Category Archives: Scientific writing

General information and advice about writing scientific texts.

Not solely about that Bayes: Interview with Prof. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

Last summer saw the publication of the most important work in psychology in decades: the Reproducibility Project (Open Science Collaboration, 2015; see here and here for context). It stirred up the community, resulting in many constructive discussions but also in verbally violent disagreement. What unites all parties, however, is the call for more transparency and openness in research.

Eric-Jan “EJ” Wagenmakers has argued for pre-registration of research (Wagenmakers et al., 2012; see also here) and direct replications (e.g., Boekel et al., 2015; Wagenmakers et al., 2015), for a clearer demarcation of exploratory and confirmatory research (de Groot, 1954/2013), and for a change in the way we analyze our data (Wagenmakers et al., 2011; Wagenmakers et al., in press). Continue reading →

Fabian Dablander

Fabian Dablander just finished his Masters in Cognitive Science at the University of Tübingen. He is interested in innovative ways of data collection, Bayesian statistics, and open science. You can find him on Twitter @fdabl.

Publishing a Registered Report as a Postgraduate Researcher

Registered Reports (RRs) are a new publishing format pioneered by the journal Cortex (Chambers 2013). This publication format emphasises the process of rigorous research, rather than the results, in an attempt to avoid questionable research practices such as p-hacking and HARK-ing, which ultimately reduce the reproducibility of research and contribute to publication bias in cognitive science (Chambers et al. 2014). A recent JEPS post by Dablander (2016) and JEPS’ own editorial for adopting RRs (King et al. 2016) have given a detailed explanation of the RR process. However, you may have thought that publishing a RR is reserved for only senior scientists, and is not a viable option for a postgraduate student. In fact, 5 out of 6 of the first RRs published by Cortex have had post-graduate students as authors, and publishing by RR offers postgraduates and early career researchers many unique benefits. Continue reading →

James Bartlett

I'm James Bartlett, a PhD student at Coventry University, UK. The aim of my project is to create a profile of cognitive mechanisms associated with substance use in light and heavy smokers. I keep myself occupied outside of academia by playing hockey, or watching ice hockey. You can also find me on Twitter (@JamesEBartlett).

Meet the Authors

Do you wish to publish your work but don’t know how to get started? We asked some of our student authors, Janne Hellerup Nielsen, Dimitar Karadzhov, and Noelle Sammon, to share their experience of getting published. Continue reading →

Leonor Agan

Leonor is a postgraduate student at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences (University of Edinburgh), pursuing a MSc in Neuroimaging for Research. She holds a BSc in Psychology from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and a BA in Psychology from Maynooth University in Ireland. She worked as a Research Assistant in Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (University College Dublin), and Psychology Department (University College Dublin). Her research interests include cognition, memory, and neuroimaging techniques, specifically diffusion MRI and its applications in disease. She is also an Editor of the Journal of European Psychology Students. Find her on Twitter @leonoragan and link in with her.

”Writefull” Can Help Your Academic Writing!

Have you ever done a Google search to check if your writing is correct? Many of us do it all the time – especially when writing in our second language. The idea behind this approach is simple: The more results Google gives us (i.e. the more often our chunk is found on the Internet), the more ‘accepted’ it apparently is. For example, if we are not sure if the correct form is ‘looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘looking forward to see you’, Google will tell us it might be better to use the first (148,000,000 versus 15,800,000 results). This way, Google can serve as an incredibly useful tool to help us in our (academic) writing. Continue reading →

Juan Castro-Gutierrez

Juan Castro is a research associate in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has a strong interest in psychology, and in particular in natural language processing and acquisition. His work focuses on artificial intelligence and on the development of language tools.

Peer Review Process – Tips for Early Career Scientists

As many of us enter the world of science having little experience in peer review it is relevant to describe it in more detail and provide some useful tips about the process. By the time some of us finish university, we might have some general idea and knowledge about how peer review works by submitting own manuscripts and, hopefully, getting published. However, what happens if a person is about to become a reviewer oneself? This changes perspectives considerably. Thus, many early career scientists who become reviewers have not only insufficient experience, but also lack knowledge on the matter. That is why it is important to share some useful insights on how reviewers’ work looks like and on what one should be focused on when going through a big number of submitted texts in order to choose the best ones.

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Magdalena Kossowska

Magdalena Eliza Kossowska is a Psychologist, Project Manager, and Recruiter. She has volunteered for various NGOs (including EFPSA, AEGEE, Polish Psychologists Association), and participated in scholarships in Prague, Czech Republic; Tromso, Norway; and London, United Kingdom. She is interested in organisational, cross cultural, as well as cognitive psychology.

Why meta-analysis? A guide through basic steps and common biases

Meta: meta- combining form. From Greek meta ‘with, across, or after.’ Pertaining to a level above or beyond.

Analysis: analysis |əˈnaləsis| noun. From Greek analuō ‘I unravel, investigate’. Detailed examination of the elements or structure of something,

Often times, researchers and students find themselves going through a dense amount of papers on a certain topic only to find results that don’t really seem to point towards a coherent or homogenous conclusion. Does this treatment work?
Continue reading →

Luís Miguel Tojo

Luís Miguel Tojo is a MSc student in Cognitive Neuroscience (Neuropsychology) at Maastricht University, Netherlands, since 2012, having finished his BSc in Psychological Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is currently Vice President of EFPSA (2013-2014) and has been the Research Officer for the Junior Researcher Programme since early 2012. His research interests cover neuroprotective factors against neurodegenerative diseases and brain insults, and neuropsychopharmacological approaches to mental illness.

Research Proposal: Behind-the-Scenes Exclusive

Staying in academia involves writing up research proposals. For some, it starts as early as during their Bachelor’s studies where they have to provide one-page experiment proposal for their supervisors. Then, after several discussions with the supervisor, they may begin their very first research experiment. Later in time, other coursework comes in – where in order to pass the subject – one must carry out an experiment that makes sense. For many students, the last time (or sometimes the first and only time) they wrote something similar to a research proposal is, when they begin their Master’s thesis. At this level, a good outline of the research is unavoidable and usually mounts up to 3-5 pages. Of course, it is possible to slip-through the system without approaching the thesis-writing preparation seriously, but usually such approach ends up in much more negative feelings than simply outlining the strategy and planning for the research.

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Peter Lewinski

Peter Lewinski is Marie Curie Research Fellow in The CONsumer COmpetence Research Training (CONCORT) and in Vicarious Perception Technologies B.V. He is a PhD candidate (2012-2015) in Persuasive Communication at Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) - University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He studies facial expressions and advertisements. He was at the EFPSA Executive Board and Board of Management in 2011-2013.

Advice for the Next Generation of Researchers in Psychology from an Experienced Editor

In April 2012, at the conference of the Austrian Society for Psychology (ÖGP) at the University of Graz, Robert Kail – experienced researcher and editor for one of the flagship journals in Psychology, Psychological Science – gave an insightful presentation and discussion targeted to give advice about manuscript preparation and the submission process to junior researchers in psychology. His presentation was organized around several key questions taken from a survey that students of the association for psychological science (APSSC) had conducted. The following main topics of his presentation will be discussed in this post: turning a thesis into a paper, writing a clear introduction, choosing the right title for a paper, and what to consider during the submission phase.

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Peter Edelsbrunner

Peter is currently doctoral student at the section for learning and instruction research of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He graduated from Psychology at the University of Graz in Austria. Peter is interested in conceptual knowledge development and the application of flexible mixture models to developmental research. Since 2011 he has been active in the EFPSA European Summer School and related activities.

The structure of an APA research paper

Throughout the course of our studies, we have all read a lot of literature reviews or scientific papers, those whose methodological standard we could have learned from and improved and others that make us wonder how they ever made it through the peer- review process of the journal. Nevertheless, we have to admit that we all still make mistakes and sometimes submit manuscripts that do not match APA guidelines. In order to improve our general knowledge about how to format papers in our beloved APA style or to refresh our previous knowledge related to it, this post intends to give a brief overview over the structure of a scientific paper and some other crucial APA features your paper should contain.
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Sina Scherer

Sina Scherer, studying at University of Münster, Germany, and University of Padova, Italy. I have previously worked as JEPS Bulletin Editor and am active in a NMUN project simulating the political work of the United Nations as voluntary work. I am interested in cognitive neuroscience and intercultural psychology, anthropology and organizational psychology (aspects of work-life balance, expatriation).

How to write a good title for journal articles

Writing the title takes just a fraction of the time you need to put down your work on paper. Nonetheless, this starting point is very important one, because it may influence the impact of your work and the number of readers that it will attract. With the increasing digitalization of research, more and more people are using abstract databases to find articles relevant to their work. That’s why, if you want your article to come up in the search results, you should make sure that its title is a good summary of your work and that it addresses the right audience. How can you do this? Here is a step-by-step guide with some useful tips.

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Martin Vasilev

Martin Vasilev is a final year undergraduate student of Psychology at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and the author of some of the most popular posts on JEPS Bulletin (see for example, his post on the most common mistakes in APA style was the most read in the JEPS Bulletin in 2013 and his post on writing literature reviews, which was reprinted in the MBA Edge, a magazine for prospective postgraduate students in Malaysia)

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