The Official Blog of the Journal of European Psychology Students
Walking down the corridor of a dark, mysterious medical centre to find the empty waiting room on a cold January evening, I had many burning questions ready and waiting to jump from my notepad that I couldn’t wait to discover the answers to. I was waiting to carry out my first qualitative interview with Dr. Cole* for my undergraduate psychology research; little did I know the exciting journey that I was about to ignite …
You are sitting in front of the computer, staring at one of the thirty browser windows that you have opened as a result of your online search for a research topic. For the past few days, you have been going round in circles, trying to nail down a research problem to work on, but to no avail. In fact, as a last resort to this exasperating quest, you have now decided to Google for “how to find a research topic”. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is not new. If you have the experience of conducting your own study, chances are, at the early stages of your research, you have faced with the difficulty of deciding on a research question and have constantly wondered if you were asking the right question. In truth, the search for a good research question is a daunting task, especially when researchers are often expected to know how to identify or figure out a good research question on their own.
Fortunately, with every problem, there is always a place at which we can use as a starting point that will hopefully lead us to a desirable solution.
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.
As regular readers of the JEPS bulletin will know, EFPSA is a staunch supporter of the open access movement. The JEPS Bulletin has led the way in the organisation’s support of this most important issue for modern science and has provided regular informative digests of the latest developments for the open access movement and what these mean for the psychology students of Europe (and beyond!).
As someone who was introduced this issue through following updates of the bulletin, I was honoured to get the chance to be involved in EFPSA’s first steps into greater involvement in the open access movement. In July, Ivan Flis, the Editor-in-Chief of JEPS, and I travelled to Budapest to take part in the first annual Right to Research Coalition General Assembly. Before going into how this will impact the future of EFPSA, let’s recap on some R2RC history!
” We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden” (Goethe)
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change
anything.” (George Bernard Shaw)
Nothing is as permanent as change. These various proverbs referring to the surpassing of time we experience cannot only refer to daily processes. While human beings and nature change, sience and research intend to describe and investigate those changes. Continue reading
These are some turbulent times for open access in Europe. Since we try to be the information hub for psychology students on the subject of open access, we will cover the two hot OA topics currently happening in Europe and the development of one student initiative (of which EFPSA is also a member) — Right to Research Coalition — that should become quite vocal on the topic in the near future. The two OA ‘hot potatoes’ currently being discussed in the research community are the Finch Report in the UK and the European Union Horizon 2020 research framework.
For our first part of the triptych, let’s talk about the Finch Report. At first it might seem like a country specific topic, but its implementation might have European and worldwide implications, since the UK is the de facto leader in open access policies and practices.
Also some advice before you continue reading — if you are not too familiar with the topic, please consult our Open Access Basics post so you understand all the OA specific terminology used in this post.
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose“
(Zora Neale Hurston)
As psychological researchers we have to ask ourselves the big question of WHY we are conducting research; a question that some might argue may be even more important than questioning HOW we go about it. From starting with a research idea to concluding the research process certainly takes longer than most people would think. However, it does not stop there. While some may say that they are conducting research because it is part of their degree or job, most of you will know that, in an ideal case scenario, we conduct research in order to make the world (or at least the world of psychology) a little richer. This is certainly a privilege that we enjoy when being active in a discipline such as psychology.
Today, much of the world of scientific writing and publishing revolves around making sure the standards of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (or more commonly known as “APA style”) are being met. Every undergraduate has gone through one or more courses about it, and every student pursuing a career in research sure as to know it from back to back. It can even be remarkably challenging to imagine the scientific enterprise without the existence of the Publication Manual.
APA style has come to refer to this well-developed system of writing conventions that includes guidelines on how to organize empirical reports, how to reference other published works, and how to solve a dozen other problems that arise in the preparation of a manuscript. But the reach of APA style doesn’t end in the settings in which manuscripts are prepared. Indeed, APA style has become common even in disciplines outside psychology, such as nursing, education and anthropology. Contemporary English textbooks present APA style as an established standard on a par with the revered “MLA style” (Achtert & Gibaldi, 1985).
But when something is so pervasive in a certain context we have to stop and ponder: what are the consequences of having such a fixed set of standards regulating most of scientific publishing in the social sciences?
Although qualitative research methods have grown increasingly popular,confusion exists over how their quality can be assessed and the idea persists that qualitative research is of lesser value when compared to quantitative research. Quantitative and qualitative research have different historical roots and are based on very different concepts, yet the dominance of positivist ideas about what constitutes good quality, valid research in psychology has often led qualitative research to be evaluated according to criteria, that are designed to fit a very different paradigm. Inevitably, the diverse perspectives which use qualitative methods and their differing views on how people should be studied mean there is disagreement and controversy over how quality should be evaluated. Despite this, it is seen as important to develop common criteria which allow the quality of qualitative research to be evaluated on its own terms.
When creating a research project, it is quite important to take into consideration many different factors that not only may influence the outcomes of the study itself, but as well how and in what way it may bring a change into the discipline. Thus, it is quite prominent to create a portfolio that lists hierarchically your project priorities and to consider their impact and contribution in a wider societal perspective and researcher’s closest environment. To be able to do so you may profit quite considerably from an information of a good quality. Obtaining such a knowledge will be helpful in broadening your academic horizon providing useful information on the maximization of your research outcomes.
