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For PhD students. Shopping Cart For PhD students For PhD students ThinkWell offers a number of services to PhD students, including: workshops books free templates and guides to help you plan and manage your PhD Workshops We offer a number of workshops for PhD students, including: All workshops are organised through universities. Books We offer a number of books designed to help PhD students and early career researchers. Free templates and guides Our free downloadable templates will help you plan your PhD. The Four Sentence Abstract | Research Practice. I found this many many years ago, and have used it ever since. While it is not ideal for framing a research question where you don’t yet know the outcome (as that is a reasonably speculative model of research) for writing a summary of a chapter, or a proposal for an essay or conference paper, it has never failed. The original is from Kent Beck, which I think is missing but a fine Canadian (one Michael W.

Godfrey) has kept it. My summary is: I try to have four sentencesin my abstract. The first states the problem.The second states why the problem is a problem.The third is my startling sentence.The fourth states the implication of my startling sentence. Beck’s specific example: An abstract for this paper done in this style would be:The rejection rate for OOPSLA papers in near 90%. I also sometimes use the form of a) What are you going to do? It is surprisingly robust, and for larger than four sentences I have commonly started with four sentences, then each sentence has become a paragraph….

Nvivo lit review

NVivo Endnote Lit review. Hone your NVivo skills with literature reviews | The NVivo Blog. 25 July 2014 - IN coding, EndNote, framework, literature, matrices, matrix, NVivo, query, reviews, Scrivener, search, text There are some excellent resources available about using NVivo for your literature reviews. Here, I describe some ways in which I use NVivo for literature reviews, which you might find useful.

I believe working with NVivo during literature review is an excellent way to manage research, a practical way to learn and practice with NVivo, honing practical skills. This post ties in with my SlideShare presentations to help to visualise the processes. Citations as sources It is useful to think of citation materials as sources, and conceptualise working with them in NVivo in ways similar to working with interview transcripts or other sources.

Using EndNote smart groups I have accumulated about 2,500 references, so I use EndNote’s “smart groups” feature to create groups of references. Import and organize references in NVivo Explicit and emergent approaches Memos and writing up. Using NVivo Tools for Literature Review | PleagleTrainer Blog. I use NVivo computer-aided qualitative data analysis software as part of my literature review process.This post describes some of the things I do as part of that process.* You can see an accompanying SlideShare here. Background: My research studies PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning in PLT. This study involves individual and extra-individual dimensions of practice. I am interested in how social structures (such as “law”) are inscribed into practices, and whether practices can affect or change those structures.

As part of my research, I have collated about 2000 items of literature, which I need to organise effectively for my doctoral research and for the future. I use Endnote, and I am pretty happy with it. I’ve observed, however, that different citation managers suit different styles of working. I will be talking about Endnote in this post, but the process I describe is probably similar to other citation managers. Why use NVivo for your literature review? | Anuja Cabraal. Whenever I tell people that I have used NVivo for a literature review, they always want to know more! Writing a literature review is so much more than simply reading and writing.

In fact, there is even a blog dedicated to dealing with literature reviews for academics and PhD students. While there are tools such as Endnote and Zotero that help with citations, there are few tools to assist with the sorting, categorising and grouping of the literature, which are essential parts of the process of writing a literature review. This is where CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) can help, and the one I’ve used, and found particularly useful, is NVivo. The main benefits I have found so far: It helps you find patterns and put things into groups and categories The sample categories (Nodes) I created. Grouping, categorising and finding patterns in literature are an important part of the literature review process. It lets you change categories easily as your research progresses. Full Tour - Qiqqa. PDF Viewer The heart of Qiqqa, with all the features you’d expect from a regular PDF viewer, plus more tailored just for the serious researcher.

Annotations, highlights, free form drawing Add your notes directly to a section of the document. Use the colors your prefer, add tags, even a rating and follow up date. Got a stylus? Write or draw in freehand on your document. View multiple pages at once Most PDF viewers battle to show you the 10000ft view. Annotations Summary Particularly useful for large documents, the annotations summary shows you a preview of your important sections, and allows you to jump straight to that part of the document. Automatic Abstract Qiqqa attempts to automatically find and extract the document’s abstract when available. Automated Jump Links and bookmarks If your PDF has bookmarks, these can be easily accessed. Tabs Open multiple documents at once, or the same document as many times as you need to, so you can see different parts at the same time. Dictionary & Web Search. NVivo 10 for Mac Help. Home > Sources > Bringing source materials into NVivo > Import data from spreadsheets and text files This topic is about creating new dataset sources in NVivo, by importing data from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

For example, you might want to import a spreadsheet containing survey responses. In this release of NVivo for Mac, you cannot import data from text files. What do you want to do? Gather your data You cannot add additional records (rows) or fields (columns) to a dataset after import, so it is important to gather your data before you start the import operation. For each dataset that you want to create, your data must be gathered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx or .xls).

You cannot select multiple worksheets (within a spreadsheet), so the data you want to import must be gathered into a single worksheet. The maximum amount of data that can be imported into a single dataset is 255 fields (columns) and 100,000 records (rows). Top of Page Prepare an Excel spreadsheet for import. Things you were taught at school that are wrong. Do you remember being taught you should never start your sentences with “And” or “But”?

What if I told you that your teachers were wrong and there are lots of other so-called grammar rules that we’ve probably been getting wrong in our English classrooms for years? How did grammar rules come about? To understand why we’ve been getting it wrong, we need to know a little about the history of grammar teaching. Grammar is how we organise our sentences in order to communicate meaning to others. Those who say there is one correct way to organise a sentence are called prescriptivists. Prescriptivist grammarians prescribe how sentences must be structured. Prescriptivists had their day in the sun in the 18th century. These self-appointed guardians of the language just made up grammar rules for English, and put them in books that they sold. They took their newly concocted rules from Latin.

And yes, that is the origin of today’s grammar schools. The other camp of grammarians are the descriptivists. 1. What’s a #phd ‘contribution’? | patter. What’s a #phd ‘contribution’? You hear the term contribution almost as soon as you enrol in the PhD. It’s something you wrestle with as you write your research proposal – you need to convince your chosen institution that your research will make a contribution. Funders are particularly keen to hear about contribution too, is their scholarship money going to produce one, they wonder. And of course, you continue to worry about contribution. For instance, during your field work. Contribution – do I have one here? But what is ‘a contribution’? Expressed in plain language, examiners see a contribution as something interesting, something that brings a new perspective, something that teaches them and offers them something they haven’t considered before.

Who knew birds were so creepy … the Hitchcock contribution Examiners usually expect the contribution to be spelled out for them. Like this: Like Loading... About pat thomson. Preparing to submit a thesis or project for examination. You must submit your thesis or project via Equella. Once it has been endorsed by your School and the School of Graduate Research (SGR), it will be sent to the approved panel of examiners for an examination outcome.

Before submitting your thesis or project you must schedule a meeting with your supervisory team to discuss the following: Decide in consultation with your supervisory team whether your thesis or project is ready to be submitted for examination.Clarify whether there is any need for applying for an embargo or confidentiality agreement.Begin to discuss the drafting of your doctoral citation (PhD only). The modes of submission are: thesis modeproject mode. You need to ensure that you meet all the requirements for submission of a thesis or project before submitting: If these requirements are not met, the SGR may not accept your submission. Your thesis/project must contain the following in the order below: You must submit the following items to Equella by your maximum completion date:

Who Cites? APA - Citing and referencing - Library Guides at Monash University. APA style is an author-date citation style. It was developed mainly for use in psychology, but has also been adopted by other disciplines. There are two major components to the APA author-date style - the in-text author-date citation at the appropriate place within the text of the document, e.g. (Smith, 2010), and the detailed reference list at the end of the document. All in-text citations must have a corresponding reference list entry, and the converse applies for reference list entries. This guide is based on more detailed information in: American Psychological Association. (2010). Frequently asked questions about APA style APA style CENTRAL is a new online resource designed to assist in the application of APA style formatting rules.

Printing this guide: Please note printing directly from pages in this guide may alter the citation formatting display. APA 6. Author, Initials. (year). Source. An important purpose of the reference list is to enable readers to locate your sources. Therefore, details must be correct and complete. Each in-text citation and the related reference list entry should be identical in spelling and year. A work is listed only once in the reference list, regardless of how many times it is cited in text. All citations should be listed in the reference list, with the exception of personal communications. The following is an example of an APA reference list. Reference list Australian Psychological Society. (2014). Friedman, H. Gardner, H. (1983). Holder, M. Hughes, D. Krieger, T., Zimmermann, J., Huffziger, S., Ubl, B., Diener, C., Kuehner, C., & Grosse Holtforth, M. (2013). Marelich, W. Midford, R. (2005). Nader, C. (2009, June 19). National Health and Medical Research Council. (2013).

Noel, H., Denny, S., Farrant, B., Rossen, F., Teevale, T., Clark, T., … Fortune, S. (2013). Reed, M. Reed, M. Savage, J. (2004). Why use NVivo for your literature review? | Anuja Cabraal. Easy Reading Is Damn Hard Writing — The Startup. “As for how to write well,” writes Paul Graham, “here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut everything unnecessary.”

It’s all too easy to follow his first piece of advice and then neglect to follow the rest. The root of the problem lies in our desire to impress. Thesaurus carpet-bombings and long-winded sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they feel authoritative and intellectual. But they’re just masks; effective writing is lean, clean, and easy to read. It’s difficult putting thoughts to page without losing a little luster along the way. Strip away the inessential Richard Lanham’s Paramedic Method is helpful for finding and killing the bloat.

Highlight the prepositions.Highlight the “is” verb forms.Find the action. In every paragraph Lanham revises, wordiness sneaks in out of laziness, or because the author wanted to turn a plain statement into a pompous profundity. Here’s an example from Revising Prose: <h2>How do I write a literature review?</h2> - Learning Centre. As part of a thesis, the literature review enables you to demonstrate your knowledge of previous work in your field and to situate your own research in the context of this work. The literature review may form one or more distinct chapters of the thesis it may also be part of the introductory chapter or be incorporated as background for a number of chapters. How the review is incorporated generally depends on the field of studyA literature review can have a number of purposes within a thesis. These include: to show gaps in the researchto justify your own researchto demonstrate your understanding of your fieldto generate new research hypothesesto place your own research in its contextto summarise and evaluate past researchto show similarities and differences (or consistencies and inconsistencies) in previous researchto give an overview of controversies in past research For more help on this topic, see the links on the right...

Writing literature reviews. Critical reading - Literature Reviews - LibGuides at University of Melbourne. The first step towards critical reading is to keep your purpose in mind when you read. Don't let the arguments in the book distract you from your reading agenda. Before beginning to read, take a few moments to think about what it is you are expecting from the article or chapter. Previewing or prereading can help you focus your thoughts. Skim the headings and the abstract of the piece, perhaps look at the first line of each paragraph and the conclusion. Do you need to read everything with equal attention? Critical reading of web based material Most information that appears on the internet has not been peer reviewed, unlike many journal articles and most scholarly books. When you are looking at material online, keep a critical focus. Who are the authors of this piece?

Evaluating information on the web - for further assistance Asking questions You should have some specific questions in mind as you read. What were the authors trying to discover? How similar were the programs used? Literature review writing | University of Technology Sydney. LearningGuide writingLiteratureReview. HDR - Write the thesis. HDR - Write the thesis. Ten ways To Write Every Day.