If you're applying for a master's program or especially for a phd program your research is going to be super important part of your profile.
For phd it's absolutely necessary for masters of course it's optional but having it is going to give a strong point in your profile.
Even if you are not applying to a research based program having a research project in your profile shows the admissions committee that you are someone who's able to take the knowledge that they learned in class and then apply it in a real world situation and of course get like a stamp of approval from a peer-reviewed journal or conference.
How To Write and Publish a Research Paper
So here are the steps that you need to follow in order to publish your own research paper:
Step One
Approach a professor. The first step is you got to find a guide for your research work. This guide you can find through your own university, you can approach one of the professors that you know at your university that you know might be good at research or likes to do research.
You can approach a professor that is not from your university from a different university within your own country or any any other country. This can be complicated because professors are a little bit shy to work with students that they don't really know well but the easiest way to push forward is just to find professors in your own college.
Step Two
The second step is to decide on a topic. Now that you have a guide now you need to decide on a topic for your research work.
There are two ways that you can do this, the first way is either you will have your own research idea which if you do that's great if you don't the professor might have a research idea that they want to explore and they want to make use of your research skills and in order to see if you know if a paper can be published or there's kind of potential within that idea.
Some professors might ask you to do your own literature review and then figure out what kind of areas you guys can potentially do research work on
What this means is you will essentially pick a topic like for example computer vision and then you will read a bunch of papers on computer vision you know papers that just came out and then you'll try to see gaps in those papers.
So like how can you do the experiment in a different way maybe there's like a potential idea that you come up with while reading those papers.
Then as you do literature review you might get some new ideas to explore.
Step Three
The third step is to start learning and start working so in a lot of cases for your research work you might have to build up new skills.
For this you can use courses on udemy or coursera or edx you can even find a bunch of youtube videos online if they'll teach you what you need to know and once you build those skills and of course you start working towards your research project.
Step Four
Step four is to produce a proof of concept, proof of concept is sort of like a prototype for your project or like your idea just to show your know onlookers that hey okay this project has like you know some direction like you know, it actually has potential to turn out to be great and we just need to keep pushing forward in that direction.
So proof of concept doesn't have to be really fancy it can just be like a small version of your targeted project for example. Let's say your project is to create like a self-driving car.
So maybe like the car is your big goal but then if you want a proof of concept maybe you create like a self-driving atv or maybe you create like a self-driving one of those child atvs that you know little kids drive around on.
Step Five
Step five is to produce a complete product. Now from your proof of concept you go on improving it, you will fix all the problems that you need to and you just build your final product.
So once you have your complete product ready that's when you know the results of your research work and you can actually have something that you can tell other people about in conferences and journals.
Step Six
Step six is to produce a preliminary paper. What this means is essentially now that you have your product or your result of your experiment basically. You want to put this down in like a scientific format, so you basically just copy like a template, there are so many paper templates out there so you want to just copy like a template and then write your paper based off of that template.
Basically just put down all the information that you have learned from all the tests that you completed, take pictures and draw graphs.
Step Seven
Step seven is to pick a publication. Now you have to actually choose to publish your paper somewhere, so you actually choose a publication that you want to go to, again having a guide is super awesome because they'll just tell you what publication you guys can publish in because they will be able to judge your research work and sort of tell whether your research work is good enough.
Step Eight
Step eight is to submit your paper regarding the publication specifications. Depending on the journal and the conference that you guys are submitting your paper into, they will have different requirements.
Some of them will want you to know they want like some two inch margins or maybe one inch margins some of them will prefer having it in two columns or some of them will want the research work in one column.
There's going to be a lot of different specifications for each particular publication. That's why when you have your preliminary paper all you have to do is just convert that preliminary paper to whatever specifications that the publication is asking for and then you just submit your new paper.
Step Nine
Step nine is to wait for further edits. Once you submit your first draft, they will come back to you and they will tell you okay so we want this change we want that change we want you know better graphs this this part is done improperly and all that kind of stuff right so you'll need to make all those changes and then resubmit it and then wait for their approval.
Step Ten
Step ten is that your work is published. You're basically done now. If you publish it at a conference then you will be present at the conference, if it's in a journal then i guess just wait for the journal to come out and you're pretty much done now.
Now all you have to do is to write down the citation of your publication in your resume on your linkedin profile and all that and in your sop or whenever you're applying to college you can say that you know you submitted this paper at this journal.
To summarise everything once again, the steps to publish your research paper are:
- First approach a professor.
- Second decide a topic.
- Third start learning into whatever skills that you need and start working towards a project.
- Step four produce a proof of concept
- Step five is to produce a complete product or you know the completed version of your experiment.
- Step six is to prepare a preliminary paper, do the literature review add the pictures graphs etc.
- Step seven is selective publication.
- Step eight is to submit a paper according to the specifications.
- Step nine is to wait for further edits you know from those from that publication.
- Step ten you're done your work is published.
Hope this post was helpful, if you any questions you can drop them in the comments box.