Early-career researchers face a lot of challenges before reaching the desired academic pedestal. The journey involves crossing many stepping stones be it getting their research articles published, delivering impactful presentations, preparing selection-worthy research proposals or scouting for funds.
So, connecting with the right professionals and the right community becomes important to sustain oneself and achieve career goals. Efficient mentors can play a crucial role in boosting the research capabilities of scholars and score a success.
Value of Research Guidance
A mentor is well-familiar with the ins and outs of a particular academic field. They can share their understanding and experiences, and guide scholars in their research journey. In this way, mentors can prove immensely beneficial for academic and professional growth. Particularly, they can:
- Reveal the secrets and expert tips to becoming a successful academician.
- Resolve critical issues by banking upon their thorough knowledge.
- Act as a sounding board by reacting to your suggested ideas are a way to estimate their likely success.
- Hone your skills and competence, thereby boosting your confidence and chances of success.
- Share their methodologies and mechanisms of research work to direct you about accomplishing goals.
- Offer moral support, egg you on and motivate you in your research struggle.
- Provide necessary advice and feedback whenever required to improve your research outcomes. Early-career researchers are in a tight spot when it comes to selecting mentors due to their lack of prior knowledge or experience. Yet, it is a strategic decision and must be considered in depth from the start.
If you fail to find a good mentor in your network, you can opt for professional mentoring services that can help you with:
Technical Writing: Experts will train you in scientific writing so that you can come up with research papers and get them published on your own accord. Besides this, you’ll be coached in composition of research proposals, structuring and formatting of scientific articles, do’s and don’ts of technical writing, and strategies to optimize your paper’s language as per a certain journal’s requirements.
Plagiarism Screening: Software and other tools will be used to scan your paper thoroughly and spot plagiarism. You will be taught how to avoid plagiarism – even unintentional and accidental – so that your paper can easily clear detector and screening rounds during publication. Additionally, you’ll be acquainted with the correct way to provide citations and references for all your research articles.
Strategies to Avoid Paper Rejection: Academic research and subsequent publishing is a long-drawn-out process. First manuscripts are written, formatted, revised and edited multiple times. Then, authors incorporate inputs from various co-authors, collaborators, colleagues and mentors. Even after several checks, papers can get rejected by publication journals, at first glance or after a peer review. To escape this, you can rely on expert tips shared by professional research support services organizations. Precisely, they will coach you about various aspects, including:
- Journal selection – Choose a journal that publishes your line of work.
- Problem statement composition – A strong problem statement makes all the difference by clearly stating the objective of your research paper.
- Writing the conclusion – Partially conducted studies lacking a conclusive evidence may not be acceptable.
- Data sufficiency and presentation – Provide details of scientific, statistical or other evidence under respective headers, such as ‘Methodologies’, ‘Experiments’, etc. Your research and its conclusion must not be backed by rough estimations, arbitrary data or hypotheses.
- Legible language: No matter how complicated your study, its presentation should be simple and intelligible enough for others to understand. Journals accept standard English for publication. Your manuscript must be painstakingly proofread before submission to avoid grammatical and other errors.
- Ethical research standards: Your research subject, content, experimental systems, methodologies and procedures should align with the applicable standards of research practice, scientific integrity and accreditation boards.
Presentation Skills:PowerPoint and poster presentation skills. Researchers must be competent at delivering impactful presentations at international and national public forums. However, for novice scholars, this could be an intimidating experience and their poor presentation abilities may actually ruin the overall reception of their research work. So, academic communicative skills must be imbibed and rehearsed over again to make powerful presentations. In this regard, professional mentors can be helpful to introduce academicians with popular and impressive presentation structures and language expressions for scientific research. They can help pinpoint high frequency mistakes and suggest strategies to overcome them. Practical tips and learning materials can be shared by former-researchers for successful academic presentations in front of intellectually enlightened audiences.
Research Support: Academic publishing can be a daunting process, particularly when handled all alone by a scholar. However, with end-to-end publication support services, you can cross the many hurdles in your publishing journey and reduce the chances of paper rejection. It is often the case that failure to adhere to journal guidelines or other publishing protocols lead to outright rejections. In other cases, incomplete references, manuscript being outside the scope of the journal, manuscript lacking rudiments like the title, keywords, authors, affiliations, references, tables or figures, plagiarism and language or grammar not being up-to-the-mark become the grounds for rejection. Therefore, professional; services can play a crucial role by offering services, such as journal selection, pre-submission peer review, substantive editing, formatting, plagiarism check and manuscript submission. In case the paper is rejected in the first attempt, revised paper editing and responding to reviewer services are also provided. Furthermore, some specialist offer market research, graph correction, data collection, result interpretation, compiling requirements and statistical analysis support to enrich the quality of your scientific papers.
IPR & Patenting: It is important for every researcher to win exclusive rights over their creations. IPR allows doctorates to secure patents, trademarks and copyrights for their research work. And, with professional support services, you can eschew a lot of rep-tapism and sail through tiresome processes rapidly. Typically, patent, IPR and copyrights services cover support with regards to patentability search, application drafting, filing request for examination, responding to office action and industrial design service.