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What is the format for a technical report vs a research paper?

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Growing 70 pts 0 followers
Mangalore University · Posted
Cybersecurity Finance & Banking

My question

I have been collecting data for my thesis research and realized I may have an ethical issue. I surveyed 450 college students about their academic stress and mental health. The survey was anonymous, but I am now questioning whether I need IRB approval retroactively.

The situation:

  • The survey was done purely as pilot research before my formal thesis proposal
  • I used Google Forms and data was stored on my university Google Drive
  • No personally identifying information was collected
  • This is at an Indian university (not a US institution)

What are the ethics review requirements for student survey research in Indian universities? Is anonymous pilot data typically exempt?

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10 Replies

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Shiva Prasad Active 480 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

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Ganesh Menon Growing 140 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

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Jaya Lakshmanan Growing 50 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Replying to Jaya Lakshmanan
Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

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Jaya Lakshmanan Growing 50 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Ishaan Verma Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

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Preethi Anand Distinguished 690 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

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Replying to Preethi Anand
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Replying to Preethi Anand
Jagdish Rawat · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

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Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?