Postgraduate Research - Tips for Postgrads

Rick Shine on Writing Papers

• The relevance of my experience is research and publishing, not teaching and not grant applications. I have done it the old fashioned way through ARC and Discovery grants so I don’t have a lot of advice for getting funding. The way I got grants and continued to get grants was through publishing lots of papers
• A third of all papers published in biology each year are my papers and this equates to 40-50 papers per year. I was either going to be a crime fiction writer or a scientist. Either way, I have always liked to write and I write all the time.
• Writing papers is the same as writing anything. You need to attract attention so make it interesting and entertaining. Make it clear where you work fits into the conceptual understanding that already exists. Exploit ruthlessly the uniqueness of an organism and the fact that it’s Australian. Think of it like story telling and start with a simple cute question to intrigue the reader.
• When putting a paper together get al the information from the research you have done and bring it down to a statement or generality. The final step is to discuss what the generality means, where does it fit, and what does it tell us.
• Above all the story needs to be simple with clarity of thought. Work out what the simple story is and how you can tell it.
• Red Thread concept for writing papers – from Bill Magnison:
  The Red Thread is a single conceptual theme. A single long argument that goes the entire way through the paper. Bill’s advice is to write the paper in reverse;
  - What is the story? (Discussion)
  - What bits of the results do I need?
  - Sift the methods
  - The intro then basically writes itself
• Think about the paper while you are doing the work. Once the research is done. Put the tables and figures together and study the stats and then make sure they match.
• Keep it short.
• 1st person (I did this). Active voice. Short sentences.
• Never make the author the subject eg. Use "Roos jump high (Smith etal)" instead of "Smith et al found roos jump high".
• Accept that everything you ever publish will one day be wrong. The only thing you can do is be scrupulously honest with what you did.

Tips for PC Users

Movies for presentations

If you take movies of ".MOV" format using a digital camera (e.g. Nikon Coolpix) and want to insert them into powerpoint so you can run them during presentations, here's what to do:

1. Powerpoint uses MediaPlayer not QuickTime to run movies, so will probably not recognize the ".MOV" extension. You need to convert your ".MOV" files into ".AVI" files using some freeware called "Rad Video Tools".
2. Go to the web site: http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm
3. Download and install the "Rad Video Tools" software.
4. Go to your "Programs" folder then the "RadVideo" Folder in which the stuff has been installed.
5. Ignore things called "Bink" and "Smack" (!) and open the "RadVideo" icon (or drag it onto your desktop and create a shortcut). This is the thing which converts your movies to ".AVI".
6. Select the file you want to convert, make sure it is set to convert to AVI, then hit the convert button. It does not overwrite, so you still have your original .MOV version too.
7. In Powerpoint, go to "Insert", then"Movies and Sounds" then "Movie from file" and select your movie (AVI version).
8. Make sure you copy the AVI movie files onto your CD or harddrive when you run your presentation because powerpoint does not actually embed the movie, it just creates a link to it.

Scanning text and having the computer recognise it as text

Recently I had over 70 pages of printed data that I needed to get into a spreadsheet. Do I spend 2 weeks entering it, threatening my sanity and risking RSI. No, this would be silly. I want technology to help out. The plan - scan or photograph the pages and then have some program turn the images into text.

Sounds simple enough but first, you need the appropriate term -
"Optical Character Recognition". Names are power and Google is the conduit for that power. You will find a bunch of freeware or demo versions of OCR software on the web. As usual there is a bunch of freeware for PCs but nothing for Macs. I managed to find one demo version for macs - a program called Readiris (which is very good and if anyone is thinking of buying software, I recommend this). After that, it was a simple matter of taking a photograph of every page, downloading them, running them through OCR and checking the output (these programs do make mistakes). It took me half a day to enter >10 000 data points.

Scanners are readily available and first year biology in Carslaw may have a scanner with OCR software - which may save you the hassle of finding your own.

Seperating References in a Document with Semicolons

Have you ever had trouble trying to separate references in a document with semicolons (i.e. Brown et al., 2000; Martin, 2003; Francis and Grant, 2003). Some journals require this format, but endnote won't do it.

If you have, here's why and what to do about it!

The semicolon is used to separate citations for formatting, and that's why you are having this problem. If you need semicolons, here is something that you can try.

1. Instead of using a semicolon, use a character that you are not going to use in this doc (like a ^ or whatever) and place that where you want the semicolon to be inserted and format.
2. When you are done formatting, you can make a copy of the doc (very important), and then in the copied doc select all of the text and then remove the field codes by selecting "remove field codes" from the Endnote menu in Word (or holding down Apple and 6 on a Mac). What "removing field codes" does is break the links between the references and bibliography. So you can't change the references after you have done this. It is very important that you do this on a copied doc because you can not undo the changes.
3. Then, in Word, select to do a find and replace and replace the ^ with a semicolons.

This technique is also useful for other strange formatting problems. For example, Copeia wants double-dashes (–) between page numbers. I haven't found a way to get Endnote to do this (if anyone knows, can you tell me), so what I do is once I've finished the document, copy it to a new file and remove the field codes. Then you can find - and replace with –.

Good luck :)

Also see the Endnote Visual Guide for Biological Sciences for more Endnote tips.

Attaching PDF files to Endnote references

1. Go to Preferences, select Reference Types, and click the Modify Reference type' tab.
2. Scroll to the bottom and add the Image field (by typing Image next to the Image label under the appropriate Reference Type (journal, book, etc.), and Save.
3. Open the reference you want to attach the PDF to, and insert object (either go to the References menu and choose Insert Object or click the Insert Object toolbar button).
4. Locate the file you want to attach, and Insert it.
5. The file will appear as an attachment, with the program icon and filename. Double-clicking on the icon will launch the associated application and open the file.