The Official Blog of the Journal of European Psychology Students
Investigating concepts associated with psychology requires an indefinite amount of reading. Hence, good literature reviews are an inevitably needed part of providing the modern scientists with a broad spectrum of knowledge. In order to help, this blog post will introduce you to the basics of literature reviews and explain a specific methodological approach towards writing one, known as the systematic literature review. Continue reading
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 is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.
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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
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
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
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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