How to publish about your research results for academic and non-academic audiences

As a graduate student, one of our goals is to produce research that will be useful to the world, that will be known and used by other people. This usefulness can come in many forms; for example, our work can serve to inspire future research, which will take the topic one step further, or it can be used by people in the industry as part of their work. But for any of this to happen, the methods, results, and takeaways of our research need to be communicated to the world. Of course, most research programs require the student to write a thesis or dissertation, but the reality is that very few people will read it besides the evaluation committee. A thesis or dissertation might eventually be also read by other graduate students that are working on the same topic and want to know the existing literature in details. But other than that, most people would prefer to read a summarized version of the research instead of the whole thesis or dissertation. Continue reading

Is Your Research Reproducible?

When a scientific experiment achieves the expected result, researchers hurry up to draft a manuscript, submit it and cross their fingers for acceptance. When that paper gets accepted for publication – a happy camper! However, and not much later, the researchers discover that it was a fool’s paradise. Their work never gets cited by peers. Often times, simply because others cannot reproduce their scientific experiment, i.e. they cannot compare it to their own experiments. There are few reasons that block research reproducibility. In this post, I will preview some of them that frequently appear in the field of computational science. Continue reading