Taking your first steps in the world of academia can be intimidating. We have all experienced it while preparing research proposals, sitting in exams, and discussing research projects with peers and professors. What can make it easier is the thriving research community you can find online. By participating in it, you can create connections, find information, learn and enhance your skill-set in research, scientific writing, and so much more. However cliche it might sound, participating in the community is a great investment in the future.

What are, then, the best places to look for research-oriented social networking? Where do Internet personas of researchers and students congregate? Read on and find our suggestions. Read the rest of this entry »

Our last post explained how to optimise your  literature searches and how to remain up to date with the most recent publications. Once you’ve found a bunch of texts of your interest, you should also take care to make sure you organise them well so you can find them with little trouble, this will ensure a smoother writing process. Here are some tips:

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Regardless of whether you’re writing a short course paper or your thesis, you’re expected to have an overview of pretty much everything published in that particular field. The internet is vast and there are several databases and search engines to find literature.  Still, how to reach the right articles and books and to be sure not to miss out on something relevant? Here’s what you can do to ensure you know the most important and recent findings in your field.

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These days, the news are full of acronyms dealing with various legislation concerning copyright. The problematic of copyright laws has long since left the geeky closet of the software community or the posh one of the poor and abused music industry. The acronyms in our title, familiar to most, are proof enough of their mainstream status. It is a central issue for the new generation, and everybody has an opinion on it. In this post, I would like to put the open access movement into that context, to see how it relates to the general public outcry regarding copyright legislation. Are these things connected? If yes, how?

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A recent JEPS bulletin post revealed that the largest percent (37%) of APA style mistakes in the manuscripts submitted for the 4th issue of the Journal of European Psychology Students (JEPS) are related to reference formatting. This is consistent with the analysis of APA style mistakes from 2010 where the largest proportion of APA style mistakes in the past JEPS submissions were related to references as well, although in a significantly larger percent (51%).

As described in a previous post, writing proper references may involve several issues–correctly listing references cited in text, as well as having all references in the list cited in text. Problems also occur in correct spelling of the references, formatting in-text citations according to APA guidelines, formatting the reference list according to the specific APA rules applying to each type of publication and ordering the references alphabetically by the authors’ surnames.
Even though the APA manual is the guide no.1 in resolving these issues–doing it manually by the book requires a lot of time and attention. The good news is that there is a number of electronic tools that can also help to avoid these mistakes. This post offers you a brief introduction to two solutions–Zotero and Mendeley Desktop.

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Journals in psychology, although most of them are not yet Open Access (optimistically speaking) as previous posts have indicated, function as working memory of scientific findings. They usually follow the idea of collecting and saving and commonly sharing findings that have been investigated qualitatively and quantitatively in the world and transmitting them worldwide and onto following generations. Although the idea of free access to most of the journals has not been fulfilled, journals nevertheless guide us through the quickly growing field of research. In order not to get too confused and overwhelmed by the mass of journals nowadays, this post intends to structure the journal world starting historically from the first and only journal in psychology established at the end of the 19^th century. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the first skills we learn at the beginning of our university career is how to search properly for psychological literature. It reflects one of the first steps we employ conducting a psychological study and follows us throughout the entire research procedure when looking for additional knowledge.

The longest journey starts with a single step. A researcher would rather state: The longest research starts with a multiple literature search. Have you wandered from one database to the other desperately looking for a place to start with? Or do you never know when to end your search?

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As a psychology student you have to face certain barriers, when you have the possibility to do research. Those barriers mostly concern the university you are studying at. If your university does not provide you the opportunity to research in a field of your interest, the chance of working in an international research team on a joint project might be a good option to develop your research skills and discover the world of academia on an international level. If you can find such a team, then you are lucky, because 1) it is great to work together with people from different cultures who are all interested in the same topic and can share their expertise 2) it gives you possibilities to work on aspects of a topic that you could not do within the cultural and methodological framework of just one university.

But the opportunity of an international research team reveals some challenges you will have to face at several critical points throughout your work. In the following post, those challenges are summarized.

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What’s the most difficult part of the APA style for students? Continuing the practice from 2010, I’ll demonstrate the typical mistakes found in the manuscripts submitted for the 4th issue of the Journal of European Psychology Students (JEPS). Given that JEPS requires submitted manuscripts to follow APA style, this post may be useful for anyone writing papers according to these regulations.

This post will also refer to any material that would provide more information on how to avoid the incompatibility with the APA style.

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In the publish or perish world of modern psychology, the question of who publishes the journals we send our manuscripts to is not asked as often as it should be. We usually aren’t even aware who the publishers are. This is the case even when we only read, cite and use articles from scientific journals. As a rule of thumb, we are more than aware of the prestige of particular journals and their public face – topic, review policy, editorial team and even access policy; but who publishes them? Who owns them and what are their policies?

Find out in this installment of the Journal of European Psychology Students Bulletin.

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