Application of ICT in

Research - Notes

UGC NET Paper 1

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Application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Research

Revolutionising Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) remains the top agenda
of many developing countries including India. Much stress has been made to facilitate the
application of ICT's in developmental planning and research. The application of ICT's in higher
education and research is seen as another potent and convincing paradigm for development
in developing countries.
Despite its polemic nature, ICTs have undoubtedly impacted the teaching and learning process
in a positive manner. Human beings have an advanced skill that allows them to share
knowledge with others and the use of ICTs to make this transfer and sharing of knowledge all
more interesting is, indeed, praiseworthy. ICTs enhance our access to knowledge as well as act
as a supplement of knowledge that we gather through traditional sources. In this post, we will
focus more on the application of ICT's in academic research at the universities.
Generally, Applications of ICT help the researcher in the following research-related tasks:

identify appropriate information sources

critically analyse information

research effectively

manage information

use the information to extend and communicate knowledge across subject fields

search up to ten databases and electronic resources simultaneously

receive results in a common format

link to individual databases for more specialised searching

select favourite resources and e-journals, save searches and records, and set up email
alerts.

Applications of ICT have many effects on research. They can be classified into three categories
which include:

1. Applications of ICT in pre-data analysis

2. Applications of ICT in data analysis, and

3. Applications of ICT in post-data analysis

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A. Applications of ICT in pre-data analysis

Applications of ICT in pre-data analysis refers to the activities of how ICTs are applied to
activities of social science research before reaching the stage of data analysis.
ICT application in the pre-data analysis includes:

1. Literature Search, Article Availability, Thesis and Dissertation Availability

2. Content Search

3. Literature Tracking

4. Data Collection

1. Literature Search: Last time researchers need to perform a manual search on hard copies of
literature in libraries whereby this is a tedious effort and the search results were limited. On
the contrary, a lot of research materials, literature and artefacts today can be searched using
Internet search engines and databases.
ShodhGanga: Indian theses repository where you can search and download the theses.
Google Scholar: Provides a way to broadly search for scholarly literature across disciplines and
sources.
Microsoft Academic Search: Find information about academic papers, authors, conferences,
journals, and organizations from multiple sources.
Mendeley: A unique platform comprising a social network, reference manager, article
visualization tools.
SSRN: Multi-disciplinary online reposto6of scholarly research and related material social
sciences.
Some other Famous Database for Research Articles and literature:

AMS

Annual Reviews

ASME Digital Collection

Cambridge Core

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)Cochrane Library

eBook Academic collection

EBSCO Databases, Discovery Service, eBooks, Point of Care Products, DynaMed and
Journal Collections

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EBSCO Information Services

Economic & Political Weekly

Elsevier

Emerald eJournals

Encyclopedia Britannica

IEEE Xplore

Indian Citation

Indian Journals

IOPscience

JSTOR

Portland Press

Project Euclid

Project MUSE

ProQuest databases

Royal Society of Chemistry Journals

Royal Society of Chemistry Publications Online

Sage Online Journals

Science Mag

Scitation

SIAM Journals Online

Springer Link

Supreme Court Cases Online

Taylor & Francis Online

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Web of Knowledge

Wiley Online Library

2. Content search - in today's world of research, researchers can utilize the softcopy
literature's search or find function (also called content search) to search for specific keywords
or phrases in which this is more effective and productive. This observation is also supported
what Sekaran (2003) had stated that online search using technology is inexpensive and can
improve the identification of relevant sources of literature. Such content search also enables a
researcher to evaluate quickly whether a particular article or thesis et al. is worthy for his or
her deeper review. Moreover, the content search also helps a qualitative researcher to count
the frequency of certain keywords that appears in an interviewed transcript more effectively.
3. Literature Tracking - In the past, researchers have to sort, classify and store all their
literature or artefacts that they had reviewed into computer folders or physical
folders/placeholders. Researchers also need to create their own tracking mechanism e.g. in a
word document or spreadsheet format to track and manage their reviewed literature so that
they can re-use or refer to it in future. Doing these manually can be daunting tasks.
With the advancement of ICT, researchers can still use the old approaches but more and more
researchers now are using software like Mendeley which can help manage, share and discover
the literature contents and contacts that they had reviewed. Using software like Mendeley to
track a researcher's literature is saving time and effort as well as capable to manage lots of
literature that the researcher was not possible in the past.
4. Data Collection - with the help of the application of ICT, Data collection can be collected via
online, web-based or Internet survey. Using this purpose-built software and Internet
technology which are greener technology in data collection can reduce the time and cost to
collect surveyed responses from the respondents. Not only an online survey can be
administered more effectively, but the data collected in its original format can also be input
directly into the statistical software.
Important Data Collection Application of ICT:

1. Google Forms

2. Survey Monkey

B. Applications of ICT in data analysis

Application of ICT in data analysis includes the ICTs are applied on activities during the stage of
data analysis and can be divided into:
1. Quantitative Data Analysis
2. Qualitative Data Analysis
1.Quantitative Data Analysis:

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The exploratory factor analysis, multiple regression, t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
are some common data analysis techniques used among researchers conducting quantitative
research. There are also some advanced and popular data analysis techniques like path
analysis, covariance-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), variance based SEM (partial
least squares), hierarchical regression analysis, hierarchical linear modelling et al.
Statistical Package for Social Science / SPSS are more advanced and rich with a lot of features
and
functionalities

R (R Foundation for Statistical Computing)

MATLAB (The Mathworks)

Microsoft Excel

SAS (Statistical Analysis Software)

GraphPad Prism

Minitab

2. Qualitative Data Analysis:

The following statistical software packages are for qualitative data analysis:

NVivo

ATLAS.ti

MAXQDA

SPSS Text Analytics

Transana can be used for video transcribing in certain qualitative research

C. Application of ICT in post-data analysis

Application of ICT in post-data analysis refers to the ICTs are applied on activities of research
after completing the stage of data analysis which covers:

1. References and Bibliography Compilation

2. Article and Thesis / Dissertation's Discussion among Researchers, Supervisors, Supervisees

etc.

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3. Plagiarism Detection

4. Journal Manuscripts Submission

1. References and Bibliography Compilation:

A few years back, researchers tend to compile references and bibliographies manually. They
literally typing in to build the entire section of the references or bibliography then followed by
sorting them in ascending order. Recently, while researchers are writing, they can use citation
or reference management software to help select citations and populate the references or
bibliography automatically. This type of software can improve researchers' efficiency and
accuracy while preparing their articles or theses.
The following software is used for referencing and bibliography compilation

EndNote

Zotero

Mendeley

2. Article and Thesis / Dissertation's Discussion:

In the course of producing an article, thesis or dissertation, there are needs for discussions or
communications among researchers, supervisors, supervisees or during the viva voce. Now,
we have the advanced application of ICT to facilitate sharing of research materials, seeking
comments from subject matter experts, enable analytics to monitor papers published, as well
as following some scholarly works.
There are online platforms or websites which can be used for such discussion:

Academia.edu

ResearchGate

3. Plagiarism Detection:
In the past, plagiarism acts were slow and hard to detect as the authority of universities or
journals dependent on readers to identify them manually while they were reading through the
submitted articles or theses/dissertations. With the advancement of ICT, readers or
researchers can use plagiarism checker software available in the market like:

Grammarly

Article Checker

Turnitin

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DupliChecker etc.

4. Journal Manuscripts Submission:

In the past, journal manuscript submission used to be via email communications between
researchers/authors and journal's editors/coordinators. Now web-based journal manuscript
management and peer-review software, electronic manuscript submission or management
systems are commonly used among the community of researchers and journals/publishers.
Using such systems can reduce their time of submission and checking the status of publishing.
Moreover, using such systems can greatly improve the productivity and quality of work to
administer the submission as well as the peer-review management in which
miscommunication, loss or delay of communication can be
minimized.
The following are the Application of ICT for Manuscripts Submission and publicising:

Elsevier

Wiley

Sage Publications etc

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