions (blog posts, e-comments, Wikipedia references), social media attention, and citation counts beyond Scopus ( 8 ). Comparisons with other altmetrics tools, such as ImpactStory, proved that PlumX has the most comprehensive coverage of social resonance of scholarly information ( 9 ). Subscribing institutions can now open individual accounts on the PlumX dashboard to comprehensively track their researchers' impact ( 10 ).

Although Scopus author identifiers are linked to records of the largest abstract and citation database, limited timeline of the contents coverage (mostly back to 1996) may distort profiles of scholars with longer academic career and higher citations of their initial works, which are not yet covered by this database. Scopus profiles may also contain technical mistakes due to the automatic processing of data and generating more than one identifier for the same author. Such a limitation can be overcome by regularly monitoring updates and merging two or more profiles at the request of the users.

ResearcherID

In contrast to Scopus, Web of Science does not automatically generate author identifiers, which is viewed by some as a limitation in terms of comprehensive evaluation of an individual's publication activity and related metrics ( 11 ). In 2008, Thomson Reuters launched ResearcherID as a multidisciplinary service, which was integrated with the Web of Science platform. The website was specifically designed to disambiguate authors by creating unique profiling web pages and showcasing individual scholars' publications and citations from Web of Science.

The authors with access to Web of Science can create the ResearcherID profile, present and regularly update their biographic notes and indexed articles, track citations and h-index values, provide links to their ORCID IDs, and find collaborators. Although this profiling system does not provide comprehensive coverage of all authors with Web of Science-indexed items, it is often employed for distinguishing the most prolific and influential researchers globally ( 12 ).

Despite the fact that there are more than 270,000 registered IDs on Web of Science ( 13 ), their distribution is disproportionate across academic disciplines and countries, and quantitative comparisons with other profiling systems are not in favor of ResearcherID. In fact, an analysis of 4,307 Norwegian researchers' profiles revealed that ResearcherID was the least popular platform, with only 130 ID holders (3%) ( 14 ). The same study reported that there were 1,307 scholars with ResearchGate (30%) and 333 with Google Scholar (8%) profiles.

In contrast to the Scopus identification system, ResearcherID relies exclusively on the authors' self-identification ( 15 ), which may create inaccuracies and errors in their publication lists by aggregating non-indexed and other authors' Web of Science-indexed items. Finally, concerns have been raised that the ResearcherID platform, which was initially designed for individuals, is now abused and filled with numerous ‘predatory’ journal profiles. Such profiles are created to mislead the readership and claim that these journals are visible on Web of Science ( 16 ).

PubMed does not issue unique author identifiers, but biomedical and allied specialists often rely on this free and rapidly updated platform for literature searches and evaluations of individual profiles linked to MEDLINE-indexed and PubMed Central-archived articles ( 17 ). It is rightly credited as the primary research tool for biomedical specialists ( 18 ).

The accuracy of profiling on PubMed depends on the use of correct author names and their affiliations. Manual corrections of the retrieved records are sometimes required ( 19 ).

The main advantage of the PubMed/MEDLINE profile is its integration with the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) specialist keywords vocabulary and scientific prestige of the indexed items ( 17 ).

Importantly, a web server called Peer2ref is designed to pick expert reviewers and editors by evaluating profiles of authors with MEDLINE-indexed articles ( 20 ). More than 3,800 MEDLINE-indexed journals in the last ten years are searched through for the profiling. The programme automatically evaluates and disambiguates profiles by analysing authors' bibliographies, co-authors, and keywords in their MEDLINE abstracts.

An important recent development for name disambiguation in PubMed was its integration with ORCID, enabling the transfer of bibliographic records from PubMed Central to ORCID IDs ( 21 ).

Researchers who apply for or receive grants from the US National Institutes of Health can now create their Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae (SciENcv) profile, which is a service of The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) ( 22 ). This service is available to all researchers who hold personal accounts at NCBI. The SciENcv service is also compliant with ORCID ( 23 ). It allows them to showcase their research and academic accomplishments, previous grants, awards, and bibliographies.

Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar Citations was launched in 2012 as a free online platform, and was viewed by some as an alternative to other global citation-tracking services ( 24 ). It now functions as a basic tool for promoting authors from any scholarly discipline with at least one published item in an indexed journal, book, conference proceedings, and non-reviewed sources, which are tracked by Google. The authors with a few or no indexed articles, poorly visible on Scopus and Web of Science, and particularly those from the Social Sciences and Humanities, can benefit from managing their Google Scholar Citations profile. Such a profile is also useful for promoting early career researchers and preserving information about eminent and deceased scholars.

The author profiles can be filled with photographs, links to similar profiles of co-authors, manually added or retrieved from Google articles, books, dissertations, presentations, and any other published items. Citations to these items, which are processed for calculating the individuals' h-index, are also collected from a wide variety of automatically identifiable sources. Evidence from the field of information science suggests that article downloads and captures (bookmarkings) increase Google Scholar Citations ( 25 ).

The lack of filtering poor quality and irrelevant items and the absence of an organized thesaurus for systematizing searches are the main limitations of Google Scholar. The platform is not protected from manipulations and citation boosting by uploading apparently fake citing sources on the Internet ( 26 ). It is also filled with articles from numerous ‘predatory’ journals, polluting science and damaging reputation of Google Scholar as a reliable source for evaluating research performance ( 27 ). At the same time, attempts have been made to introduce validation tools for improving the reliability of the Google Scholar Citations profiles ( 28 ).

ResearchGate

ResearchGate is one of the largest social networking sites for researchers with more than 4.5 million registered users ( 29 ). It was launched in 2008 as a multidisciplinary hub of researchers, a platform for sharing articles and interacting with potential collaborators, and a scholarly discussion forum.

To create the profile page, a researcher should have at least one publication, which is identifiable by the system, or an email account from a recognized institution. Other tools have also been introduced to create verifiable profiles. The ResearchGate profiles incorporate photographs, keywords of professional interests, links to published articles, and other scholarly items. The users can follow publication activity of other registered researchers, send online messages, discuss research issues, and get notifications when their articles are viewed, downloaded, or cited.

The website's functionality is similar to that of other profiling and social networking services, such as Academia.edu, Google Scholar, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, ResearchGate is primarily designed for scholarly communication and data sharing between researchers, authors, and journal editors ( 30 ). It also stands out of numerous networking sites by archiving full-texts of pre-published and published items in line with the copyrights ( 31 ).

A study revealed that ResearchGate and Google Scholar cover almost the same scholarly items. However, early archiving of pre-published articles on ResearchGate increases their visibility and chances of getting cited ( 32 ). There is also evidence suggesting that readers who view articles on ResearchGate tend to cite them in their Scopus-indexed articles ( 33 ).

The platform tracks citations along with alternative metrics to calculate the ResearchGate Score, which is proved a reliable measure of individual research performance comparable to that of Scopus-based metrics ( 34 ).

Along with the advantages, ResearchGate has also limitations due to the lack of validation tools for preventing archiving of non-reviewed and ‘predatory’ items ( 32 , 35 ). Copyright violations are also common due to users' lack of awareness of the publishers' open archiving regulations. An analysis of randomly selected full-texts of 500 articles, which were posted on ResearchGate, demonstrated that only 108 (21.6%) of these items were from open access journals ( 36 ). The same study demonstrated that 201 (51.3%) of 392 non-open-access items were not eligible for posting on ResearchGate, and in most cases it was possible to avoid the copyright violations by repositing pre-published manuscripts instead of published PDF versions of articles. Finally, concerns have also been raised over the abuses of ResearchGate, leading to cyber-bulling and breaches of privacy ( 37 ).

Academia.edu

About 11 million users have accounts on Academia.edu ( 29 ). This website shares some features with ResearchGate ( 38 ). However, Academia.edu is more tailored to the academic needs. It generates personalized lists of recommended references for its users, saving time for related literature searches ( 39 ). Although Academia.edu is a multidisciplinary hub, one study found that linguists and sociologists keen to preferentially use this website for profiling in their field of professional interests ( 40 ). Based on an analysis of a sample of 31,216 articles, it was found that an article posted on Academia.edu attracts 69% more citations after 5 years than a comparable article not available online ( 41 ). Widely known limitations of this website are related to inappropriate use of its domain name (edu) and scarce tools for the quality scholarly communication.

Researchers who wish to interact and cooperate with their colleagues worldwide, and especially those at early stages of their career, should correctly and consistently list their names in all publications. Creating a unique digital identifier is critically important for them and for authors with common, identical, and variably recorded names ( 42 ). Getting an ORCID identifier allows recording variably listed or common names under a unique digital link and overcoming the author name ambiguity.

Launched in 2012, the ORCID initiative is now the main multidisciplinary hub of researchers, authors, reviewers, mentors, and other academic contributors with permanent identifiers ( 43 ). The number of registered ORCID account holders has grown rapidly over the past 5 years and reached 3,742,608 (as of August 21, 2017). Many leading publishing houses, grant funding agencies, and libraries have endorsed this initiative and provided funding for its development ( 44 ).

The ORCID profiles can be filled with manually added or transferred from CrossRef, Scopus, ResearcherID (Web of Science), Europe PubMed Central, KoreaMed, and other online platforms records of published journal articles, book chapters, and dissertations. Unpublished scholarly works can also be presented on the users' profiles to share preliminary research data. Additionally, the account holders can populate their ORCID profiles with links to their presentations, datasets, images, video files on Figshare, and automatically feed their integrated profiles on ScienceOpen for promoting research and attracting post-publication comments ( 45 , 46 , 47 ). Finally, scholars with Publons accounts acquire a peer review section on their ORCID profiles to fill it with exported information about verified reviewer assignments ( 48 ).

The list of keywords and biographical sketches at the ORCID interface can be edited by the account holders to highlight their scope of professional interests and main achievements, which are required for grant applications, academic promotions, and research collaborations. The ORCID platform has also tools to secure privacy of the users.

Despite its advantages in terms of openness, increased visibility for early career researchers and experts from developing countries, improved management of grant applications and journal submissions, there are some limitations of the system. Approximately 20% of the registered ORCID accounts are now inactive ( 49 ). Some of the scholarly works listed on the users' profiles are poorly validated and apparently incorrect ( 44 ). Although enormous efforts have been made to cover a large number of researchers and contributors, roughly only 10% of the world's researchers are currently represented on the ORCID platform, their distribution across countries is not proportional, and not all research funding agencies and academic institutions mandate opening and maintaining ORCID IDs ( 50 ). Concerns have also been raised over the eventual monopolization of the scholarly communication through the digital identifiers ( 49 ).

A more specialized approach to evaluating academic activities is offered by Publons, which is an increasingly reputable platform for peer reviewers. It was recently acquired by Clarivate Analytics, recognizing this platform as an essential tool for evaluating research performance ( 51 ). Publons also partners with the ScholarOne editorial management system to aid editors in evaluating potential reviewers ( 52 ).

This initiative was launched in 2013 to freely register and credit reviewer and editorial contributions, and rapidly became the only online platform for crediting reviewers and allowing them to claim publication activity by getting digital identifiers from CrossRef for the best reviewer comments ( 53 ).

Unique Publons identifiers are issued to all registered users, who may fill their profiles with photographs and biographic notes, list journals assigning them reviewer and editorial duties, integrate with their ORCID IDs and other academic profiles, and transfer their reviewer comments for open access with the publishers' permission ( 54 ). Publons supports all models of peer review, ranging from double-blind to post-publication review, and is compliant with their users' privacy requirements in terms of listing any reviewer and editorial assignments ( 55 ).

A recent study comparing research performance on Google Scholar and Publons demonstrated that the latter serves a unique purpose, allowing journal editors to pick the best reviewers for future services regardless of their author activities tracked by Google ( 56 ).

Publishers endorsing the initiative and allowing their reviewers to record related information on Publons increase not only the reviewers' but also their own visibility. This is why some non-Anglophone publishers have also joined the initiative and encouraged their contributors to showcase their reviewer and editorial accomplishments on Publons ( 57 ).

DIFFERENCES IN THE USE OF SCHOLARLY PROFILES

For comprehensive evaluation of any individual research profile, no single bibliographic database or scholarly networking platform is currently sufficient. In fact, empiric analyses of information scientists' profiles on Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, specialist databases, and social networking websites revealed that each of these services covered less than 50% of the authors' publication activity ( 58 ).

An analysis of 6,132 profiles on Google Scholar, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley demonstrated that specialists in the Social Sciences and Humanities mostly rely on Academia.edu while biologists prefer ResearchGate for scholarly networking ( 59 ). A survey of 296 faculty members of one of the major New York research and academic institutions pointed to a surprisingly low awareness of the author identifiers among them (n = 95, 32%), with physicists, biologists, and health scientists being relatively better informed than other specialists and mathematicians, who were least informed ( 60 ). The surveyed faculty members mostly used ORCID IDs (n = 49, 15%), followed by Scopus author ID (n = 29, 9%), ResearcherID (n = 25, 7%), and arXiv ID (n = 20, 6%).

The use of online profiles differs substantially across countries. Scholars from Brazil and India are well represented on ResearchGate while their Chinese, Russian, and Korean colleagues rarely use this platform for showcasing their publication activity and interacting with potential collaborators ( 37 , 61 ).

Functionalities and content coverage of scholarly networking and profiling websites also differ substantially. ResearchGate predominantly archives recent articles of the profile holders while historic papers remain poorly visible on this platform, and particularly in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities ( 62 ). A recent analysis of search, navigation, analytics, privacy, filtering, and other features of ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and Zotero proved that none of these services has advanced operational functions ( 63 ). The same study scored ‘above average’ and ranked first ResearchGate based on an analysis of its information retrieval and management functions.

PERSPECTIVES OF PROFILING INDIVIDUAL SCHOLARS

Online researcher and author profile is a recognized tool for self-promotion, scholarly networking, sharing publications, and making an impact ( 64 , 65 ). Global visibility of research output and availability of complementary platforms for aggregating massive volumes of scholarly items and tracking citations and alternative metrics add to the research management and ranking of scholars. Advanced searches through ResearchGate and Academia.edu are increasingly employed for systematic analyses of literature, and particularly in non-mainstream science countries ( 66 , 67 , 68 ).

Authors are now able to monitor daily interest of the global scientific community toward publications posted on their Google Scholar and ResearchGate profiles ( 69 ). Many other networking platforms are upgraded to accommodate digital profiles (resumes) for academic, research, or business purposes ( 70 ). All these developments suggest that profiling is there to stay.

Additionally, there are some national platforms, which are prioritized for profiling scholars in non-Anglophone countries (e.g., the Index Copernicus Scientists panel, the Science Index platform of the Russian Science Citation Index database). Although these websites promote publications of the account holders locally, their coverage and global visibility are still limited due to the language barrier and skewed impact metrics. The latter is a particularly big issue for the Index Copernicus database, which has been criticized for indexing numerous ‘predatory’ journals and issuing questionable metrics ( 71 ).

New dimensions for profiling emerge to increase visibility and scholarly reputation of researchers at any stage of their career. The ScienceOpen platform with its unique model of profiling, open-access publishing, and post-publication commenting is a good example of the close relationship between online profiling and publishing ( 46 ). Kudos, a powerful toolkit for authors, is yet another innovative option for strengthening scholarly reputation and comprehensively measuring the impact of publications. This service is integrated with the Web of Science citation tracking and ScholarOne and Aries editorial management systems. Kudos allows sharing links to articles of the profile holders through social media and scholarly networks, thus increasing chances of their use ( 72 ). A recent study showed that authors discussing and sharing their articles via Kudos increase downloads of these items by 23% ( 73 ).

But advances in the digitization and social networking have also created challenges, which will prevail and grow in the coming years. Paradoxically, one of the pressing issues is the wide variety of online platforms offering diverse services for setting individual accounts. Not all researchers embrace the advantages of the available platforms and some of them question the quality and credibility of information provided on social networking channels ( 39 ). On the other hand, it is difficult for the individual researcher to discern the advantages and disadvantages of each platform, and continuing proliferation of such platforms is likely to make this problem even worse. There is a real risk that early career researchers aiming to enhance their profile and optimize their visibility may spend more time updating their profile in multiple networking platforms than continuing to be academically productive. Research and academic institutions, in turn, fail to incorporate relevant topics in the process of education and make online profiling mandatory. In the wake of proliferation of profiling platforms, ORCID is perhaps the only universal option which can become mandatory for early career researchers and senior scholars alike.

Research managers, journal editors, and publishers are in their position to make the use of reliable profiling platforms mandatory for ranking scholars. Given the preferential use of some websites for profiling authors in certain disciplines (e.g., PubMed for medicine, Academia.edu for social sciences and humanities), a combined approach can be viewed as an optimal solution ( Table 2 ).

With the increasing use of various online tools for research, it is likely that new complementary profiling platforms will be offered and established ones will be upgraded to meet the growing needs of interdisciplinary research and scholarly publishing. It is much desirable to strengthen the complementarity (“cross-talk”) of profiling platforms so that one could easily update, secure, validate, and populate each of them with information from a single source.

DISCLOSURE: The authors have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any institution.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION: Conceptualization: Gasparyan AY, Yessirkepov M, Endovitskiy DA, Kitas GD. Methodology: Gasparyan AY, Nurmashev B, Yessirkepov M, Voronov AA. Writing - original draft: Gasparyan AY, Yessirkepov M, Kitas GD. Writing - review & editing: Gasparyan AY, Nurmashev B, Yessirkepov M, Endovitskiy DA, Voronov AA, Kitas GD.

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Home » Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

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Research Paper

Definition:

Research Paper is a written document that presents the author’s original research, analysis, and interpretation of a specific topic or issue.

It is typically based on Empirical Evidence, and may involve qualitative or quantitative research methods, or a combination of both. The purpose of a research paper is to contribute new knowledge or insights to a particular field of study, and to demonstrate the author’s understanding of the existing literature and theories related to the topic.

Structure of Research Paper

The structure of a research paper typically follows a standard format, consisting of several sections that convey specific information about the research study. The following is a detailed explanation of the structure of a research paper:

The title page contains the title of the paper, the name(s) of the author(s), and the affiliation(s) of the author(s). It also includes the date of submission and possibly, the name of the journal or conference where the paper is to be published.

The abstract is a brief summary of the research paper, typically ranging from 100 to 250 words. It should include the research question, the methods used, the key findings, and the implications of the results. The abstract should be written in a concise and clear manner to allow readers to quickly grasp the essence of the research.

Introduction

The introduction section of a research paper provides background information about the research problem, the research question, and the research objectives. It also outlines the significance of the research, the research gap that it aims to fill, and the approach taken to address the research question. Finally, the introduction section ends with a clear statement of the research hypothesis or research question.

Literature Review

The literature review section of a research paper provides an overview of the existing literature on the topic of study. It includes a critical analysis and synthesis of the literature, highlighting the key concepts, themes, and debates. The literature review should also demonstrate the research gap and how the current study seeks to address it.

The methods section of a research paper describes the research design, the sample selection, the data collection and analysis procedures, and the statistical methods used to analyze the data. This section should provide sufficient detail for other researchers to replicate the study.

The results section presents the findings of the research, using tables, graphs, and figures to illustrate the data. The findings should be presented in a clear and concise manner, with reference to the research question and hypothesis.

The discussion section of a research paper interprets the findings and discusses their implications for the research question, the literature review, and the field of study. It should also address the limitations of the study and suggest future research directions.

The conclusion section summarizes the main findings of the study, restates the research question and hypothesis, and provides a final reflection on the significance of the research.

The references section provides a list of all the sources cited in the paper, following a specific citation style such as APA, MLA or Chicago.

How to Write Research Paper

You can write Research Paper by the following guide:

• Choose a Topic: The first step is to select a topic that interests you and is relevant to your field of study. Brainstorm ideas and narrow down to a research question that is specific and researchable.
• Conduct a Literature Review: The literature review helps you identify the gap in the existing research and provides a basis for your research question. It also helps you to develop a theoretical framework and research hypothesis.
• Develop a Thesis Statement : The thesis statement is the main argument of your research paper. It should be clear, concise and specific to your research question.
• Plan your Research: Develop a research plan that outlines the methods, data sources, and data analysis procedures. This will help you to collect and analyze data effectively.
• Collect and Analyze Data: Collect data using various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments. Analyze data using statistical tools or other qualitative methods.
• Organize your Paper : Organize your paper into sections such as Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. Ensure that each section is coherent and follows a logical flow.
• Write your Paper : Start by writing the introduction, followed by the literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. Ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and follows the required formatting and citation styles.
• Edit and Proofread your Paper: Review your paper for grammar and spelling errors, and ensure that it is well-structured and easy to read. Ask someone else to review your paper to get feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• Cite your Sources: Ensure that you properly cite all sources used in your research paper. This is essential for giving credit to the original authors and avoiding plagiarism.

Research Paper Example

Note : The below example research paper is for illustrative purposes only and is not an actual research paper. Actual research papers may have different structures, contents, and formats depending on the field of study, research question, data collection and analysis methods, and other factors. Students should always consult with their professors or supervisors for specific guidelines and expectations for their research papers.

Research Paper Example sample for Students:

Title: The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health among Young Adults

Abstract: This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults. A literature review was conducted to examine the existing research on the topic. A survey was then administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Introduction: Social media has become an integral part of modern life, particularly among young adults. While social media has many benefits, including increased communication and social connectivity, it has also been associated with negative outcomes, such as addiction, cyberbullying, and mental health problems. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults.

Literature Review: The literature review highlights the existing research on the impact of social media use on mental health. The review shows that social media use is associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health problems. The review also identifies the factors that contribute to the negative impact of social media, including social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Methods : A survey was administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The survey included questions on social media use, mental health status (measured using the DASS-21), and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis.

Results : The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Discussion : The study’s findings suggest that social media use has a negative impact on the mental health of young adults. The study highlights the need for interventions that address the factors contributing to the negative impact of social media, such as social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Conclusion : In conclusion, social media use has a significant impact on the mental health of young adults. The study’s findings underscore the need for interventions that promote healthy social media use and address the negative outcomes associated with social media use. Future research can explore the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health. Additionally, longitudinal studies can investigate the long-term effects of social media use on mental health.

Limitations : The study has some limitations, including the use of self-report measures and a cross-sectional design. The use of self-report measures may result in biased responses, and a cross-sectional design limits the ability to establish causality.

Implications: The study’s findings have implications for mental health professionals, educators, and policymakers. Mental health professionals can use the findings to develop interventions that address the negative impact of social media use on mental health. Educators can incorporate social media literacy into their curriculum to promote healthy social media use among young adults. Policymakers can use the findings to develop policies that protect young adults from the negative outcomes associated with social media use.

References :

• Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive medicine reports, 15, 100918.
• Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., … & James, A. E. (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: A nationally-representative study among US young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 1-9.
• Van der Meer, T. G., & Verhoeven, J. W. (2017). Social media and its impact on academic performance of students. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 16, 383-398.

Appendix : The survey used in this study is provided below.

Social Media and Mental Health Survey

• How often do you use social media per day?
• Less than 30 minutes
• 30 minutes to 1 hour
• 1 to 2 hours
• 2 to 4 hours
• More than 4 hours
• Which social media platforms do you use?
• Others (Please specify)
• How often do you experience the following on social media?
• Social comparison (comparing yourself to others)
• Cyberbullying
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
• Have you ever experienced any of the following mental health problems in the past month?
• Do you think social media use has a positive or negative impact on your mental health?
• Very positive
• Somewhat positive
• Somewhat negative
• Very negative
• In your opinion, which factors contribute to the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Social comparison
• In your opinion, what interventions could be effective in reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Education on healthy social media use
• Counseling for mental health problems caused by social media
• Social media detox programs
• Regulation of social media use

Thank you for your participation!

Applications of Research Paper

Research papers have several applications in various fields, including:

• Advancing knowledge: Research papers contribute to the advancement of knowledge by generating new insights, theories, and findings that can inform future research and practice. They help to answer important questions, clarify existing knowledge, and identify areas that require further investigation.
• Informing policy: Research papers can inform policy decisions by providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers. They can help to identify gaps in current policies, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, and inform the development of new policies and regulations.
• Improving practice: Research papers can improve practice by providing evidence-based guidance for professionals in various fields, including medicine, education, business, and psychology. They can inform the development of best practices, guidelines, and standards of care that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• Educating students : Research papers are often used as teaching tools in universities and colleges to educate students about research methods, data analysis, and academic writing. They help students to develop critical thinking skills, research skills, and communication skills that are essential for success in many careers.
• Fostering collaboration: Research papers can foster collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers by providing a platform for sharing knowledge and ideas. They can facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships that can lead to innovative solutions to complex problems.

When to Write Research Paper

Research papers are typically written when a person has completed a research project or when they have conducted a study and have obtained data or findings that they want to share with the academic or professional community. Research papers are usually written in academic settings, such as universities, but they can also be written in professional settings, such as research organizations, government agencies, or private companies.

Here are some common situations where a person might need to write a research paper:

• For academic purposes: Students in universities and colleges are often required to write research papers as part of their coursework, particularly in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Writing research papers helps students to develop research skills, critical thinking skills, and academic writing skills.
• For publication: Researchers often write research papers to publish their findings in academic journals or to present their work at academic conferences. Publishing research papers is an important way to disseminate research findings to the academic community and to establish oneself as an expert in a particular field.
• To inform policy or practice : Researchers may write research papers to inform policy decisions or to improve practice in various fields. Research findings can be used to inform the development of policies, guidelines, and best practices that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• To share new insights or ideas: Researchers may write research papers to share new insights or ideas with the academic or professional community. They may present new theories, propose new research methods, or challenge existing paradigms in their field.

Purpose of Research Paper

The purpose of a research paper is to present the results of a study or investigation in a clear, concise, and structured manner. Research papers are written to communicate new knowledge, ideas, or findings to a specific audience, such as researchers, scholars, practitioners, or policymakers. The primary purposes of a research paper are:

• To contribute to the body of knowledge : Research papers aim to add new knowledge or insights to a particular field or discipline. They do this by reporting the results of empirical studies, reviewing and synthesizing existing literature, proposing new theories, or providing new perspectives on a topic.
• To inform or persuade: Research papers are written to inform or persuade the reader about a particular issue, topic, or phenomenon. They present evidence and arguments to support their claims and seek to persuade the reader of the validity of their findings or recommendations.
• To advance the field: Research papers seek to advance the field or discipline by identifying gaps in knowledge, proposing new research questions or approaches, or challenging existing assumptions or paradigms. They aim to contribute to ongoing debates and discussions within a field and to stimulate further research and inquiry.
• To demonstrate research skills: Research papers demonstrate the author’s research skills, including their ability to design and conduct a study, collect and analyze data, and interpret and communicate findings. They also demonstrate the author’s ability to critically evaluate existing literature, synthesize information from multiple sources, and write in a clear and structured manner.

Characteristics of Research Paper

Research papers have several characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of academic or professional writing. Here are some common characteristics of research papers:

• Evidence-based: Research papers are based on empirical evidence, which is collected through rigorous research methods such as experiments, surveys, observations, or interviews. They rely on objective data and facts to support their claims and conclusions.
• Structured and organized: Research papers have a clear and logical structure, with sections such as introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. They are organized in a way that helps the reader to follow the argument and understand the findings.
• Formal and objective: Research papers are written in a formal and objective tone, with an emphasis on clarity, precision, and accuracy. They avoid subjective language or personal opinions and instead rely on objective data and analysis to support their arguments.
• Citations and references: Research papers include citations and references to acknowledge the sources of information and ideas used in the paper. They use a specific citation style, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago, to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Peer-reviewed: Research papers are often peer-reviewed, which means they are evaluated by other experts in the field before they are published. Peer-review ensures that the research is of high quality, meets ethical standards, and contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field.
• Objective and unbiased: Research papers strive to be objective and unbiased in their presentation of the findings. They avoid personal biases or preconceptions and instead rely on the data and analysis to draw conclusions.

Advantages of Research Paper

Research papers have many advantages, both for the individual researcher and for the broader academic and professional community. Here are some advantages of research papers:

• Contribution to knowledge: Research papers contribute to the body of knowledge in a particular field or discipline. They add new information, insights, and perspectives to existing literature and help advance the understanding of a particular phenomenon or issue.
• Opportunity for intellectual growth: Research papers provide an opportunity for intellectual growth for the researcher. They require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, which can help develop the researcher’s skills and knowledge.
• Career advancement: Research papers can help advance the researcher’s career by demonstrating their expertise and contributions to the field. They can also lead to new research opportunities, collaborations, and funding.
• Academic recognition: Research papers can lead to academic recognition in the form of awards, grants, or invitations to speak at conferences or events. They can also contribute to the researcher’s reputation and standing in the field.
• Impact on policy and practice: Research papers can have a significant impact on policy and practice. They can inform policy decisions, guide practice, and lead to changes in laws, regulations, or procedures.
• Advancement of society: Research papers can contribute to the advancement of society by addressing important issues, identifying solutions to problems, and promoting social justice and equality.

Limitations of Research Paper

Research papers also have some limitations that should be considered when interpreting their findings or implications. Here are some common limitations of research papers:

• Limited generalizability: Research findings may not be generalizable to other populations, settings, or contexts. Studies often use specific samples or conditions that may not reflect the broader population or real-world situations.
• Potential for bias : Research papers may be biased due to factors such as sample selection, measurement errors, or researcher biases. It is important to evaluate the quality of the research design and methods used to ensure that the findings are valid and reliable.
• Ethical concerns: Research papers may raise ethical concerns, such as the use of vulnerable populations or invasive procedures. Researchers must adhere to ethical guidelines and obtain informed consent from participants to ensure that the research is conducted in a responsible and respectful manner.
• Limitations of methodology: Research papers may be limited by the methodology used to collect and analyze data. For example, certain research methods may not capture the complexity or nuance of a particular phenomenon, or may not be appropriate for certain research questions.
• Publication bias: Research papers may be subject to publication bias, where positive or significant findings are more likely to be published than negative or non-significant findings. This can skew the overall findings of a particular area of research.
• Time and resource constraints: Research papers may be limited by time and resource constraints, which can affect the quality and scope of the research. Researchers may not have access to certain data or resources, or may be unable to conduct long-term studies due to practical limitations.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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How to Order Authors in Scientific Papers

It’s rare that an article is authored by only one or two people anymore. In fact, the average original research paper has five authors these days. The growing list of collaborative research projects raises important questions regarding the author order for research manuscripts and the impact an author list has on readers’ perceptions.

With a handful of authors, a group might be inclined to create an author name list based on the amount of work contributed. What happens, though, when you have a long list of authors? It would be impractical to rank the authors by their relative contributions. Additionally, what if the authors contribute relatively equal amounts of work? Similarly, if a study was interdisciplinary (and many are these days), how can one individual’s contribution be deemed more significant than another’s?

Why does author order matter?

Although an author list should only reflect those who have made substantial contributions to a research project and its draft manuscript (see, for example, the authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ), we’d be remiss to say that author order doesn’t matter. In theory, everyone on the list should be credited equally since it takes a team to successfully complete a project; however, due to industry customs and other practical limitations, some authors will always be more visible than others.

The following are some notable implications regarding author order.

• The “first author” is a coveted position because of its increased visibility. This author is the first name readers will see, and because of various citation rules, publications are usually referred to by the name of the first author only. In-text or bibliographic referencing rules, for example, often reduce all other named authors to “et al.” Since employers use first-authorship to evaluate academic personnel for employment, promotion, and tenure, and since graduate students often need a number of first-author publications to earn their degree, being the lead author on a manuscript is crucial for many researchers, especially early in their career.
• The last author position is traditionally reserved for the supervisor or principal investigator. As such, this person receives much of the credit when the research goes well and the flak when things go wrong. The last author may also be the corresponding author, the person who is the primary contact for journal editors (the first author could, however, fill this role as well, especially if they contributed most to the work).
• Given that there is no uniform rule about author order, readers may find it difficult to assess the nature of an author’s contribution to a research project. To address this issue, some journals, particularly medical ones, nowadays insist on detailed author contribution notes (make sure you check the target journal guidelines before submission to find out how the journal you are planning to submit to handles this). Nevertheless, even this does little to counter how strongly citation rules have enhanced the attention first-named authors receive.

Common Methods for Listing Authors

The following are some common methods for establishing author order lists.

• Relative contribution. As mentioned above, the most common way authors are listed is by relative contribution. The author who made the most substantial contribution to the work described in an article and did most of the underlying research should be listed as the first author. The others are ranked in descending order of contribution. However, in many disciplines, such as the life sciences, the last author in a group is the principal investigator or “senior author”—the person who often provides ideas based on their earlier research and supervised the current work.
• Alphabetical list . Certain fields, particularly those involving large group projects, employ other methods . For example, high-energy particle physics teams list authors alphabetically.
• Multiple “first” authors . Additional “first” authors (so-called “co-first authors”) can be noted by an asterisk or other symbols accompanied by an explanatory note. This practice is common in interdisciplinary studies; however, as we explained above, the first name listed on a paper will still enjoy more visibility than any other “first” author.
• Multiple “last” authors . Similar to recognizing several first authors, multiple last authors can be recognized via typographical symbols and footnotes. This practice arose as some journals wanted to increase accountability by requiring senior lab members to review all data and interpretations produced in their labs instead of being awarded automatic last-authorship on every publication by someone in their group.
• Negotiated order . If you were thinking you could avoid politics by drowning yourself in research, you’re sorely mistaken. While there are relatively clear guidelines and practices for designating first and last authors, there’s no overriding convention for the middle authors. The list can be decided by negotiation, so sharpen those persuasive argument skills!

As you can see, choosing the right author order can be quite complicated. Therefore, we urge researchers to consider these factors early in the research process and to confirm this order during the English proofreading process, whether you self-edit or received manuscript editing or paper editing services , all of which should be done before submission to a journal. Don’t wait until the manuscript is drafted before you decide on the author order in your paper. All the parties involved will need to agree on the author list before submission, and no one will want to delay submission because of a disagreement about who should be included on the author list, and in what order (along with other journal manuscript authorship issues).

On top of that, journals sometimes have clear rules about changing authors or even authorship order during the review process, might not encourage it, and might require detailed statements explaining the specific contribution of every new/old author, official statements of agreement of all authors, and/or a corrigendum to be submitted, all of which can further delay the publication process. We recommend periodically revisiting the named author issue during the drafting stage to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that the list is updated to appropriately reflect changes in team composition or contributions to a research project.

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Research: How Women Can Build High-Status Networks

• Carla Rua-Gomez,
• Gianluca Carnabuci,
• Martin Goossen

Companies can help women overcome common obstacles they face when trying to forge powerful professional ties.

Despite the potential career benefits of building high-status networks, research has long shown that women face greater obstacles in establishing these networks compared to men. The authors’ research , published in the Academy of Management Journal, not only underscores what we know about the unique challenges women face in building high-status networks; it also offers a strategic roadmap for overcoming these challenges. By understanding and leveraging the power of shared social connections, women as individuals can navigate around systemic biases and forge valuable professional ties that propel their careers forward. For organizations committed to gender equality, their study provides a clear directive: Invest in building network sponsor programs that recognize and use the distinct pathways through which women can achieve high-status connections.

In the context of career advancement, the notion that “It’s not what you know, but who you know” holds some truth. However, for many women, this concept presents unique challenges. Despite the potential career benefits of building high-status connections within an organization, research has long shown that women face greater obstacles in establishing such connections compared to men. Our research , published in the Academy of Management Journal, offers new insights into this persistent challenge, and we share some of those insights in this article.

• CR Carla Rua-Gomez  is an assistant professor of management and organization at SKEMA Business School, Université Côte d’Azur (GREDEG). She received her PhD from Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Switzerland. Her research interests revolve around innovation, social networks, and gender inequality. Carla is particularly interested in understanding how workplace dynamics perpetuate or limit gender inequality within research-intensive corporations.
• GC Gianluca Carnabuci is a professor of organizational behavior at ESMT Berlin. He is also the holder of the Ingrid and Manfred Gentz Chair in Business and Society. His research and teaching focus on how informal networks shape the flow of information and knowledge within organizations, and how that affects the productivity of leaders, teams, and organizations.
• MG Martin Goossen is an assistant professor in the Department of Management of Tilburg University. His research focuses on the role of individual employees in the R&D activities of high-technology firms.

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Title: uni-smart: universal science multimodal analysis and research transformer.

Abstract: In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to address this challenge. Known for their strong abilities in summarizing texts, LLMs are seen as a potential tool to improve the analysis of scientific literature. However, existing LLMs have their own limits. Scientific literature often includes a wide range of multimodal elements, such as molecular structure, tables, and charts, which are hard for text-focused LLMs to understand and analyze. This issue points to the urgent need for new solutions that can fully understand and analyze multimodal content in scientific literature. To answer this demand, we present Uni-SMART (Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer), an innovative model designed for in-depth understanding of multimodal scientific literature. Through rigorous quantitative evaluation across several domains, Uni-SMART demonstrates superior performance over leading text-focused LLMs. Furthermore, our exploration extends to practical applications, including patent infringement detection and nuanced analysis of charts. These applications not only highlight Uni-SMART's adaptability but also its potential to revolutionize how we interact with scientific literature.

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Technological innovations for sustainable transformation towards carbon neutrality

• Published: 27 March 2024

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• Xiongfeng Pan 1 ,
• Jia Liu 2 ,
• Chew Tin Lee 3 &
• Xianyou Pan 4  

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Sustainable transformation towards carbon neutrality can be achieved by the development of innovative low-carbon energy technologies. Despite the promulgation and subsequent implementation of various policies, many obstacles and challenges lie ahead in the long transition to the achievement of a sustainable transition towards carbon neutrality, including government behaviour, the market environment, and enterprise capacity. Seeking to overcome such substantial barriers to such development, this special issue focuses on urgent issues, with the theme of “Technological Innovations for Sustainable Transformation Towards Carbon Neutrality”. The call welcomes researchers worldwide to contribute to extensive discussions on this theme and share their original thinking and high-quality research output. Its primary focus is to determine how stakeholders who have developed new technologies and designed green transformation paths can attain their carbon neutrality goals.

The guest editors of this special issue (Prof. Dr. Xiongfeng Pan, Prof. Dr. Jia Liu, Dr. Nader Atawnah, Prof. Dr. Chew Tin Lee, Dr. Muhammad Imran Qureshi, and Dr. Rashid Zaman) have worked diligently to bring together a diverse range of papers that address some of the most pressing low-carbon technological innovation challenges of our time. For example, He et al. (2023) quantitatively studied the implications of the dynamic decision behaviour of stakeholders on the prefabricated construction market; Lu et al. (2023) proposed a three-step method to guide the establishment of an extensible carbon emission factor database for the construction industry; Kayani et al. (2023) investigated the intricate interplay between carbon emissions and foreign direct investment within the context of BRICS; Yu et al. (2023) examined the feedback mechanism of critical peak pricing on coal consumption of power generation side units; Pan and Wang (2023) evaluated the impact of marine ecological compensation policy on marine carbon emission efficiency; and Skrzypczak et al. (2023) explored the development of sustainable fertilizers from waste materials of a biogas plant and a brewery. This special issue presents the latest research and developments in low-carbon technology and deepens our understanding of how to promote and accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies and sustainable transformation.

We, the guest editors, would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief of the ESPR journal, the editorial assistant, and all the supporting staff for giving us this opportunity. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to all the contributors and reviewers who have made this special issue possible. We hope that the papers in this special issue will inspire further research and innovation in this important field.

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Dalian University of Technology, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China

Xiongfeng Pan

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

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Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

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Pan, X., Liu, J., Lee, C.T. et al. Technological innovations for sustainable transformation towards carbon neutrality. Environ Sci Pollut Res (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32401-2

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‘You Transformed the World,’ NVIDIA CEO Tells Researchers Behind Landmark AI Paper

Of GTC ’s 900+ sessions, the most wildly popular was a conversation hosted by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang with seven of the authors of the legendary research paper that introduced the aptly named transformer — a neural network architecture that went on to change the deep learning landscape and enable today’s era of generative AI.

“Everything that we’re enjoying today can be traced back to that moment,” Huang said to a packed room with hundreds of attendees, who heard him speak with the authors of “ Attention Is All You Need .”

Sharing the stage for the first time, the research luminaries reflected on the factors that led to their original paper, which has been cited more than 100,000 times since it was first published and presented at the NeurIPS AI conference. They also discussed their latest projects and offered insights into future directions for the field of generative AI.

While they started as Google researchers, the collaborators are now spread across the industry, most as founders of their own AI companies.

“We have a whole industry that is grateful for the work that you guys did,” Huang said.

Origins of the Transformer Model

The research team initially sought to overcome the limitations of recurrent neural networks , or RNNs, which were then the state of the art for processing language data.

Noam Shazeer, cofounder and CEO of Character.AI, compared RNNs to the steam engine and transformers to the improved efficiency of internal combustion.

“We could have done the industrial revolution on the steam engine, but it would just have been a pain,” he said. “Things went way, way better with internal combustion.”

“Now we’re just waiting for the fusion,” quipped Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of blockchain company NEAR Protocol.

The paper’s title came from a realization that attention mechanisms — an element of neural networks that enable them to determine the relationship between different parts of input data — were the most critical component of their model’s performance.

“We had very recently started throwing bits of the model away, just to see how much worse it would get. And to our surprise it started getting better,” said Llion Jones, cofounder and chief technology officer at Sakana AI.

Having a name as general as “transformers” spoke to the team’s ambitions to build AI models that could process and transform every data type — including text, images, audio, tensors and biological data.

“That North Star, it was there on day zero, and so it’s been really exciting and gratifying to watch that come to fruition,” said Aidan Gomez, cofounder and CEO of Cohere. “We’re actually seeing it happen now.”

Envisioning the Road Ahead 

Adaptive computation, where a model adjusts how much computing power is used based on the complexity of a given problem, is a key factor the researchers see improving in future AI models.

“It’s really about spending the right amount of effort and ultimately energy on a given problem,” said Jakob Uszkoreit, cofounder and CEO of biological software company Inceptive. “You don’t want to spend too much on a problem that’s easy or too little on a problem that’s hard.”

A math problem like two plus two, for example, shouldn’t be run through a trillion-parameter transformer model — it should run on a basic calculator, the group agreed.

They’re also looking forward to the next generation of AI models.

“I think the world needs something better than the transformer,” said Gomez. “I think all of us here hope it gets succeeded by something that will carry us to a new plateau of performance.”

“You don’t want to miss these next 10 years,” Huang said. “Unbelievable new capabilities will be invented.”

The conversation concluded with Huang presenting each researcher with a framed cover plate of the NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer, signed with the message, “You transformed the world.”

There’s still time to catch the session replay by registering for a virtual GTC pass — it’s free.

To discover the latest in generative AI, watch Huang’s GTC keynote address:

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