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How do I handle missing data in longitudinal studies.imputation or exclusion? (81)

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Bearys Institute of Technology · Posted
Environmental Science Accounting & Auditing Nanotechnology

Background

I am a first-year PhD student in Chemical Engineering. My guide has asked me to apply for PMRF in the upcoming cycle.

I need to write the research proposal component (2 pages). My research is on biodegradable polymer membranes for water purification.

Questions:

  • What level of detail is expected in the technical approach section?
  • Should I include preliminary results even if they are from coursework projects?
  • How important is the societal impact section?
  • Is it okay to cite work from my own MTech thesis?

Any feedback from people who have successfully received PMRF would be invaluable.

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Divya Krishnan Growing 85 pts · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

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Zara Hussain Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

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Replying to Zara Hussain
Rekha Shetty Starting 40 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

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Replying to Zara Hussain
Ashwin Murthy Distinguished 560 pts · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

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Preethi Anand Distinguished 690 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Ekta Choudhary Starting 45 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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Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

The short answer: it depends heavily on the journal and field, but here is a general framework.

If your null result is well-powered and the hypothesis was reasonable: Absolutely publish it. Null results in well-designed studies are as valuable as positive results. Journals like PLOS ONE explicitly welcome them.

If your study is underpowered: Be transparent about it. Report effect sizes and confidence intervals, not just p-values. A small, underpowered study with honest reporting is still a contribution.

What kills papers is when limitations are obvious but the authors have not addressed them.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Eshan Patil Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

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Sunil Bhattacharya Active 390 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.